Why We Need Feldenkrais to Build a New Culture

One of the things I, along with my Colin Kirts and many others, are beginning to notice is that we, as humans living in civilization, are living in a way that is violating our own nature, creating excessive violence toward other humans and other life forms, and destroying ourselves and our home. What do we mean by violating? We violate ourselves by failing to comply with a truth about ourselves, denying our needs, failing to respect our boundaries, or acting as if we are separate and unrelated from all other forms of life. Violating ourselves has become so habitual that we no longer feel it--we are largely unaware that we are doing it. Another way to say this is that the way we live is not sustainable. 

Myself and many others (and many who came before us) are engaged in a process of finding a new way to live and creating new cultures and paradigms. One of the crucial things that needs to happen for these new paradigms to work is for us to continuously engage in the process of unlearning. If we create new cultures without systematically investigating ourselves and our conditioning, we create a paradigm that may look quite different but has many of the same problems as this one.

What is the best tool I know for unlearning? Feldenkrais. Through Feldenkrais we learn to inhibit our habits. We learn to inhibit the compulsory excitation in the brain in a way that allows us to think and act in new ways rather than perpetuate our habits and conditioning. We see that we don't have to do things the way we've always done them. We start to be able to clearly see and question our underlying beliefs and assumptions. Feldenkrais Awareness Through Movement lessons give us a structure and framework to test reality, to experiment with our beliefs, and to find out what is objectively true for each of us as individuals (ontogenetic) and what is true for humans as a species (phylogenetic).