awareness through movement

38 AWARENESS THROUGH MOVEMENT
his own experience how closely linked breathing is with every
change of feeling or anticipation of a strong emotion.
Throughout the history of mankind we find systems and rules
designed to induce a calming effect by improved breathing. The
human skeleton is so constructed that it is almost impossible to
organize breathing properly without also satisfactorily placing the
skeleton with respect to gravity. The reorganization of breathing
alone succeeds only to the degree that we succeed indirectly in
improving the organization of the skeletal muscles for better
standing and better movement.
9. Hinges of habit
Finally, and most important of all, there is one more reason why
we should choose the action-system as the point of attack for the
improvement of man. All behavior, as we noted before, is a complex
of mobilized muscles, sensing, feeling, and thought. Each of
these components of action could, in theory, be used instead, but
the part played by the muscles is so large in the alternatives that
if it were omitted from the patterns in the motor cortex the rest
of the components of the pattern would disintegrate.
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