What is BodyMindMovement?
BodyMindMovement is an approach to somatic movement education, a multi-layered process of healing and personal transformation through movement re-patterning, guided visualization, and touch. Somatic movement education (part of the broader field of somatics, the study of the body and mind as they are experienced internally) weaves together principles of embodied anatomy and developmental movement. We support self-learning by exploring aspects of the internal sensory world, supplemented by the concepts of traditional anatomy and kinesiology. In the confluence of those studies we listen to our bodies, respond to what we feel, and consciously invite new movement habits and sensory choices.
How is this work applied?
BodyMindMovement Somatic Movement Education (SME) is used for general wellness, for personal integration, or for addressing specific physical or personal symptoms. Many people use the work purely for personal enrichment on physical, relational, mental, and spiritual levels. Others integrate the work into their existing movement and therapeutic professions. Still others choose to become certified as Somatic Movement Educators in order to apply the work directly with infants, children, and adults. The application of SME principles encompasses postural and movement evaluation, communication and guidance through touch and words, experiential anatomy and imagery, and the patterning of new movement choices. The resulting discoveries are then applied to everyday activities in order to integrate new awareness into daily life, or into the practice of specific movement forms such as dance or yoga.
Who participates in the SME and EPA Certification Programs?
Practitioners of many movement, creative, and therapeutic disciplines--including dance, music, theater, yoga, martial arts, athletics, physical therapy, occupational therapy, massage, psychotherapy, and medicine—enrich their practices through the study of somatic movement education.
How can I use this training?
The BodyMindMovement SME training will enable you to understand how the body works from an experiential perspective. For educators in movement disciplines and therapies, that understanding will profoundly enhance your ability to analyze movement, present your material from an embodied personal perspective, and lead students into greater self-awareness as movers. For artists and psychotherapists, SME training will provide a greater understanding of how the mind is expressed through the body and how our developmental movement history shapes our being. Most students find the training to be an asset personally as well as professionally.
The goal of the somatic movement professional is to heighten both sensory and motor awareness to facilitate a student-client’s own self-organization, self-healing, or self- knowing. In this context, “movement” includes the subtler movements of the breath and energy, the voice, the face, and the postural muscles, as well as any large movement task, event, or expression. Somatic movement lessons often use touch to amplify sensory experience through the skin, the body’s largest organ, and therefore more quickly awaken awareness.
What are the prerequisites needed to register?
Most courses in the BodyMindMovement program may taken individually with no prior experience in somatic movement education. They are designed for people who already have some experience with movement, bodywork, or other body-mind disciplines.
To enroll in the 500-hour Somatic Movement Educator Program, a student must fulfill the following criteria:
- Be at least 24 years old
- Be mentally, physically and emotionally able
- Be able to demonstrate competence in a specific movement form such as dance, yoga, martial arts, in another bodywork or somatic modality, or in a therapeutic discipline such as psychotherapy or physical therapy
- Have taken at least one course at the Center for BodyMindMovement.
How can I learn more?
Recommended reading for topics in somatic movement education and awareness:
Hartley, Linda, Wisdom of the Body Moving, An Introduction to Body-Mind Centering, Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 1989
Juhan, Deane, Job’s Body: A Handbook for Bodywork, Barrytown, NY: Station Hill Press, 2003
Johnson, Don Hanlon, ed. Bone, Breath & Gesture, Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 1995
For information about the BodyMindMovement Programs contact Mark Taylor