Moshe explains what ki or chi is to him.
Interviewer: The other day when we were
talking, you said that if you talked about ki, nobody would publish it,
that they wouldn't want to hear about it. Right, you said that?
Feldenkrais: Mmmmm.
Interviewer: So my feeling is that I would like to talk about it anyway and …
Feldenkrais: It's not
that I don't want to talk about it, but for me this starts with the
organization of the body. To me, ki is not a thing and not a spirit and
not an anything, but the way a body is organized to function and that
way in which it functions best. It means that a body can produce with
it's weight, with the muscles that it has, with the brain it has, the
greatest amount of work possible with a particular organization of that
body and that particular organization turns out to be central to the
thing we are talking about. It's a complex appreciation of how a human
body is made, how it functions: That it has a head that must not be
involved in the movement but which must be free, whatever the movement
is, to move anywhere and that the lower abdomen must be in such a state
that it can do all the things that it needs to do without disturbing the
head. The rest of the body and the arms are not to be used to produce
strength. And that is the truth. Once you get that, if you do, you can
do Judo throws, the most difficult ones; the heaviest person, you can
throw him if you get that. But to the people who are keen on mysterious
things of ki and chi, this is a complete come-down, and they are not
interested. They don't want to listen to it. They don't want it to be
like that.
INTERVIEW WITH MOSHE – The Extraordinary Story of How Moshe Feldenkrais Came to Study Judo
by Dennis Leri, Charles Alston, Mia Segal, Robert Volberg, Frank Wildman, Anna Johnson and Jerry Karzen assisting during San Francisco training in 1977
by Dennis Leri, Charles Alston, Mia Segal, Robert Volberg, Frank Wildman, Anna Johnson and Jerry Karzen assisting during San Francisco training in 1977
