Moshe Feldenkrais II

Continuing with the vision that Moshe Feldenkrais built, if we observe the natural process that a person lives as he develops his common activity, we will realize that in the earliest stages of life babies will build their sensory-motor relationships through experience that are generated between them and the environment, that is, each movement is built through the interaction that occurs in a given space, with an internal stimulus that is the product of the baby's need and the response of the environment (mom, dad, caregiver, bed material, chair, etc.) that way the movement will suffer a series of variables through each repetition, this generates in the baby sensations that are building the bases of thought, at the same time there will be tensions that They are products of the emotional base (without placing any label such as joy, sadness, etc.), so the baby simply lives the experience but does not have a specific objective Or, it does not seek a specific result (the above happens in the early stages of life), thus an adaptation is built with its environment and it develops in such a way that it generates the possibilities of being self-sufficient. Much of this experience occurs in a spontaneous environment, but through interaction with society and the elements that education builds, this spontaneous development undergoes adaptations, where situations that limit their experience begin to build, it is at this time that the Possibilities for action are restricted by deviating from just experiencing the ones allowed by him or the lanes that his society allows, forming the foundations of a new experience supported by a forced act (from the point of view that his possibilities of action have decreased, conditioning him to that allowed at that time in your environment). Under this panorama the supports of many habits are produced. There are ideologies where the community is considered to be more important than the individuals that constitute it. This throws the process of personal development into a second or third plane. There are other ideologies where they focus attention on the individual's own development in order to build a society. And from these two scenarios we will find a variety of mixtures.

You may ask yourself, why is knowledge of these points useful? According to Moshe Feldenkrais in his book The Potent Self (1), he points out to us: “The man we know is a nervous system adapted by experience to a given environment, his inconvenient potentials having been inhibited by the long period of dependency (in all its stage growth and development from birth to independence). The formation of attitudes, habits and reactions have in common that: the same operating principle limits their use to certain conditions and excludes the possibility of operation in others ”. He concludes that the beginning of the mechanism also encloses and determines the end, and generates a similarity with these ideas based on processes from physics, with the adaptation mechanism that the person lives. He exposes some examples where daily behavior patterns have been developed based on the experience that the individual lives, gradually generating a conditioning. Thus, each individual explores his world according to what has been learned, when external conditions modify the conditions that facilitate or are related to what has been learned, eliminating the possibility of executing that habit, attitude or reaction. For some individuals this can represent a great crisis in their life, observing it as the end of something coupled with the insecurity that all this causes, while for others it is simply a change rather than assuming and living a new adaptation which they consider as a possibility of growth through acquiring new learning. From these two points we can again find a great diversity of response, in each person. What is the importance of understanding or knowing these points of view for the formation of new habits?

1.- The power of the self (the Potent self), Moshe Feldenkrais, Editorial Paidós Vida y Salud, p. 85.89.