Freeing Your Body

Celebrating October 12

History has always been written by the conquerors or the would-be conquerors. Those who have been conquered do their best to preserve their culture and their version of history, but it's an uphill battle.

For example:
For centuries China has exported the idea that the Han Chinese people are the only ethnic group who are truly Chinese. There are more than 50 other ethnic groups who have been living within the territorial boundaries of China for centuries, including Tibetan, Hmong, Uyghur, Mongol, and Salar. All the various Han Chinese empires and governments have worked to eradicate not only the existence, but the memory of these cultures.

In the past decade Russia has reinvigorated its centuries-old effort to eradicate the existence and memory of Ukraine, a country that existed before the Russian empire. Russia's propagandized version of Ukraine's history, culture, and place in the modern world is being disseminated nationally as well as internationally as it tries to destroy Ukraine yet again.

Then there's the United States.
October 12, 1492 was definitely a turning point in world history, triumphant for Europeans and devastating for the conquered indigenous peoples.
Can the date be recognized appropriately for all concerned?
In the US Columbus Day is still a Federal holiday.
To counter this, thirty years ago the date became known as Native Americans' Day in South Dakota and is now celebrated as Indigenous Peoples' Day in almost 20 other states (not South Carolina ...). President Biden issued the first Federal proclamation to recognize Indigenous Peoples' Day in 2021.

Canada does not celebrate Columbus Day, instead marking June 21 as Aboriginal Day to celebrate and learn about indigenous peoples including Inuit, Métis and First Nations.
October 12 is Dia de la Raza (Day of the People) in Mexico and many Caribbean, Central and South American countries. While the Spanish word "raza" can be translated as "people" in English, it includes the concept of "lineage" or "ancestry," those from whom a people is descended.
It is celebrated as Day of Respect for Cultural Diversity in Argentina, Day of Indigenous Resistance in Venezuela, and encompasses as many citizens as possible in Nicaragua, where it is Día de la Resistencia Indígena, Negra y Popular, the Day celebrating the Resistance against colonialism by indigenous people, blacks, and all downtrodden citizens.

Should we celebrate October 12?
Or would it be more appropriate to mark the anniversary of the start of the invasion of the Americas as an opportunity to reflect on and reevaluate our present day vestiges of the European colonial and xenophobic mindset?

Freeing Your Mind helps to Free Your Body.

Photo by ia huh

Moshe Feldenkrais on Body and Mind

Try not to think in words.
Formulation in words inhibits the brain
from thinking for itself.

When thinking in words we think in familiar patterns,
in ways we have thought, read, heard, or said sometime before.
Instead, learn to think in patterns of relationships,
in sensations divorced from the fixity of words.
This will allow you to find the ability to make new patterns
and to carry those patterns of relationship
from one discipline to another.
In short, you think personally, originally.

Learning that allows the growth of patterns
and their functioning in relationships
is learning that leads to new and different ways of doing things.
This kind of learning increases your ability to choose more freely.

This is the kind of learning produced by Awareness Through Movement lessons, where the accent is put not on which movement you deal with
but on how you direct yourself doing it.

Every emotion is in one way or another linked in the brain's cortex
with some muscular configuration and attitude.

An emotional state always appears together with
the attitude of the body with which it was conditioned.
Therefore, when a body habit has been resolved,
an emotional complex is resolved simultaneously.

The body and mind are never independent;
such subdivision is entirely arbitrary and unfounded.
They are not just parts somehow related to each other,
but an inseparable whole.

The feeling of being alive
relates to the awareness of growing to be oneself.


Quotations by Moshe Feldenkrais
Photo by Casey Horner

Dr. Feldenkrais and Ukraine

Moshe Feldenkrais was born in 1904 in Slavuta, a town in western Ukraine controlled by the Russian Empire. He fled the Russian pogroms as a teenager and was never able to return to an independent Ukraine.

Russia and Ukraine share roots dating back millennia, but their cultures, religious foundations, and languages separated centuries ago. Imperial Russia only began expanding into Ukraine around 1790, and until the Russian Revolution it exercised a policy of extermination of Ukrainian identity.

The USSR continued the Russian Empire's policy of extermination of Ukrainian identity. In 1991 Ukraine's independence was recognized by the international community, but the Russian government has disputed its sovereignty.

Putin wants Ukrainian land but not Ukrainian people. It's an Imperialist approach to occupation. Since the US was created with a similar approach, it's not surprising the government can't find an effective way to address Russia's attack on Ukraine.

It seems to me we have to address our own continuing history of identity extermination before we'll be able understand how to address another country's.

Which will require transformation into quantum thinking, suggested by Feldenkrais' experience that his Method "leads to knowledge of oneself and to previous undiscovered resources in oneself," by Ramana Maharishi's inquiry, "Who am I?," and by Krishnamurti's assertion that we must move into a new perceptual dimension.

Are we up for it?

More next time.

Copyright© 2022 by David Rowland, all rights reserved.

Photo used with permission of the International Feldenkrais® Federation