about the course

Before you had bones, joints, muscles, and organs, you were a water balloon — a quivering bubble with a central midline and segmental folds, acrobatically becoming a human body.

Every other movement you learned since then has built outward from this initial balance of fluid pressure and membrane tension.  When you notice the lines of tension in the skin, the dense seams between muscles, the bones stretched long like pizza dough, you are seeing the remnants of embryonic unfolding. 

This class is intended to give movement nerds and health practitioners a vivid first-person sense of embryonic development, with the hope of inspiring new approaches and a deeper practical knowledge of the moving body.

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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

• This 3-hour Continuing Education class is open to open to all practitioners of movement, somatics, mindfulness, and physical medicine