The Glory of Being Human: Bones, Brains, Gravity, Learning

To be human is a miracle. And we can make our lives even better.



THE GLORY OF BONES AND BEING HUMAN
We have a skeleton.

This is glorious, because with the skeleton we can see from four or five or six feet above the ground, and we can walk, and make love, and plant a garden and move ourselves around in the field of gravity.

Gravity is always there.

I love to laugh at the We Create Our Own Reality people, and say: okay: hold a rock in front of your face and create a reality where the rock doesn't fall toward the ground, eventually. All the tricks of throwing it in the air, and having a shelf under it, still: gravity is there. It's not invented in our minds.

It's part of life on Earth.

That our parents could or should have been nicer, that is a matter for speculation. That we live on a planet with gravity as a daily and constant occurrence

We have gravity and we have two legs.

What does that mean? It means we are less stable than a four legged table or a dog or a horse, or even a three legged stool. We are instable, which means we can move easier than if we were stable.

And another reality is that babies don't know how to crawl, how to roll over, how to bring their hands to their mouths, how to sit up, how to walk, how to talk. A million people can put all the best vibes into the holiest baby in the world, and it's still going to need to learn how to move in the ways of a human.

Which means it will discover gravity. It has no choice. It will discover movement, almost always, and when it starts to move, the baby will start to discover that different ways of moving bring about different results.

The baby learns.

Without learning, human life would stay at more or less the sucking blob level.

So we have gravity, we have two legs, we have two arms, we have a spine, ribs, pelvis, head, arms, legs, hands, feet, toes, fingers, eyes, ears, nose, mouth, tongue, hungers and thirsts inside us, an ability to track inside ourselves (as we learn it) where the arm and hand and leg and spine are. We have muscles that move the bones around.

We have a brain that is learning how to put all this together and crawl across the room.

We don't know we are going to crawl.

We discover this.

This is what this work is about: discovering huge new possibilities that we didn't even know were there and available for us. And we do it like a baby: little steps, lots of learning, lots of play, lots of discovery, no real demand to "do it right," an openness to the new.

We are learning creature, with skeletons and muscles and amazing brains in a field of gravity.

We are, as we grow, amazing creatures for who all sorts of things that we might have considered previously "impossible," (as crawling would be to a two week old baby), can become possible.

The impossible becoming possible, the possible becoming easy, the easy becoming elegant: this is what this work is about, this wakeup feldenkrais work. And it is not just about moving easier and sweeter and more elegantly.

It is about learning how to transform into a larger and more complete being.

This is good work.

This is fun.

This is thrilling.

This is available, to you, to me, to us all. Give a call if you are inspired to change and transform anything in your life.