Friday, April 14: Getting Smarter

TRAINING AND LEARNING
I’m spending some time in a local classroom, and in a way it’s heartbreaking. The kids, of course, are wonderful, and the teachers think they are teaching, but almost all of what I see is training: this is the right way to do it, do it the right way. This is fine for dogs or monkeys, but human beings, we like to learn.

Learning is having options and then choosing between those options. Learning is messing around and discovering what is the right answer for us right now. Learning is exploring which answer works in which circumstance.

Feldenkrais was an heart an explorer of the terrain of learning. He saw, quite clearly the effects of the Day the Waters Changed, in yesterday’s mentioned Sufi story. We are dependent on people who teach us to be afraid and constricted and narrow minded. How to come out of this?

Returning to learning how to learn more easily and efficiently is a return to our first and primary leaning, a return to sensing, which to my mind is the language of the brain. Sensing and exploring movement and learning by trying out lots of possibilities. This is why I’ve started to say in my Feldenkrais ads that among the usual benefits of more flexibility of mind and body, is the straightforward claim: get smarter.