I’ve just spent two hours on working a paragraph of Moshé Feldenkrais’s into something I could use for a Youtube Short. The text mingling felt rather effortless, annoying at times, but smooth sailing with a dictionary, a thesaurus, and a computer, but was quite some work nonetheless.

And thanks for nothing to GPT-5, which proofed to be useful only for grammar checking.

Title: The sensation of effort

1st slide:

• That light feeling when your hands glide like rays of light over piano keys.
• When your running stride flows.
• That crisp, perfect ping when you hit a golf ball just right.
• That feeling when your gear shift clicks perfectly into place.
• When your basketball shot rolls out perfectly, with no hesitation.
• When your singing voice hits the perfect resonance.

2nd slide:

• In truly skillful movement, work is being done, but the sensation of effort is absent.

3rd slide:

• In contrast, a sensation of effort signals that a movement is working against your body’s design;
• that a movement is inefficient enough to trigger a warning;
• is poorly distributed, badly timed, and wasting energy.

4th slide:

• Effort is a helpful signal if you act on it — and a troublesome one if you ignore it.

Source

Here’s the original text, Moshé Feldenkrais, The Potent Self, Chapter 12, Correct Posture, Section “Absence of effort”:

In good action, the sensation of effort is absent no matter what the actual expenditure of energy is. Much of our action is so poor that this assertion sounds utterly preposterous. It suffices, however, to observe a good judo man, an expert weight lifter, a figure-skating champion, a first-class acrobat, a great diva, an Arabian horseman, a skillful porter—in fact, anybody who has learned to perform correctly mental or bodily actions—in order to convince oneself that the sensation of effort is the subjective feeling of wasted movement. All inefficient action is accompanied by this sensation; it is a sign of incompetence.