As a child I loved to move. Gymnastics was the most accessible form of movement where I grew up and provided a container for discovering motion, momentum, physicality, creativity, imagination, and fun! As a child, I took this love for motion and discovery everywhere I went. I invented movement playgrounds out of sofa pillows, mattress, and blankets. Growing up with boulders and forests, I climbed on rocks and swung from tree branches. My love for movement always stayed with me but it was not until college that this desire for discovery through motion manifested itself through dance and body based movement therapies. At 19 years old, I stepped into my first dance class. I had no technique or familiarity with how to coordinate my body to different rhythms and patterns. I was muscle bound and full of tension. My excitement and eagerness fueled my intensity to learn how to organize my body. How could I move my body with fluidity, subtle and bold articulation, expression, ease, power, awareness, and strength? This inquiry fueled my personal exploration to learn how to move my body that led me to my early career in Pilates, Gyrotonic®, yoga, dance, and somatic movement practices. My love for movement, analogous for my love of life and learning, opened the door for deeper investigation into what supports our embodiment experience and our sense of self and wholeness.

Our perpetual motion signifies our aliveness. Our collective embryological experience is harnessed by the movement and knowing of our cells. Attuning our attention into the deep knowing of body facilitates a whole body presence that enhances our body-mind communication. As a healer, movement educator, bodywork practitioner, dancer, performer, and lecturer, I have witnessed the power and value of movement and somatic awareness to facilitate bodily presence and knowing-ness. To embody our full living body potential empowers our full human potential. Would you prefer to be powered at 100% or 20%? When we disconnect from our body experience, we are disconnecting from an invaluable reservoir of resource, knowledge, and creative potential.

 

The field of somatic movement education values the belief of awakening awareness within the body to connect to the intrinsic wisdom and deep knowing of our bodies. Connecting to our movement potential with mindfulness, awareness, and compassion creates a container for us to learn about ourselves on levels that may be unfamiliar and to facilitate healing of movement patterns, limited beliefs, and unhelpful thinking and emotional patterns that may inhibit our innate states of resilience, clarity, well-being, and happiness. Tapping into our moving body potential in safe and compassionate space allows our personal truths and stories of who we are and what is going on with us in any moment to be heard and witnessed. Cultivating a practice of compassion, acceptance, and empathy expands our capacity to understand and connect with others so we may build healthy and productive relationships. Moving into healthy relationships with others develops our sense of community in caring ways, shaping how we work together to solve problems, build a safer world, and protect our planet, environment, wildlife, and natural resources from destruction. Moving from a place of inner presence expands our perception to sense, feel, and then move from a place of conscious choice making into positive action.

I believe in the power and responsiveness of kinesthetic and tactile learning. Learning from our direct, subjective experience builds our physical knowledge and knowing. It allows us to dissolve former paradigms that no longer serve us and cultivate new paradigms of being that support our higher purpose and path in life.

My work is supported by my research in phenomenological qualitative research methodologies, such as action research and arts-based social science methodologies. A qualitative research approach includes the study of experience from the perspective of the individual and emphasizes the importance of personal knowledge, subjective experience, and personal narrative as part of how humans contribute to creating truth. Methodologies in qualitative research highlight a heuristic process, a process of self-discovery and self-learning. The embodiment process within somatic movement education is founded on principles of self-learning, self-discovery, self-reflection, and self-authority, values that are also found in qualitative research. Our subjective experiences and the phenomena we notice, feel, and discover are central to our exploration, a process that deepens our connection to self, other, and our world. My methodology within my work is based on exploration, in which we describe phenomena such as bodily sensations, emotions, affects, consciousness, subconscious, thoughts, and images, in order to discover and understand the complex meanings present in our lived experiences.