Brain Body Tools are strategies that have evolved from my own somatic, experiential study of the relationship of the mind, body, and spirit. The study grew out of my good fortune to have met and trained with teachers who paved the way for my exploration giving me a framework to live by.
The journey to understand myself and thereby help others has become my life’s work. Meditation and the study of the body-mind connection dramatically impacted my skills and ability to help my clients. More profoundly, it taught me how to heal myself and gave me the wisdom to raise my child. My deepest desire is for you to do the same and to pass on tools of healing and self-discovery to those you love, work, know and live with.
I was introduced to the interconnectedness of the brain and the body at several critical junctures in my development. When I was 21, I was a modern dance student of Judith Komoreske in Palo Alto, California. Standing in front of a mirror in a garage, I had made a commitment to become a dancer. Every day, I practiced modern dance in the garage until I felt I was ready to try out for the advanced level classes.
Something powerful took place in those garage sessions. I began to connect to myself on another level. It was the beginnings of mindfulness although the word was not yet created. I stopped judging myself and approached my task patiently and open-heartedly. I redefined my identification of myself as a non-dancer to accepting myself in the present moment in my body. Instead of identifying with ideas that my body wasn’t perfect, I began to ease into a space of the witness, watching myself act the role of the dancer. I explored movement principles, and worked with my muscles and brain on a deeper level. I surrendered to an emerging flow from within. To get the results I wanted, I had to live within my body and mind from that place of flow. It was shortly after this that I attended my first hatha yoga class and met my meditation teacher.
Practicing meditation has been my lifeline, helping me through junctures and crises and opening me up to an unfathomable depth of experience of my inner world. I have turned to meditation for answers through loss and deep despair. I never gave up my religion. I learned the power of going within. My experience was resolute and unwavering. No one could take it away from me, because I connected with my own self when I meditated. My family was not always supportive of my choices. Despite this, I trusted my yearning to go within for answers. I struggled with anxiety, anger and depression, but I found that as I quieted my mind, my rich wise inner self, full of light, and a sense of humor, welled up from inside to guide me. One doctor told me “you can either do medication or meditation. I chose meditation.
After a year and a half as a volunteer on a rural hospital bus working side by side with doctors, nurses and holistic practitioners, the seeds were planted for my holistic journey and passion for integrative medicine.
In 1973, when I studied occupational therapy there was little discussion about the relationship of the mind and body. Dr. Jane Ayres, a neuroscientist and occupational therapist (OT) was breaking new ground in her work on sensory integration (the study of how we take in information through our senses and process it). The psychology field still believed the brain was fixed. She believed in neural plasticity and that the brain could change itself as we now have evidence of this. Although in 2013 there were many neuroscientists and neurobiologists writing about how the brain, emotions and stress are inter-related, few existed in the 70’s. Frustrated, I was looking for the course that would delve more deeply into a body-mind connection. I enrolled in The School for Body Mind Centering® founded by Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen, an OT, dancer, somatic therapist, teacher and author of Sensing, Feeling and Action.
I can remember my first day at the School for Body Mind Centering. One hundred of us all sat in a huge circle, each morning, and shared our life stories and reason for coming to study. It was a profound experience to enter into a community of healers, dancers, physical therapists, psychologists, and somatic educators. We studied anatomy every day by looking at a skeleton, did body work, movement, and discussion. This was the beginning of a four-summer exploration of Body Mind Centering, and later to be the central axis of my yoga study of Embodyoga®.
Bonnie’s work resonated with the late Candace Pert, author of Molecules of Emotion: The Science Behind Mind-Body Medicine. Dr. Pert discovered that cells responded emotionally, further supporting the body-mind-spirit connection and linking science and spirituality.
Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen taught the experience of the “mind” of all the body systems and guided us through the exploration of how the different systems, skeletal, nervous, circulatory, muscular, organs and neuroendocrine could be accessed with touch, breath and movement. We also explored the developmental movement patterns and reflexes that underlie all movement and are formidable in the first year of life. Bonnie’s research evolved into an exploration of embryological development. Through movement, visualization and energetic work we can explore the underlying architecture of the patterns of the brain and body and can re-pattern ourselves.
Sensing the patterns of the embryonic development experientially, we can gain new levels of understanding of the body and mind. Through this re-patterning, we explore, and free ourselves from negative patterns that may have been restrictive, or painful. During last year’s Body Mind Centering Association conference, my daughter had a personal experience of internal sensing. She has never been able to swallow pills. That morning in Bonnie’s workshop we were exploring through an experiential somatic exercise, the embryological development of the middle body. We were sensing the origins of the digestive track in the front of the spine. We explored this through movement, breathing and some hands-on facilitation. During class, I caught a glimpse of my daughter dancing expressively in the corner of the room, as if she had found a new level of freedom to be herself. The next day she shared that for the first time in her life, she had swallowed a pill without any difficulty. This level of somatic exploration is a powerful stepping-stone to creating change in the body’s functional capacity.
Brain Body Tools has grown from this rich heritage of meditation and integrative studies. Combined with the teachings of mindfulness, Brain Body Tools will offer practitioners a way to help clients experience the connection of the mind and body.
As we learn to go within using yoga, meditation, visualization and somatic exploration, we began to witness thoughts and feelings. We enter a new playing field of sensing from the inside out and living an embodied life.
My goal is to disassemble the concepts that yoga is for physically fit people and that meditation is about stopping your thoughts. Instead, let’s replace those concepts and open to the everyday applications of yoga psychology. For our children’s development and our own well-being join me in exploring yoga in the world. It can help us be better parents, live more intuitive, embodied, focused and loving lives, and teach our children tools to face the world.