SOMATIC MOVEMENT

I am certified as a Somatic Movement Educator by the School of Body Mind Centering which grew out of the work of Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen.  My training consists of two aspects:  Developmental Movement and Embodied or Experiential Anatomy.

Somatic Movement is a term that was coined by Thomas Hanna to describe  a first person, subjective experience of your own body.  Not your body as you imagine it is perceived by others, nor your body as defined by medical texts  or experts such as doctors but your own individual sensing of your body:  your muscles, bones, skin, organs, your breath and so on.  The term Somatics is used to describe a whole range of movement disciplines such as Yoga, Tai Chi, Body Mind Centering, Hanna Somatics, the Feldenkreis Method, Laban and others.   As Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen so eloquently writes:

“The mind is like the wind and the body is like the sand; if you want to know how the wind is blowing, you can look at the sand.  Our body moves as our mind moves.  The qualities of any movement are a manifestation of how mind is expressing through the body at that moment… when we diret the mind or attention to different areas of the body and initiate movement from those areas, we change the quality of our movement… movement can be a way to observe the expression of mind through the body, and it can also be a way to affect changes in the body-mind relationship.”