Effortless movement is letting the move execute itself while you observe. It is to be automatic and moving on autopilot. Moving automatically is the way to mastery and effortless action. Let your subconscious take over. Act the way it wants to act. Express whatever wants to come out. Your subconscious will learn by itself how to act better. It will integrate improvements more easily into itself. Say to yourself “I have no mind, I have no will, I have no control, I am the vessel, and it is doing it through me.”
You are not the one making the movement but you are the movement itself. Watch it come and go as if it wasn’t yours. You will slip into a steady space where you feel quite empty. A state of emptiness. Feel as if you’re not in control of your body. Surrender control of your body completely. Imagine that your body is being used like a puppet. Pretend that it’s not you. This will result in a feeling of effortlessness and detachment. Allowing your subconscious to take over is surrendering control to God to do the movements through you. Detachment is trusting and surrendering to God.
Acting automatically and effortlessly is acting at the level of mastery. It is the ability to detach and observe while imagining that your body is moving by itself. This is the key to acting naturally. As technique asserts itself, the player is free to feel something while playing! Feel, don’t think. Act from a state of mindlessness. The right art is purposeless, aimless! The “purposelessness” and “aimlessness” is a means of establishing ourselves as a channel.
The consciousness of self is the greatest hindrance to the proper execution of all physical action. The highest state of action is the selfless state. It is a state where you are in the flow of the universal mind. You’re moving and not moving at all. It is not, “I am doing it,” but rather “it is happening through me,” or “it is doing it through me.” This state of super-consciousness is the opposite of self-consciousness. In that moment, time disappears. It is impossible to be self-conscious and totally involved in the activity at the same time. Consciousness of the self is a barrier between the actor and the action. As you forget your own presence, you attain a state of oneness with the activity and become absorbed in a way that defies the passage of time.
Move around without trying, without caring. The more you feel you can walk away any time, the more powerful your action becomes. More maneuverability, more freedom and more creativity will result. Perfection is something you surrender to. It overcomes you. Just let yourself move automatically. The feeling that you should be practicing more should be ignored. You have to reach a zone where time is timeless and effort is effortless, and becoming great is not important!
We have to re-program the urge to control. We are so used to analyzing everything that we act in narrow, restricted ways. Some people think that this is dedication and humility, but it is just plain inhibition. Analysis should not come during the action, but well after the whole experience is over. Don’t analyze while doing, analyze later. Action should occur totally devoid of thought. Fear of failure and frustration are barriers against creativity. It is better to act badly from a liberated state than to act well from a state of bondage.
Absolute economy of motion comes from letting your body take control and do only what it knows how to do. The effort it takes for you to act equals the distance between you and mastery. Mastery is not about being able to do something correctly most of the time, or even all of the time. Mastery is being able to do it perfectly every time without thought. This state of unconsciousness is realized only when, completely empty and rid of the self, you become one with the perfecting of your technical skill.
Do something not according to the way it is supposed to be done but do it in a way that feels right for you. Your feeling of an action may seem so natural that it might persuade other people that it is the new way to do it. Strength comes from doing what is most natural for you at the moment. Instead of people sensing your limitations, they might marvel at how many ways you can conceive of doing the same thing. If you obey your inner self too much, someone might call you a genius! Different variations of an action are likely to develop naturally as time goes on. The most honest way to act is to stay out of the way.
