Moving Consciously: Somatic Transformations through Dance, Yoga, and Touch

Connections: Total Body Integration through Bartenieff Fundamentals

What is the story you always tell about yourself? Can you tell it one last time?

I also know that I am doing this for love of the activity—or stated more objectively—for autotelic reasons internal to the process. Somatic studies emphasize autotelic purposes—doing something for its own sake, as in yoga and Zen where all work is seen as equal. In these perspectives as in somatic processes, we work not toward a particular end, but

Moshe Feldenkrais liked to speak about how to find “elegance” in movement, and he didn’t mean ornamentation, but rather an easy attention and reversibility. What goes away from a referenced point returns easily. These are all matters of moving consciously.

Howard Gardner in his famous Frames of Mind, the Theory of Multiple Intelligences (1983) identifies seven main modes of learning as (1) linguistic, (2) logical-mathematical, (3) bodily kinesthetic, (4) spatial-visual, (5) musical, (6) interpersonal, and (7) intrapersonal.

movement and feelings associated with actions. Affect as

Dance as theater is an important kind of

Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain (2012), Damasio shows how images, both abstract and concrete, are “the main currency of our minds.”14 In this, he associates images and minded awareness. Mind is more than the ability to think in words; it is also the ability to imagine and create images of all kinds in tandem with bodily knowled

and yoga, as also in games and sports, are part of a powerful loop of intention and perception. Movement is not something we do nearly so much as what we are, and harbinger to what we can become.