Complex habits

Thinking in movement does not come easy, it takes quite some work to undo old habits. Our (western) culture promotes many ideas that seem to contradict FM's ideas - for example, being 'right'.

Everyone wants to be right, but no one stops to consider if their idea of right is right.

I want to start with a little criticism of the master himself, setting a dubious example in using universal quantifiers like 'everybody' and 'no one'. Let's develop this statement, even if this process might take away the ease and poignancy of FM's words.
'People wanting to be right (which there are many of) rarely stop to consider if their idea of right is right.'

For me, this is just another quote warning about end gaining. If we just 'do it right', victory is ours as well, that's one of the promises of the training to be an endgainer (also known as education system). Wanting to be right produces in social interaction quite typical strategies, mainly based on violence, aggression and emotional game play. The twin sister, not wanting to be wrong, deploys more passive strategies like defense and withdrawal. Their father, Aristotelian logic, has died long ago, yet its ghost still haunts many. Thinking about right and wrong often leads to the fallacy of categorizing nearly everything into this mutual exclusive terms, ignoring anything that fails to fit definetely into one of those boxes.

The opposite of wrong is in many cases just as wrong. We certainly gain new experiences when we push our shoulders forward instead of pulling them back, our overall use most likely doesn't improve. Too easy, one might think, AT is all about changing habits, I relocated my discomfort from one area to another. Strike!

Maybe it helps to assume that we never do it right. If we stop doing the wrong thing, the right thing can happen. Doing one thing to 'counteract' another produces a change of habit, and if we stay clear from thinking that this was the 'right' change, we slowly improve our use as well. As long as we view the world through the black and white filter of right and wrong the view of details remains obstructed.

But isn't there something 'right' to 'do' in life? The mystical answers to this question founded religions, I wouldn't yet dare to answer this for anyone else but myself. Life is self-propagating and self-aware (at least in the human form). The 'right' thing as such is survival of the individual and the species. From this evolutionary perspective we did nothing gravely wrong - otherwise I couldn't carve these words with electronic ink into the global memepool.

Although I spend quite some time finding the right way to get in and out of a chair, when I undid this tense idea I gained much more information out of it. Once the inner judge became more quiet, I had a better chance to integrate the somatic knowledge I received. Good judgement is a desirable skill, but many situations in life work out easier without it.

Especially when observing oneself the right-wrong filter prevents (or delays) accepting undesirable habits. Just accepting that right and wrong have no relevance for the here and now seems to contradict the tenets of our culture. The skill for life changes oneself radically, unless one clings too much on specific symbol sets.