Sherry I don’t know if you remember, but at the beginning of the summer I found The Thinking Body on the bookshelf and asked if you had read it and if you liked it, and you answered, “It was revolutionary for its time.”
Of course that didn’t answer my question and the next question was, well what does it mean today?
Mabel Todd’s, The Thinking Body, is the founding literary source for a method called Ideokinesis that uses imagery to understand the functionality and relationship among parts of human anatomy. Essentially these images are analogies, which today are commonplace in any good pedagogy. Analogies reframe complex concepts to make the concept accessible to a learner. Research in psychology tells us that they help people understand because an analogy makes the material relevant. It offers a package of related information the learner already knows in which to incorporate this new knowledge. Association with already learned material strengthens understanding of new material. When the “material” is a behavioral or muscle pattern, a mover cannot voluntarily make the nervous, muscular, and skeletal systems operate in a new way because those processes are automatic, but the body does know how to embody the flowing of a river. The image provides an association, like an analogy, but this is a kinesthetic qualitative perceptual shift that calls different muscles to act, enabling the mover to embody a new pattern to initiate change.
So maybe the approach through imagery is not understood as a revolutionary method of education today. Similar approaches exist in many other fields. The insight of Ideokinesis, however is that this method is distinct when it is applied to movement learning because what is being learned exists in the physical realm, and information is absorbed through imagination and kinesthetic sense, instead of reading or memorizing.

-Julia Moser-Hardy

I raise my arm. I feel the action driven by my shoulder blade driven drawing down my back into my body establishing deep, powerful integration from my finger tips to my core.

I raise my arm. I feel the action driven by my finger tips reaching out into space establishing a connection to the audience.

Same action. Different sensation. Its all about perception…or is it “only” perception? I hesitate to trivialize this important process by saying it is only an imaginary shift of attention. It’s not real, its only a different perspective. I would say, No, the two actions, even though they accomplish the same purpose, are fundamentally different because the body experiences distinct and separate sensations by receiving different messages through real neuron connections from the point of sensation to the brain.

However, this complex does pose interesting questions about a societal cling to reality and fear of the imaginary. Consider a crazy person who suffers form hallucinations. “Oh they’re only imagining it.” The idea of living in an imaginary realm is a socially rejected idea. So, what purpose does the concept of reality serve in our lives? Is it limiting? First and foremost the concept of reality keeps us on the same page as others. As a by-product it also keeps us in the realm of the purely observational, but maybe the realms of imagination and reality are not so distinguished from each other. Lets not forget that the entire cities as they exist today, did not exist hundreds of years ago and were brought into the realm of reality BY the imagination.  Pieces of art, the sound waves of a musical composition are real artifacts that only once existed in imagination and who is to say that our sensations are any less? Even a person who imagines himself covered with ants in hallucination is only describing the very real sensation of his nerves firing. Imagination is a real experience and so are the “imagined” ideas that form a perception.

-Julia Moser-Hardy

As this summer research project is coming to a close, I’m wondering where to focus now? Simply Somatic has been launched! This website has lots of good info, lots of options for discovering more about a somatic point of view, and many ways to interact with others who are interested in this “somatic thing” (especially if we include our social network SomaticMe). I seem to have been asking this “what’s next?” question since the beginning of our project back in June. What is next for this year’s research (after our beginning attempts last summer to investigate a somatic perspective in higher education)?

A wider conversation is among my interests. I’d like to know what others are doing to grow this field out of its roots in therapeutic practice, injury prevention, and body awareness. It occurs to me that a somatic point of view has potential to infiltrate any field of inquiry that includes physical engagement of any degree. How does a more intensely physically embodied perspective influence one’s perceptions? Notions of embodiment have been in the conversation across many fields for decades. Has this common vocabulary moved a physically engaged perspective more to the center of the conversation? What’s next? I’d like the circle of inclusion in this somatic realm to reach farther afield, to penetrate perspectives that talk about embodiment yet do not engage the body in meaningful ways. Back to one of our beginning questions last summer–how could such a shift change the way we do education?

-Sheryl Saterstrom

Jake Dalton American Cup 2011

Sooo of course I have to post an appropriately-timed reflection, for the XXX Olympic games, on the incredible bodily awareness successful athletes acquire over years of training. While watching the mens gymnastics qualifiers I was struck by the impressive awareness of bodily connectivity some of the gymnasts showed, especially in moments like this, where the gymnast rolls out of a tumbling pass and is suddenly vertical.

In breaking down that moment, let’s first look at the relationship between upper and lower body. After rolling through the spine as his back comes up off the floor he keeps his legs folded and his torso reaching forward. In the movement of his upper body, he holds an appropriate amount of tension to keep this forward reach without relaxing into depending on his momentum. This keeps his upper body tucked close to his upper legs which will help transfer his weight, in coming to vertical, over the feet.

In the next moment he establishes clear connections between heel to knee through the tibia, and between the heel to the sitz bones of the pelvis. Keeping his upper body reaching forward, he plants his feet and comes to an almost-sitting position where his knee and ankle joints are perpendicular. This was the most consistent marker I saw all night. Every gymnast who did a pass like this found this embodied marker in coming out of the floor. Why? — because at this moment the tibia is exactly vertical over the ankle joint, setting up the standing position, but this involves a connection through the upper leg to the pelvis too. If the pelvis were any more forward the knee joint would be at a different angle affecting the alignment of the lower leg. This means a connection between the front of the heel, that roots the foot, ankle, and lower leg to the floor, to the pelvis is critical to finding this marker.

This connection is also important in the last motion: bringing the pelvis over the vertical set up of the lower body to standing. If the body simply straightens, the weight of the upper body would, like a see-saw, overpower the alignment set up in the lower leg. The feet would slip out and the gymnast would land on his behind. To avoid such a disaster, the connection between the pelvis and the front of the heel informs the mover to find where vertical alignment over the set up of the lower-leg, and the torso continues to reach forward as he comes to standing, and unfolds from the pelvic hinge.

Assessing the entire movement on a macro level, it is clear that folding and unfolding occurs simultaneously in every joint. It is the relationship of joint functioning, not muscle contractions, not pure momentum, that allows this action to occur smoothly. This functional anatomical study is the way somatic educators teach anatomy, because this is how human beings live life. Its interesting to know that the tibia is the most vertical bone in the body, but what purpose does that knowledge serve if we don’t also understand the functional role of that information?! One answer might be that the tibia is vertical so that during a moment of weight transfer the body can find stable vertical alignment again, but it only does this through its relationship to operations of the ankle, knee, and pelvic joints.

-Julia Moser-Hardy

This is an inescapable truth. The most immediate environment through which human beings experience living is the body. The body can be perceived as separate from the self, (and many wester practices do encourage this view,) yet that is not the way life is experienced. I do not HAVE a body, I AM BODY. My body receives the sensory information that I evaluate and incorporate into my self and informs me of the next appropriate functional response. What if I lived life in a more “in-bodied” way? How would this perceptual shift change my understanding of my environment and my functioning and role within my environment?

-Julia Moser-Hardy

The imaginers, creators, researchers, and movers behind SimplySomatic.com recognize the importance of the feedback loop between our voice and the voices of you, our audience. On this blog you will find our somatic musings of the week. We hope these thoughts will inspire you to begin or participate in a conversation with users of this website by replying to our posts, by introducing or discussing topics in our forum, or by joining our network of somatic movers, SomaticMe!