Shift Network – Somatic Movement Summit 2023 | Digital Download

In exploring what makes us  human, what empowers us to be  our best? How can we grow as a society?

We cannot go into the brain and just think it.  Then we are ignoring the whole rest of the system. The physiology is the access point and the expression of thought and feelings and spirituality.  Everything that goes beyond living day to day without thinking doing things by habit.  The movements are just a framework to explore our own self image and limitations as well.

You are asked to do a just small movement, but to really explore how you are think about doing it, which makes you find new connections through yourself including more of yourself in every intention and every thought. Which just makes more of yourself available.  And then as a society we also become more sensitive and aware to each other, and the whole thing goes into a very spiritual place.  It’s really nice for us to access it from something as practical as movement that anyone can do in relation to a floor or a chair.

When you change your posture you change your relationship with gravity.  It also affects your breathing. If you breathe out, all the emotional things like laughing or crying, they involve expiration. Also looking down, when you ask someone to think of something sad, people look down. It’s also the posture of prayer. So there is a very emotional component to this.  It is also a component when people get stressed out.  Thinking of something happy, people are making pictures in their head, so you go from the emotional to the visual.

In this work we explore these movements so everyone has an entrance point into their internal state and master it.  If you are stuck in a state you want to change, you have several hooks.  You can think of gravity, you can look up, notice changes in the body.  So we encompass the idea that thought and physiology are intertwined in a way that empowers people to feel better about themselves and behave in a way that suits their hopes.

This is how the movement and the spiritual and the emotion all tied together in this practice.