The Body Has Its Reasons by Therese Bertherat

Author:Therese Bertherat
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Mind and body
Publisher: Inner Traditions/Bear & Company
Published: 2018-06-23T00:00:00+00:00

Perfect Morphology

Classical medical gymnastics is satisfied to analyze and classify the different types of morphology, which are considered constitutional and therefore irreversible. Whether you're ectomorphic, endomorphic, round, flat, or cubic, you are what you are. Our imperfect structure is considered normal because it's common. Isn't the beauty of just proportions, like health, an extremely rare gift of Nature? Beauty, because it is exceptional, would therefore be abnormal.

Françoise Mézières teaches that morphology shouldn't be the science of the classification of dysmorphisms, but the art of recognizing the perfect form, which is the only normal morphology. She taught us not to accept any treatment that is not directed toward that perfect form. For neither the importance of the subject's deformation nor his age prevent him from being able to approach that form in an appreciable way. To the stupefaction of her trainees, she declared that neither morphological type, even if it's hereditary, nor acquired deformities (with the exception of fractures and mutilations), are irreversible. She had even concluded from experience that old people's bodies (her oldest patient was eighty-five) are more malleable than young people's and that she could obtain astonishing results with them.

Françoise Mézières's description of the normal body is that of Greek sculpture of the classical period. Why not that of Hindu sculpture or of French gothic art? Isn't beauty an idea as arbitrary and fleeting as fashion? Isn't the perfect form a question of taste?

Françoise Mézières maintains that the only normal morphology is that which corresponds to the relation of the proportions of the body's parts to one another that characterizes Greek art of the classical period. This art was unique in representing the human being as he should be—that is to say, as he could be if he could give reality to his true potential. This fulfilled human body is like that of a hero or a divinity. (The great American dancer, Martha Graham, talks of "the divine normal being.")

The Greek artist didn't attempt to express psychological, mystical, or political contradictions—but rather a corporal and moral unity that is not utopian but realizable and toward which each mortal, out of self-respect, should direct himself. The famous "serenity," which marks the works of the great Greek period, is the expression of the achievement of this unity and of the subject's perfect physical health, since, for the Greeks, there could be no beauty without health. And there could be no health without the beauty of just proportions.

The following descriptions will help you compare your body with this normal image and understand that your real "defects" perhaps are not those that claimed your attention until now.

Looked at from the front, the clavicles, the shoulders, the nipples, the spaces between the arms and the ribs should be symmetrical and on the same level.

Looked at from the back, the neck should be long and full (and not show two protruding vertical lines separating three grooves). The shoulder blades should be symmetrical and not stick out. The shoulders and hips should also be symmetrical.

When

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