Last night we went to a friend’s art opening. The artist has spent many tortured years working through personal challenges in order to build his international reputation. His craft was never in question: he can paint and sculpt anything in any medium. But life kept handing him difficulties: financial woes, the responsibility of raising his children as a single father and years of rejection. And now he has a painting in this prestigious gallery selling for $12,500. He laughed and told me he painted it in one and a half hours.
When I commented to my husband Ron about this, he shrugged. “He couldn’t have done this in an hour and a half if he hadn’t spent forty years working his ass off to become the artist he is today. The $12,500 is not just for the ninety minutes, but for the lifetime he dedicated to get to this point. I was reminded of a quote from Joseph Campbell:
“Nietzsche was the one who did the job for me. At a certain moment in his life, the idea came to him of what he called ‘the love of your fate.’ Whatever your fate is, whatever the hell happens, you say, ‘This is what I need.’ It may look like a wreck, but go at it as though it were an opportunity, a challenge. If you bring love to that moment–not discouragement–you will find the strength is there. Any disaster you can survive is an improvement in your character, your stature, and your life. What a privilege! This is when the spontaneity of your own nature will have a chance to flow.
Then, when looking back at your life, you will see that the moments which seemed to be great failures followed by wreckage were the incidents that shaped the life you have now. You’ll see that this is really true. Nothing can happen to you that is not positive. Even though it looks and feels at the moment like a negative crisis, it is not. The crisis throws you back, and when you are required to exhibit strength, it comes.”
I see in retrospect that each failure or struggle in my own past are like jigsaw puzzle pieces, slowly, sometimes awkwardly landing in place. Unlike the puzzles we buy, there was no picture on the box of how it was supposed to turn out so my life often looked like “a wreck.” I remember sobbing while baking my own bread, not because it was an artisanal passion, but because I felt too broke to buy bread. (Who would have thought 30 years later, I’d be trying to avoid eating bread or that baking artisanal bread would be the subject at cocktail parties?) My suffering led to my discovery of the Feldenkrais Method®. And like my artist friend, I find I’m now synthesizing my life experience for others.
Kinēsa® feels like my friend’s art opening: a chance to share my lifetime of learning to help others assemble their puzzle pieces. When the Shift Network asked me to create a one year training of my approach to somatic education, I knew it would be a challenge to compress the richness of Feldenkrais’ teaching, my research of ancient traditions and body language and more, into a practical training. But the invitation felt like destiny. After all, Feldenkrais said we could “make the impossible, possible, the possible, easy and the easy, elegant.” One puzzle piece at a time, I’m “loving my fate.”
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Here’s a classic take on making the impossible possible – enjoy!
Lavinia,
I have been following you for the past couple years.
As my body aligns
With cricks and crackles
my mind is freed of chaos
And shackles
So true – the body IS the mind!
Like many of us, I get a deluge of emails, but I will always open Lavinia’s for her great wisdom that she shares with us! Thank you!
This certainly resonated with me and with my wife of 50 years who received some very bad health news this week. Life is about experiences that in time explain the process of living. I am wondering what you would think of my new book Mysterious Destiny If I sent a copy. Of course I don’t know that you would have time to read it. Some people read it as a story but I think it is more of an allegory.