Move

“Movement is life. Life is a process. Improve the quality of the process and you improve the quality of life itself.”

-Moshe Feldenkrais


Movement is incredibly complex, and notoriously hard to define clearly. Our attempt to do it cannot be complete or exhaustive, but one has to begin somewhere.

Movement implies change. Change of internal relationships of body-parts, changing spatial relationships within the time-space continuum. It is what happens between positions, and internally in any position that is held. Breathing is a movement, so is your heart beating. Some movements are more overt, clear, external and conscious. Some are internal, not easily seen or felt, but necessary none the less. If we could look inside any body it will be hard to spot a part of it that is not in motion, oscillating, pulsing, circulating or being hurled through the space by our conscious choices.

How we move literally shapes our bodies, even our bones.

Bartenieff articulates it beautifully:

“In the miracle of new life we recognize what is truly fundamental in movement. Momentous change occurs, relationship is created, and patterns of connection begin to set up which will continue throughout life.”

Moving is a signature of life and entails much more then just the physical domain alone. It captures the human as a whole, so also the emotional, social, intellectual and spiritual domain. Imagine in this framework the body as substantial & relational.

Viewing the body as substantial you will see it in isolated compartments as anatomy, fysiology, and biomechanics. The image of the relational body is in our view more appealing. The body develops in relation to its environment. The human as an embodied being develops itself in relation to its environment. Movement is moving in the space surrounding you and moving in interaction with your environment, including other bodies. From this perspective of the relational body springs movement in relation to others.

Especially this quality is often forgotten in a period where the fancy and the extreme are easily displayed, and most often celebrated.