Seal Bait – Your mind body and spirit connection

For Georges Hébert, influenced by the teachings of philosopher and educationalist Jean-Jacques Rousseau, only the observation of nature could lead people to the true methods of physical development. He wrote:

The final goal of physical education is to make strong beings. In the purely physical sense, the Natural Method promotes the qualities of organic resistance, muscularity and speed, towards being able to walk, run, jump, move quadrupedally, to climb, to keep balance, to throw, lift, defend yourself and to swim.

In the "virile" or energetic sense, the system consists in having sufficient energy, willpower, courage, coolness, and fermeté ("firmness").

In the moral sense, education, by elevating the emotions, directs or maintains the moral fibre in a useful and beneficial way.

The true Natural Method, in its broadest sense, must be considered as the result of these three particular forces; it is a physical, virile and moral synthesis. It resides not only in the muscles and the breath, but above all in the "energy" which is used, the will which directs it and the feeling which guides it.

Hébert defined the guiding principles and fundamental rules of the Natural Method as:

With regard to the development of virile qualities, this is obtained by the execution of certain difficult or dangerous exercises requiring the development of these various qualities, for example while seeking to control the fear of falling, of jumping, of rising, of plunging, of walking on an unstable surface, etc.


Adapted from the Wikipedia article Georges Hébert, under the G. N. U. Free Documentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki