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You are in one of *those moments* with a client in your care.

 

Their inner experience is unknowable, and yet they are describing it to you with words. You notice a stream of changes in their body and in the space between you.

 

Your job is to blend intuition and lucid decision making. To move from this place to that. To dance at the border or go to the center. You are tasked with shaping the space of their experience, to help them feel and move better.

 

To do this, you build maps of their felt sense -- bones, fluids, fasciae, meridians, chakras, dantians -- whole landscapes of interoceptive metaphors.  Probably many of these maps coexist in your practice.

 

What do we know about the brain’s process here?  How does guided imagery feed back on to movement, pain perception, affective self-regulation?

 

This class is about surfacing and refining our mapmaking skills.  It’s about helping

Bodyworkers, Movement Teachers, and Mindfulness Practitioners navigate the infinite inner space of a human form — and have fun doing it!

 

 

methodology

We’ll be focusing on:

• How do the brain and body co-emerge? 

• How can we refine and re-encode our body maps over time?

• Palpation: The neuroscience of controlled hallucination

• Embodied movement: Seeking a common language

• Maps and the inner experience: Meditation and visualization

• Now what? Integrating this into your current practice

 

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what is embodiment?

Embodiment is an exciting new field of study, with numerous useful approaches.  For our purposes we define it as “The skill of perceiving, identifying with, and expressing the internal state of the body in the present moment.”

 

To speak in a grounded way about this subject, it helps to develop artful connections between different scientific modes:

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From the perspective of embryology, how did this body form itself in the first place? What are the deep kinships between the body’s various tissues, and can awareness of these kinships instigate a richer experience of them?

 

From the perspective of somatic psychology, embodiment depends on certain conscious and subconscious processes. Are you aware of sensory changes in your body? Do you respond to them as gifts, as nuisances, as threats? Are you able to relate dynamically with other bodies, and with space?

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From the perspective of neuroscience, the key processes are interoception, proprioception, and affective self-regulation.  Where is the body in space? What are its physiologic signals? How does the brain integrate what it feels and how it feels about that information? Under what conditions do these brain systems learn/adapt? There is tremendous complexity in this field, but we can draw some careful inspiration for our daily embodiment practice.

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continuing education certification

ONLINE

• This 3-hour Online Continuing Education class is open to all clinicians, movement teachers, somatic educators, and artists.
   

IN-PERSON

• This 5-hour Continuing Education class is open to all clinicians, movement teachers, somatic educators, body nerds and artists.

 

Both meet the WA state CE requirements for physical therapy and massage therapy.​

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NOTE: All virtual classes have a 'live' option, or can be viewed on your own time.All attendees will receive pre-class content, live class recording, supplementary materials, and a follow-up quiz for CE credit.

 

ONLINE ONLY TICKET: Participate in a live or recorded zoom class (11am-1pm) with lecture, demo, and QA session.

IN-PERSON TICKET: Attend the morning lecture in-person, plus an additional 3 hours (2pm-5pm) of hands-on demo + practice time (limited to 6 tickets - see safety information below).