(no subject)
The motor cortex of the brain, where patterns activating the
muscles are established, lies only a few millimeters above the brain
strata dealing with association processes. All the feeling and sensing
that a man has experienced were at one time linked with the
association processes.
The nervous system has a fundamental characteristic: We cannot
carry out an action and its opposite at the same time. At any
single moment the whole system achieves a kind of general integration
that the body will express at that moment. Position, sensing,
feeling, thought, as well as chemical and hormonal processes,
combine to form a whole that cannot be separated out into its
various parts. This whole may be highly complex and complicated,
but is the integrated whole of the system at that given moment.
Within every such integration we become aware of only those
elements that involve the muscles and the envelope. We have
already seen that the muscles play the main role in awareness. It
is not possible for change to take place in the muscle system
without a prior corresponding change in the motor cortex. If we
can succeed in some way in bringing about a change in the motor
cortex, and through this a change in the coordination of or in the
patterns themselves, the basis of awareness in each elementary
integration will disintegrate.
Owing to the close proximity to the motor cortex of the brain
structures dealing with thought and feeling, and the tendency of
processes in brain tissue to diffuse and spread to neighboring
tissues, a drastic change in the motor cortex will have parallel
effects on thinking and feeling.
A fundamental change in the motor basis within any single
integration pattern will break up the cohesion of the whole and
thereby leave thought and feeling without anchorage in the patterns
of their established routines. In this condition it is much
easier to effect changes in thinking and feeling, for the muscular
part through which thinking and feeling reach our awareness has
changed and no longer expresses the patterns previously familiar
to us. Habit has lost its chief support, that of the muscles, and has
become more amenable to change.
From Awareness Through Movement, Moshe Feldenkrais.