From Impossible to Elegant

A few years ago I completed an intensive 5 year program in a psycho-physical healing modality called coreSomatics (at the Somatic Institute, Pittsburgh, developed and led by Kay Miller). coreSomatics is informed by depth psychology, Gestalt Psychology, the Feldenkrais Method, the Alexander Technique, other body-mind practices, and the expressive arts. During the program and since, I felt especially drawn to the philosophy and practices of Moshe Feldenkrais, the creator of The Feldenkrais Method. In describing movement  - through awareness - in the body, the goal, he said, was to:

Make the impossible possible
The possible easy
And the easy elegant

It works. People practicing his Awareness Through Movement system can achieve miracles at making the" impossible" elegant. I have since come to believe this to be a universal evolutionary principle, true for all creative endeavors. We often do not get to see the elegance emerge because too often we just stop at the impossible.

When we get a vision or an impulse to innovate (which we actually do all the time if we pause to be in awareness), if we change the question of from "Is this possible?" (which often results in a no if there is no previous evidence to back up the vision) to "How might we make this possible?" (which assumes that is already possible, despite the lack of historical evidence, and we just need to discover the ways to create it forth) we are on the evolving path to elegance.

Comments

[Ellen Martens]

I like this concept ... thank you for sharing what you have learned; I am sure it takes a while to learn, but just knowing that it can be learned puts us on the right track.

[Susan Kuhn]

This is so true, and really so basic to life. We get caught up in the rush and chaos of what is now that we fail to see the slow transformations that are underway, e.g., the change of seasons, the growth of young people. This seems to to be a core religious principle too, as well as a basic stance in eastern religions, just to be in the present and not caught up in the whirl of events, so that we can be aware of this underlying transformative process that is the essence of all of nature, and align all of our efforts with it.