1extracted Pages From Everyday Eurythmy - Sivan Karnieli

1.
The Technique of Eurythmy is Love
The word ‘upright’ also contains the sense of ‘moral uprightness’ or honesty.
A person who stands upright is potentially authentic in his own and others’
eyes. This ‘upright’ position is the starting position for all eurythmy
exercises. Eurythmy counteracts mendacity, said Rudolf Steiner. Someone
who is upright cannot easily lie.
Starting position for the exercises

Unless otherwise indicated, every exercise starts by placing yourself in space
in an upright but not stretching position; your arms should hang loosely by
your side. Try to feel calm, at rest. Your feet are close enough to each other
to nearly touch, and your weight rests equally on both.
This small observation can already show us something else: in eurythmy

the soul's inner movement and the body's outer movement are one. The
technique of eurythmy is not about muscle tension or a particular mobility of
the body, but love. From this technique proceeds what can then be perceived
as movement impetus, tension, release, presence, immediacy and a great deal
more. The soul's love should be active in this technique. In common parlance
people say that love is blind, but the opposite is true: when we love, we see
more because love opens the eyes of the soul. Love is a movement towards
the things and the beings of the world ...
And isn’t it this that increasingly enriches us? If I do my gymnastics
exercises in the morning, my body becomes or remains more mobile, flexible
and stronger, and I will of course feel good. But if I start my day with ‘soul
gymnastics’ (as Steiner also called eurythmy), my soul becomes more
mobile, flexible and stronger. Everything I encounter will move me more
deeply. I will sense the richness of life, my own included. Above all, I will
give my soul its own space to exist: the stronger my own inner capacity for
movement, the less the outer world will overwhelm me. Perhaps things will
still be hectic, but this will impinge less and less on me. I will not feel hectic.
I am on my path, walking it myself, rather than being pulled from one place
to the next. I begin to see the beauty of the world and to feel its abundance. I
do not think one thing yet do another. I can be creatively present in my life,
living, thinking, feeling and acting in the here and now.
The most important question—one which sustains eurythmy—is this: who
is it in me who can stand upright, who is capable of loving, who opens up
spaces and shapes them?
Let us speak of the I, the authentic I. Let us try. What I call the I is the
movement, the impulse that enables me to employ the four elements of this
earth on which I live, but also my intelligence and the motions of my
sensibility, even my dreams. It is, in fact, a strength that lends me the
power nothing else gives me: that is, the power of not having to wait for
outward life to approach me before I live. The ego needs things, the
greatest possible number of them (whether these be money, status,
authority, acclaim or gratification). The I does not seek these. When it is
present, at work, active, then it sets its own work against this other world
of things. The I is wealth in the midst of poverty; it is interest when
everything around us is tedium. It is hope even if all objective means of
hope have faded. From it arises humankind's whole world of inventiveness.
And ultimately it is what we retain when all else is denied, when nothing
more approaches us from without, and yet our powers are still great
enough to overcome this emptiness.3
These words are by Jacques Lusseyran, who was blinded age four. He also
said:’... real blindness was the inability to love any more, or to grieve; it was
not the loss of sight.’4
To raise oneself into the upright, to love, to see, even if not with one's eyes,
to feel and engender the future within us now: all the substance of a world
that is growing all the time. A world of growing, that is what eurythmy is,
and this becomes life: a world that is founded on the human I, on the strength
that can face the void even, since someone—my I—is still there and
perceives it.
The following little exercise helps to come to oneself in the middle of the
daily rush. You don’t have to do the whole of it; sometimes it is enough to
feel my head consciously in the pillar of light, and perceive my backspace. I
can do this while waiting at a train station, while walking in town in a large
throng of people, or when my little boy has a tantrum. Our frontspace absorbs
our attention (and in seeing we often immediately form ideas) while the
backspace releases us. Here we can listen in to openness. Our frontspace is
defined, earthly, material; our backspace is not yet determined (we ourselves
determine it as we enter into the world before us). It is spiritual, invisible.
The frontspace takes myself from me while the backspace gives me myself.
Exercise: finding the upright

Stand relaxed, your feet together or very slightly apart, and let your head and
shoulders/arms follow gravity so that they hang down in front. Your knees
too should be loose, relaxed.
Now kindle a power of light in you, which passes from the heart and
broadens. (That is the real meaning of ‘uprightness’.) Follow this trail of light
which simultaneously travels upwards and downwards. The stronger we
engender it in us, the more powerfully will its momentum encompass our
body, so that we gradually stretch and straighten. Stretching does not mean
pulling away from below but rather strengthening and warming the feeling of
your lower body and releasing yourself in an upwards direction-until last of
all you raise your head into the column of light. Now feeling and body have
become one. Space becomes free immediately around you; the backward
space especially comes to awareness. Gravity is overcome: you stand upright,
sustained by space.
If you now direct your focus, your consciousness—or, I could also say, the
light—to the area between your shoulder blades, you can experience your
arms becoming lighter so that you can raise them sideways into the horizontal
almost with a sense of weightlessness, as if they are carried by the periphery.
This experience can suggest the ancient symbol of the sun—a circle with a
dot in the middle o—which becomes here an inner picture of the free human
being.5
Make sure that:
• stretching and straightening does not become tension, but that, as it were,
light still flows through the muscles. If you are too tense, the flow is
inhibited. Then it is like putting stones in the bed of a stream that obstruct
the current;
• equilibrium does not become static or rigid, but remains a continual and
simultaneous creating, finding and perceiving of the light.

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1.

The Technique of Eurythmy is Love

Starting position for the exercises

This small observation can already show us something else: in eurythmy

Exercise: finding the upright

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