Update From Claudia Maurice

In the spring, I finished my last course at the departement of dance at the University of Quebec in Montreal. This last course has again been very interesting for the reason that it introduced me to a new and emerging field of science that was yet unknown to me: to "Somatic Education". Somatic Education groups together all those movement approaches which aim the "becoming conscious of the body in spatial mouvement", such as Alexander Technic, Feldenkrais, Yoga, Martial Arts, Body-Mind Centering a.s.o. (in North America, the Journal "Somatics" promotes this kind of approach to movement and it could be interesting for eurythmists to take note of their ideas because of their holistic, phenomenological and sensitive approach to the human organism). The underlying attitude is to consider the human being as an undivided body-mind entity and movement as the direct expression and testimony of "life" (the fact that an organism is living). To move is seen as a way to increase "life" within an organism, which again has a healing effect on it and is at the same time a means for spiritual development. What's especially striking within Somatic Education is the yearning to overcome the dualistic split between the physical and spiritual world and to include emtional and mental apsects when looking at the human organism in movement (for example in the idea that movement has a direct influence on the soul and mental life). The initial impulse of Somatic Education was to give back to the human being the right to appear as a being with spiritual aspects, aspects that ordinary science has more and more excluded or even denied. Yet, I felt that the fact that the access to the spiritual components of the human being is searched by eradicating the difference between physical and spiritual phenomena (body and soul are an inseparable unity) and the use of research methods coming from ordinary science has the exact opposite effect: the human being is once more reducd to its biological components (emotions and mental processes, even the human I, being phenomenas entirely engendered by the biological base of the human organism). At the end of the course, it seemed to me that Somatic Education gives the impression of treating the human being as a spiritual being, but, without that this comes out clearly in the literature, in fact reduces it to its biological aspects. Nonetheless, I think this doesn't devaluate the benefits of the different movement approaches grouped under Somatic Education. It rather shows that it is much harder for many human beings to realize consciously that certain experiences are in fact spiritual experiences, than to actually have spiritual experiences or perceptions. For me, it shows again the urgent necessity for the methods of spiritual science that Rudolf Steiner proposed in order to avoid that humanity stays unconscious of the spiritual world which is concretely present in many of our experiences more than we think. One way to remain unconscious of the spiritual world is to take spiritual phenomenas for phenomenas of the world of the senses, as shown above.