In late Spring 2020 I had the honor of being interviewed by Paige Speers, local integrative wellness activist. Paige’s mission is to help educate others about diverse supportive resources that could help them heal in the ways that Paige, herself, has found benefit.
Paige’s journey began with a pulmonary embolism in 2016. The impact of the embolism left her with an acquired brain injury that affected her abilities to walk, talk and do many activities of her daily living which had included horseback riding and dance. Paige, however, was not content with the standard offerings of medical care and has spent the last four years actively seeking, exploring and practicing many different alternative therapies.
As part of her mission, she is now collecting interviews from the various practitioners who have supported her in her process. These interviews are, in part, for the book she is writing - the current working title is I Chose Greater: Living Beyond Brain Injury. As part of this process, Paige interviewed me about our work together using somatic movement therapy to help her enliven new neural pathways. Although Paige had reclaimed her ability to do the actions of walking early in her recovery process, our work together is focused on enhancing the quality of her more complex movements, like the weight-shifting, balancing and 3D integration involved in all sorts of locomotion, by strengthening her relationship with the underlying patterns of connectivity.
The photo on this blog is of Paige and Huey at Cedar Creek Therapeutic Riding Center.
You can hear more about Paige and her story directly from her by visiting this podcast: Life Over Pain
The following is the written transcript of our interview:
in terms that those of us who are survivors of brain injury can find relatable, what does your initial evaluation consist of?
My initial evaluation is to observe and be curious about what you share with me - in your written and spoken words, and in your physical and energetic movements. When we meet I am observing, listening and being present to any information that might help me understand your patterns, your challenges and how we might move together to support you in making changes in your patterns to meet your goal(s).
Which factors inform your treatment approach?
I listen to what you, the client, share with me as your goal as well as your assessment of your current skills and challenges. I take in what I have observed of your movement and cognitive skills and challenges, and then I offer an exercise or exploration that I believe will be both comfortable (as it is important to start from a platform of success) as well as challenging without being overwhelming, so as to stimulate your learning process.
How does this complement and go beyond PT?
Since I have not studied physical therapy (PT) I can only speak about PT from my personal experiences. In my experience, most physical therapists focus on strengthening specific muscles in order to decrease unease or dysfunction in a specific part of the body. While this type of approach can most certainly have value, my experience is that this value is limited. My experience of PT is that it is usually a situation of the patient being told to repeat the form of an action in a part of the body a certain number of times for a certain number of repetitions. It is a rare PT who provides the guidance to help the mover develop awareness of this part of the body as one piece of the whole body, and to approach the body as an integrated system. In my experience this is not a limitation particular to PTs: it is a pattern I have noticed that seems endemic within professions where people are trained in the current standard medical model. Many medical professionals, including PTs, have not had the training to support clients to be successful in the change process, especially if the client comes to therapy unaware or disconnected from their bodies, or seems unwilling or unable to do the prescribed tasks.
My approach complements these other modalities because my approach considers the patterns of your movement - in your whole bodymindspirit.
My approach invites you to explore and make choices about the patterns that we identify together as causing challenges to the change you seek. I consider my role to be one where I am a guide to support you in changing and/or (re)claiming patterns that, in turn, support the changes you seek. What I have to offer does not replace the other therapies because they each have an expertise that is valuable: my approach is to give you support to safely explore what they have offered to you from an embodied process of change approach.
Where do developmental movement patterns come in?
We are simply a complex collection of all the patterns we've been given as well as those we’ve chosen to claim as our own throughout our life as they manifest at this moment.
Some of the patterns are ontogenetic or developmental - meaning that we of the same species all experienced these patterns in our conception, birth and growth process. The developmental patterns of the neuromuscular system are fundamental and crucial to our whole development as an individual being (as well as a species.) This firing, growth and change of the neuromuscular system through movement was the foundation for us being able to, in turn, establish the more individual patterns we developed as we experienced, negotiated and coped with the environment. As infants we moved and by moving we learned how to use our bodies to negotiate the environment. As we learned things about the environment, we, in turn, learned how to access the new patterns of movement in the developmental sequence.
As young children and into adulthood, most of us lose the ability to access the full range of our bodily connections because we focus more on the patterns taught to us by our external environment. As we move ourselves and get feedback from the environment, we choose (often unconsciously) to limit those early bodily connections. The patterns of our families, society and the environment that we've learned often take priority over those that were gifted to us as infants.
Developmental movement patterns come into my work because in order for clients to claim a fuller capacity of their bodily connections, they need to have access to these fundamental movement patterns. Accessing and allowing the body to more fully experience the fundamental patterns of connectivity increases our options for a more lively interplay within our bodies and within our world.
For people who have experienced injury, especially when the injury has affected the person’s ability to move in the their habitual patterns that existed pre-injury, it can be very beneficial for them to practice accepting the support of the earliest patterns of connectivity to help them reclaim and re-establish the more complex patterns of movement that were affected by the injury.
Are there common physical issues that you see your work helping?
My work is appropriate for anyone with a body who would like to explore practices that support them to live life more fully, in whatever way they define this for themselves.
What made you want to study somatic awareness as a mind-body complement to counseling?
I chose to study Laban Movement Analysis (LMA) because it is a framework, not a modality. I did not want to teach people how to move: I desired to learn to support people to move in ways that have meaning and value for them as an individual within their lives.
LMA does this. LMA is a dynamic framework that supports curiosity and discovery about all movement including the movement of the body, the mind, the emotions, the spirit as well as the movement between people, between things, in societies, in space, etc. In other words, LMA is a framework to observe, analyze and make choices about all movement, about living Life. It is a framework of understanding and supporting oneself in the process of Change.
Since our bodies are the vessel through which we receive, analyze, perceive and act upon the world, the awareness of the body as a sensory, cognitive, emotional and moving entity just made the most sense to me as a crucial part of any health process...and it still does.
Counseling, on the other hand, is one “vehicle” or approach that can support the healing process. Counseling is just one of the many ways in which I share and explore this framework. The wonderful thing about being a Registered Somatic Movement Therapist and Educator is that I can bring the LMA perspective into any modality and any action or interaction. Because movement is a fundamental part of the natural experience of all life, LMA can give meaning to any movement event or experience that one desires to consider.
I chose counseling - instead of something like massage therapy, PT or OT - as my main professional vehicle for several reasons. I sought a profession that would be kind to my body for the rest of my life and I was concerned about the physical demands as I grow older of the other professions I considered.
In addition, I have a personal history of movement as healing for my own mental health challenges, but had had to find much of it on my own by trial and error. I had a great desire to bring more body awareness into the professional world of mental health that, as a client, I had found wanting. Although I have worked with some wonderful counselors, at some point I recognized that the focus in these sessions was always on the cognitive and emotional aspects of me without any integration into my moving living body, and this felt unbalanced.
What did you notice that your family, community and region was asking for that sparked your interest in starting your practice?
Interesting question. I had to consider this for a bit and my answer spans thirty-plus years of my life:
I noticed in myself and in my community a deep desire for real connection to LIFE - to embodied things, to experiences as well as ideas, like being present with the Earth as a living being, being in the experience of the dancing body and the energetic body, rather than just living on a planet and doing the actions of dance.
More recently (in the last ten years or so) I have noticed my community reflecting a desire for the focus on health to be the norm, rather than the current medical model that focuses on disease. This includes a desire for a culture that truly supports health and ease as the norm. There is a small and ever-growing community of people seeking opportunities to learn how to observe, analyze, choose and respond more organically to discomfort, illness, unease or dis-ease as information, rather than disease. This approach guides us to be more present in the wisdom of our bodies as a key part in our healing, rather than the paradigm that exists now (for the most part). The standard model view discomfort, illness, unease or dis-ease as things that need to be taken to an external authority who may likely pathologizes and diagnose the symptoms as a problem that must be"fixed" by either cutting the body apart or by shutting down the symptoms with medications. While there are times for such an approach, it also has the effect of undermining the process of change and healing as a natural and essential part of human growth.
One of the things that sparked my interest to start my practice as a somatic movement therapist is the many people I see in my everyday life who are of younger and younger ages who do not have a physical injury and yet are unable to do simple movement challenges without exertion - like getting up and down off the floor, walking up and down stairs, getting into or out of a car and negotiating uneven terrain. Although the majority of my somatic movement clients are currently people who have experienced physical injury of some sort, I have a passion to support ALL people of whatever age, size, or movement ability to move in ways that allow them to live their lives more fully. The reality is, however, that most people do not recognize the capacities that they are choosing not to access in their daily lives unless they find themselves in a situation where they are challenged and can no longer rely on the patterns to which they are accustomed on which they are accustomed to depending upon. People are the most likely to ask for support during their change process when they have experienced injury or overwheom: it is not, however, the only time that change is possible.
Is there a practitioner directory link that you recommend I add to the resource notes?
international: ISMETA https://ismeta.org/locate-a-practitioner#!directory/map/ord=lnm
local: KIndred Collective https://www.kindredcollectivecomo.com/