УМСТВЕННАЯ ОБСТАНОВКА (№ 6) — Независимый от наследственности: Фельденкрайз и дзюдо. (Часть 2)

MENTAL FURNITURE #6 - Independent of Heritage: Feldenkrais and Judo: Part 2

"Dr. Feldenkrais explains how Judo training educates one to be 'independent of heritage'." (G. Koizumi, Higher Judo, viii)

To be 'independent of heritage' means that for at least one moment we can know life in a way not dependent upon our size, weight, strength, form, age, gender, personal history, ethnic or religious background. Strictly speaking, Feldenkrais seemed to say that through proper training and education we can create an identity not founded on activity, passivity or indifference. For Feldenkrais the basis for such a training was Judo, the Gentle Way.

The Judo Path, as Feldenkrais describes it, differs from other disciplines in a number of ways. "What a man can do now is mostly determined by his personal experience, the habits of thought, feeling and action that he has formed.... Incapacity to do is produced by fear, imagination and otherwise distorted appreciation of the outside world. We teach an unemotional, objective activity which has nothing to do with what the person is or feels and we show that the result depends entirely on when, what and how a thing is done, and on nothing else. The result is that a small, sometimes insignificant physical body, of sixty years of age or over can control a powerful youth as if the latter has no will of his own. This is possible only by the impersonal, unemotional and purely mechanistic habits of thought and action inculcated by Judo practice." (My emphasis - DL, Higher Judo 17-18) In Judo practice nothing is or should be taken on faith. Judo evolved a specific regimen to fulfill the goals of Judo practice.

According to Feldenkrais, Judo employs distinctive means to transform someone. First, Judo is practiced with bare feet. Immature development of the use of one's feet means "one is capable of only pre-selected acts resulting in arrested development, decreased vitality, and withdrawal from attempting many activities with a corresponding effect on behavior." Second, Feldenkrais discusses why Judo develops the art of falling: "With great perseverance it is possible to achieve...the state where one works not from necessity but enjoys the pleasure of creative work.... (The state) is never achieved before adult independence from gravitation." (Higher Judo, 20-21)