We Are the Process.
When I go out walking after a new snow, I am walking with whoever walked before me. Last night, beyond the reach of the snowplow, a hare raced across the bridge. Someone dumped their ice coffee, and then took a lively detour down to the river. The water burbles under sheets of ice, a darker song than it sings in the summer. Birds gather as dense as leaves in a naked tree and their chirping pricks my flesh like soft summer sun.
Since I started reading the book “Matter and Desire” by Andreas Weber, my walks have become permeated by a kind of awakened sensuality. His writing attempts to infuse our scientific understanding of the natural world with a dimension of deeply felt connection. Among many far-reaching topics, he talks about the living being’s will to live, saying:
“The life wish is not a program, but an urge that emerges out of matter and also structures it. A being- even the simplest cell- is this longing”
Reading this, I couldn’t help but find a parallel in the work of Dr. Feldenkrais. One of the fundamental tenets of his method is that, when the conditions are right, the nervous system is naturally drawn towards what is good for it. I like to think that in an Awareness Through Movement lesson we are simply creating the conditions for Weber’s longing to be realized. Both understood that life is never static, that there is some force in us always drawn to health, to life, to love, to learn, to become, to create. As Dr. Feldenkrais once said,
“Movement is life. Life is a process. Improve the quality of the process and you improve the quality of life itself.”
Though Dr. Feldenkrais had training as a mechanical engineer, he knew better than to view the human body as a machine made of flesh and bone, but rather as a manifestation of matter’s desire to live. In the face of pain and difficulty, this fact is profoundly hopeful to me. We are not broken machines, full of flaws in need of fixing, not even beings engaged in a process of healing. We are, in fact, that process itself.
When we suffer, it is so easy to be taken in by the object of desire and forget that what we have already is the desire itself. The desire to feel good, to lessen pain, to feel like ourselves, contains already within it our fundamental aliveness, the spring of selfhood from which wellness flows eternally.
When I walk, I let this desire draw me into the world. When I lay down on the floor to move, I bring the same to my inner landscape, to wonder at the tracks in the snow, the familiar aches made new by a slip on the ice. It is a place where all of me is welcome, where the world hushes up enough for the heart to hear its own voice.
