ease
“Make the impossible possible, the possible easy, the easy elegant…”
-Moshe Feldenkrais
Ease. Looking for ease changes the learning process to something more then performance or product-oriented development. It is taking no satisfaction with being purely effective, but being efficient too.
The ease of a child refers not necessarily to effort. It is not that children do not use effort or are the epitome of efficient movement. Two year olds can squat perfectly but are horrible jumpers. They are however unconditioned in the art of moving in accordance to socially and culturally accepted norms and forms. This makes them more free from the expectations, and self imposed demands on the way they manifest themselves.
Observing a moving child will reveal a painful truth about our paradigms of movement: moving often relates to “training” or “exercise” and this is connected to concepts where the amount of discomfort and effort experienced in the exercise are directly related to how good it is for you and the amount of health and body related guilt you can compensate.
In our western society there is a schizophrenic relationship with effort, where it is simultaneously desirable and wrong. If something feels hard you are bad at it, and if something feels hard you are working hard and this in itself is a virtue. When moving badly becomes virtuous, this is a recipe for disaster.
We roughly posses 630 muscles, 206 bones and 230 joint in our body. Ease does not look for absolute strength and is not about the size of individual muscles and the measure by which the muscle can contract or relax. Ease conjures the image of synchronicity and cooperation. 1066 units working optimally together in harmony. Then the fundamental component of ease is not the load bearing structures or contracting filaments. It must be our nervous system, solving Bernstein’s degrees of freedom problem.
It is fundamental in two ways. Both in a direct sense referring to coordination, but also indirectly to the higher order functions of the nervous system, where our concepts about effort are at home.