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Foundation for Movement Intelligence What is Movement |
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Home | Our Purpose | MI Defined | Membership | Contact Us | Calendar of Events | Members Page | Newsletter | Links | Teachers & Classes | Sponsorship
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The Elegance of Movement Intelligence
With a nod to Howard Gardner’s Frames of Mind, we define Movement Intelligence [MI] as
the capacity to improve our potential to transform intention into action. MI incorporates conventional kinesthetic components of flexibility, balance, alignment and strength, as well as coordination and endurance, but it is something much more: it reflects the human organism’s ability to organize itself “organically” — elegantly and in its entirety — for optimal efficiency, maximal effect, and enjoyable, sustainable living.
Just as infants develop their movement vocabularies as they learn to make their way from rolling to creeping to crawling, so too can adults continue to expand the range and quality of their movement expression, intelligently cultivating and refining their repertoire throughout their lives. Surpassing survival needs, our infinite ability to improve in this domain — and raise our movement “I.Q.” — is a lifelong endeavor. It embraces aesthetic as well as athletic pursuits, and provides keys to personal satisfaction and successful aging.
As an innovative approach to personal ergonomics, MI can take on unusual appearances,
• heightening extensor tone to improve skeletal alignment • protecting vulnerable joints in order to withstand the impact of bone-building • gently pushing and pulling on bones [compression and distraction] in order to • obviating bone fractures by improving balance (in order to prevent falls) as well |
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Some General Principles* of Movement Intelligence include:
Economy — “Intention without Tension”
Intelligent movement is “reality adjusted,” i.e., appropriate to the task at hand, with the investment of necessary and sufficient energy — not too much effort, not too little. Extraneous tension and motion is eliminated, and the resulting action is unforced and unhurried, without invoking any interfering intentions.
The less excess tension involved, the more you can feel and refine your actions. [c.f. Weber-Fechner Law] Alignment — “Access your Axis”
Best movement practices create more space within the body, lengthening the spine by minimizing its curves, and truing it to a plumb line perpendicular with the earth’s surface. When a balanced, horizontally “hanging” pelvis cantilevers a column of vertically streamlined vertebrae, breath is unobstructed, turning economical, and anti-gravity challenges — like getting up out of a chair, climbing stairs, and jumping — all feel effortless. Intelligent movers orient themselves about an axis, and navigate with reference to it: around it and along it. When your axis is optimally trued to gravity, the quality of your movement becomes light, free, and easy.
Power — “The Domino Effect”
Aligned bones allow you to reclaim your innate strength and power in a sustainable manner. They function to transmit force through your limbs, all the way up from the ground through your skeletal axis to the top of your skull — evident when “heading” a soccer ball, or transporting a bucket of water, but also essential in the everyday carriage of your head atop your neck. When bones are not well-aligned, the ascending GRF [ground reaction force] is damped as muscles compensate for misdirected vectors, and shearing stress occurs in the joints which eventually erodes them.
Balance — “Be to All Sides”
Rather than holding rigidly still, stabilizing yourself in gravity requires continuous adjustment, facilitated by suppleness at every joint, and thus entails perpetual postural sway. Buoyed by righting reflexes, you remain unbraced and unbiased even at the peak of this physically heightened state — ready to move in any direction at a moment’s notice. As you restore your potential energy, and home in on an elevated sense of equilibrium and tensegral balance, you may experience a sense of relaxed alertness, accompanied by a serene feeling of dignity, confidence, and calm. Unperturbed, the French say: “Je m'en balance.”
Flow — “Continuity”
Rather than repeatedly falling and catching oneself, as some would have it, we see intelligent movement as akin to a rolling ball: in balance at every instant — ready to slow, stop, reverse, or change speed or direction without any bumpiness, jerkiness, or hesitancy. While in motion, noiselessly transferring weight to smoothly translate your body through space, your movable parts must continuously counterbalance — maintaining both your uprightness, and the uninterrupted rhythm of your respiration. For example, taking a step from standstill, your hip withdraws backward to counter a forward-lifted leg, leaving you in balance, with your breathing unaffected. Flow can be operative at any speed, but moving slowly is initially your best test, and your best teacher. A hallmark of continuous flow is spontaneous, autonomically paced breathing: unfettered, omni-dimensional and omni-directional, and, at the highest level of differentiation, informed by — but independent from — the rhythm of your activity.
Holism — “As Above, So Below”
The integrated physical body is a sophisticated somatic system in which each part reflects the whole; no local change is possible without affecting the entire network. For example, a repositioning of the head redistributes weight in the feet, and vice versa. This reciprocal relationship also carries over to other physiological systems, e.g., respiration, circulation, and digestion. Movement is thus our most visible indicator of systemic deterioration, and also provides the most accessible entry point for early intervention [e.g. Alzheimer’s].
Division of Labor — “Share the Workload”
In a well-functioning body there is an even distribution of tonus, of weight, of effort, of pressure; there is no over-activation or involvement of any particular part, which, if present, signals the need for a rebalancing or readjustment of the entire system, as a whole — and is not a call to isolate and over-focus on an already overworked symptomatic area. When you reach down to pick something up from the ground, to what degrees do you bend your knees, fold your hips, and angle your ankles?
Integration — “We’re all Connected”
Integration entails proportional skeletal involvement, i.e. the participation of all joints in every activity,
with effort distributed evenly among them. With the whole body involved, including our network of internal sphincter muscles, each part plays its role in contributing to our overall intention, without any joint getting unduly bent out of shape. Involvement of our lower limbs — the hips, knees, ankles and toes — manifests as a springiness which can be felt to echo freely throughout the body, as does our breath. Performed in moderation, avoiding extremes, our actions reflect our intentions and are carried out without triggering habitual (protective yet conflicting) internal interference, and without generating incongruent, self-contradictory external behavior. Natural Movement — “Ride the Spiral”
In healthy integrated movement, there is an organic spiraling of one side of the body over the other in an overlapping double-helix that revolves in alternation around the hip-joints. A three-dimensional spiral trajectory also naturally occurs in all four limbs: internal rotation when extending away from the body’s central core; external rotation when withdrawing towards it. This helical winding and unwinding shapes our bones, which in turn influence the way our movements spiral through space.
Initiation — “Where to Begin?”
With the head directed off the top of the spine, our peripheral limbs lead in slow gentle motion; our central core leads in faster full-bodied activity. Both possibilities are enhanced in quality through a coordinated eccentric lengthening of antagonist muscles, whose passive release ideally accompanies the activation of the agonists, i.e., extensors extend when (or even slightly before) flexors flex. Integrated full-bodied movement can be sensed as occurring about the body’s center of gravity, a point which orbits the pelvic hub in front of the sacrum. Initiations which include rotation easily involve our entire selves, and make our movement more three-dimensional; they also conserve energy, and preserve upright balance.
Wave — “What’s your Sine?”
When walking forward there is an organic fluctuation of weight, both fore and aft, that originates in our center and that can be sensed in the sole of our stepping foot. The definition of progress may figuratively be “three paces forward, one pace back” — when walking these shifts in direction occur literally within the span of a single step. If unblocked, the resulting undulation ripples upward, through the chest, and its echo can be felt to reverberate as high as our spine’s topmost vertebrae. This primal way of moving harks back to the fish, and the caterpillar.
Osteogenesis — “Use it, or Lose it”
Bones develop through rhythmic pulsations, as a secondary bonus of moving as nature meant: in a dynamic springy fashion, with the alternating pressure of body weight thrust into the ground and rebounding with a counterpressure that streams upward, lifting the body and propelling it forward. Rhythmic vibrations are the lifeblood of bone building, promoting the circulation of cleansing and replenishing fluids, e.g. venous return, as well as a push and pull on the bones — whose alternating compression and tension tugs on the tissues, promoting growth at the cellular level that makes them both sturdy and resilient. Body-based rhythms useful to explore are those of the breath, the heartbeat, walking, running, and jumping . . . unhurried, and paused at inflection points for increased awareness and choice. Repetition is necessary, but it is important not to carry bone-building activities to the point of exhaustion; better is to integrate cycles of repose and recuperation, so that sufficient motivation remains for future practice. Without the daily reinforcement of bone-strengthening processes, atrophy tends to set in [c.f. Wolff’s Law].
Visualization — “Somatic Insight”
Our imagination has the power to influence muscular tone and postural alignment, and to make changes in our self-image and our quality of movement. For example: recalling the touch of soft textures like velvet or silk; picturing melting ice cream or honey; pretending that you are walking on concrete, glass, or grass; or feeling that you are falling into piles of feathers or leaves. Powerful visualizations use specific bodily-based locations and directions, and are always in motion; without invoking any voluntary movement you conjure up an image, enter into it, and become one with it.
Spatial Awareness — “The Big Picture”
When you attend to the world with “soft eyes” — sensing the space you are in, and the space within you — you may notice the three-dimensional interrelationships in, around, and between objects, others, and yourself. This shortcut to transpersonal presence can evoke a transcendent state: a relaxed awareness of, and blending with, your surroundings. Rather than employing narrowly-focused concentration, your mind is now/here yet nowhere in particular, embracing your environment in a receptive and regenerative mode which transparently fosters instinctually integrated coordination.
Human Potential — “Poetry in Motion”
As Movement Intelligence unfolds in us, our growing mastery of weight, space, time, and flow gradually comes to embody a self-directed physiology of physically enlightened living. With our personal biomechanics better calibrated, we become refined instruments of somatic sensitivity and expression, and can begin reclaiming our birthright to elastically sculpt time and space, playfully improvising as artists of life. Phrasing our movement with pregnant pauses, we are ever engaged in the process of living — the journey, not the destination — and our earthly dance is to the music of the spheres; we are both in the world and of it, while perhaps an inch or two taller from the ground. The presence we sense is the foundation for an internally felt “Biological Optimism” as well as an externally recognizable “Body Language of Leadership.”
Organic Learning — “Practice makes Perfect”
Lasting neuromuscular repatterning best takes place on life’s sidelines, in the “greenhouse” conditions of a safe learning environment, where our organism is given a chance to mindfully explore variations and unused options in slow motion, with open awareness. Back out on life’s playing field, we trust our autonomic moving centers [cerebellum, somatosensory cortex, etc.] — enriched with newly acquired patterns, and continually updated with moment-to-moment real-world feedback — to spontaneously coordinate appropriately integrated responses, making course corrections as necessary in order to actualize our intentions.
Teach without Teaching — “Be Ye Lamps unto Yourselves”
As an instructor, avoid invoking obedience to external authority, or imitating ideals; instead, value and evoke uniqueness, self-reliance, and autonomy. Without directly teaching, set up conditions for learning; give people experiences, not explanations. Words cannot convey experience; they only motivate us beforehand, and remind us afterward. (The map is not the territory; the finger pointing at the moon is not the moon.) Don’t explain it, be it! First learn to see yourself, then to see others; finally guide others to see themselves. Cultivate a climate of curiosity, not superiority, in which students sense that there are secrets hidden that they must discover for themselves. Rather than providing answers, inspire people to live — and love — the questions. Says Ruthy Alon: “Health is search.”
* Spontaneously embodying and practicing these principles in your daily life FMI ° P.O. Box 694 ° Portland, ME ° 04104 © 2008 Foundation for Movement Intelligence |
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