Thursday, Sept 14: The Elusive Obvious and Standing Up

THE ELUSIVE OBVIOUS
One of Moshe Feldenkrais’ books is titled, The Elusive Obvious. At the core of this book is that human beings are learners. We come into the world more or less helpless and end up walking and talking and having a life, most of us.

Unlike a goat that can scamper around in a few minutes, or a dog that can talk to any other dog in the world, we learn our moving abilities and we learn language.

We also learn stuff we don’t want to learn, like how to have a bad back. We don’t consciously go about this of course,, but we learn ways of using ourselves that don’t work well, and we end up hurting ourselves and then we think we have a bad back, instead of a bad brain, that either has forgotten, or never learned how to use ourselves in delightful and easy and efficient ways.

When we were babies, our pathway of learning was discovery, discovery and exploration.

So now, we are older and what are we learning?
Hopefully something every day.


Here is a little test for the illusive obvious: How do we get up from sitting to standing.

This seems obvious: we just stand up.

But what do we DO when we “just stand up.”

This will help clarify how little we know about this: “Just stand up,” but first put your left ankle on your right knee, or your left ankle on your left knee.

Now, “just stand up” onto one foot.

There is something obvious about coming to stand that will make this not too difficult. Without this obvious understanding, coming to standing will be a struggle.

Good luck figuring it out.