Educating Toward Inner Freedom

I wanted to add these remarks about the eurythmy you have seen performed here. Let me just say that we introduced eurythmy into our Waldorf school because it affords such a wonderful contrast to ordinary gymnastics. As mentioned, physical exercises are carried out adequately in a Waldorf school, but regarding ordinary physical gymnastics, we elaborate them in such a way that, with every exercise, the children are first given a sense of spatial directions, which are, of course, fundamental. The children feel the directions of space, and then their arms follow it. In their gymnastics, they surrender to space. This is the only healthy basis for gymnastic exercises. Space is conditioned in all directions. To an ordinary, abstract concept of space, there are three directions, which we cannot distinguish. They are present only in geometry. In fact, however, the head is above, the legs below, and this gives us above and below. Then we have right and left. We live in this direction of space when we stretch out our arms. The point is not to find some “absolute direction.” Of course, we can turn this way or that. Then we have a forward and backward direction, front and back. All other directions of space are oriented in relation to these. If we understand space in this way, we can discover truly healthy movements for gymnastics, in which a person surrenders to the laws of space.