Underlying Concepts
It is my experience and belief that positive change begins with the capacity to embrace what is already here with compassion and acceptance. My skill-set supports growing this awareness and capacity in combination with ideas that invite new ways to inhabit oneself. I also believe that our experience of ourselves and our experience of making choices as we move through the world are two sides of the same coin.
Meaning-Making
What does our movement experience have to do with how we make meaning of ourselves, of those around us, and of our environment?
Below are terms I find useful to consider when seeking to influence movement patterning, and what I think they mean.
Agency
Agency is both a person’s capacity to make choices as they move through the world and a person's capacity to perceive the reality that they are making choices as they move through the world. If a person only has access to one choice, then it isn’t really a choice, and there might not be a sense of agency around it. A necessary ingredient to agency, choice-making, and change is the capacity to perceive more choices. As a movement teacher, I advocate for and offer tools for first sensing and then cultivating more movement possibilities, more choices. There is a strong correlation between agency/choice-making and less wear and tear on bodies.
Body
When I talk about the body, I am not using this term to describe a person’s physical existence as separate from mind, thought, or any other part of the self. It is my perspective that a person’s body and mind are one and the same: my body is my mind and my mind is my body. In other words, my body is me.
Body-Mind Centering®
Body-Mind Centering® (or BMC®) was founded by Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen and developed in community. This body of work offers an experiential approach to understanding human movement via study of the developmental movement progression (the process of learning to move from birth to walking) and western anatomical body systems.
*Body-Mind Centering® and BMC® are registered service marks of Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen, used with permission.
The Bodily Ecosystem & The Family Ecosystem
A body is a living system composed of a network of relationships. While control is not possible within living systems (perhaps not even desirable), anything we do to influence the relational space that constitutes any one aspect of a person will affect all of the other relationships within the system. So too are families networks of relationships, on a larger scale. Whatever influence is acting on either a caregiver’s experience or a baby’s experience, ripples throughout the rest of the ecosystem.
To read more about the family ecosystem, click here.
Curiosity
Curiosity is an emergent property that arises from the presence of enough support and comfort. In adults and infants alike, ideally, our choice-making is guided by our curiosity. When a person of any age experiences a dearth of curiosity, my curiosity is around what would offer them more support and comfort.
Developmental Movement
This is the story of all the tools and skills we acquire on our way from birth to walking. The patterns of development movement underlie all human movement and this body of work is essential to my explorations of movement with infants and adults alike. These patterns can be key to opening up new movement choices, whether a person is finding their way into them for the first time or revitalizing a pattern they’ve either skipped or lost access to somewhere along the line.
Experiential Learning
No two people are exactly alike and no two people learn in exactly the same way or have exactly the same internal experience. Each person is as unique as they are interrelated. Experiencing enough time and space to feel oneself and to be present with and value one’s own experience is a big part of how we come to engage with our curiosity, learn to regulate, and learn to meet our own needs. How much time and how much space is enough depends entirely on the individual.
Readiness
People learn best and most generatively when we have choice and the capacity to engage with our own learning process. Pushing a person of any age to go beyond where their skills can support them to be is out of sync with learning arising from curiosity.
For expanded thoughts on readiness, click here.
Co-Regulation and Self-Regulation
Regulation is the capacity to experience enough safety, comfort and curiosity to have choice around how to respond to stimuli and adapt to changing circumstances. A person who is able to regulate has the capacity to be present with one’s own internal cycles throughout the cycle of a day, a year, a lifetime. Co-regulation is the ability to be with another person in such a way that both people are better able to regulate. Self-regulation is the ability to regulate in the absence of another person. We self-regulate by noticing our internal needs and being able to respond to those needs in ways that support us as we move through the world.
It is through learning co-regulating skills that we develop self-regulating skills. It is through learning self-regulating skills that we develop co-regulating skills. They are partners, existing within and around one another. It is in tandem with the capacity to effectively self-regulate and co-regulate that we also gain the capacity to engage in generative relational bonding with others.
Somatic Movement Practice
I define any experiential, body-based practice that creates positive transformation, and that privileges the practitioner’s experience of their movement over how the movement looks from the outside as a somatic movement practice.
Many thanks to Dr. Nick Walker for inspiring part of this definition.
Support Precedes Movement
This is a core Body-Mind Centering® principle. What follows is my definition. When a person moves from a place of support, they are moving with an experience of connection to self, to the surface that is supporting them, and to the environment through which they are moving. A person moving from support has the capacity to cultivate multiple choices about how they move through the world and has a corresponding experience of agency as they move. In simple terms, a supported movement is one out of which a person is able to skillfully fall.
People often develop movement habits that are not grounded in support but rather are strategies developed to compensate for some absence of support. These types of strategies are often linked to a sense of safety and the ability to survive; such movement strategies also tend to create a great deal of wear and tear on people. ‘Support precedes movement’ suggests that a fruitful approach to accessing new movement choices lies in cultivating relational pathways of connectedness that arise from a sense of safety, comfort and bonding with one’s self and environment before attempting to give up a compensation pattern upon which a person has relied for, perhaps, their entire life – be their lifetime one month long or 100 years.
It is not possible to determine from the outside if a person’s movement is supported or if a person is experiencing enough safety and comfort to move from a supported place.
