One a recent mini- vacation of sorts, I decided to spend some time playing the violin. Something fun, new and challenging: a Gypsy melody.
I wound up where I did not intend to be —back at the computer—and discovered another spark of genius.
There I was on YouTube.com watching a master violinist give students a series of incredible yoga-derived exercises here.
Kinesthetic intelligence has been defined as “the ability to think in movements and to use the body in skilled and complicated ways for expressive and goal directed activities.”
Dr. Branton Shearer, a member of the Sparks of Genius Community, explains it as “…a sense of timing, coordination for whole body movement and the use of hands for manipulating objects.”
A little background may shed some light. Yehudi Menuhin made his violin debut at the age of seven with the San Francisco Symphony. By the time he was thirteen, he had played in Paris, Carnegie Hall, Berlin and London.
His career took him all over the world, and he was known as an exceptional musician master educator and great humanitarian.
In 1948, Yehudi Menuhin he discovered a book on yoga in an osteopath’s office and around 1950 he went to India and met the yoga master B.K.S. Iyengar.
At the time, Menuhin was very busy and somewhat fatigued. It was supposed to be a quick five-minute session, but five minutes turned into an hour and Menuhin was completely uplifted. That evening, Menuhin and Iyengar forged a friendship that lasted nearly 50 years, until Menuhin’s death in 1999.
Menuhin was intrigued with the science of motion and sound as they related directly to the improvement of his violin performance. This lifelong study was both inspired and enhanced by his practice of yoga.
One needs to work through the poor sound and video quality and actually do these exercises to appreciate the sparks of genius in them.
You do not need to be a violinist or a musician to benefit from them. Go watch. Now.
To learn more about the 9 intelligences in our 5-4-9 formula, visit http://sparksofgenius.com/sparks.html
-Dr. Rohn Kessler
