Somatic healing, cranial nerves and eye health with Martha Eddy

[INTERVIEW] My guest today is dr Martha Eddy. Martha has been active in the somatic field for more than five decades. As a teacher, she has developed groundbreaking new somatic methods. She is also an author and an international advocate of Somatic Movement & Therapy. To name just a few of her accomplishments!

In this interview, we’re discussing the history of somatic movement and all the foremothers and forefathers Martha has collaborated with. We’re also talking about somatic healing with a special focus on the cranial nerves. The discussion was held in Benicassim, Spain, during ISMETA’s first European conference in late September 2025.

Enjoy, Peter

Transcript

Peter:
Martha, I’m curious about your story...

Martha:
I had a friend I danced with when I was 13, 14, and 15. She had also gone to college early, and she’d already been in school. She was probably 17. And she said, “There’s this thing called Effort-Shape, and I think you would love it. Look for it at school.”

So I’m looking through my college catalog, and there is a course called The Self That Moves. With “Movingness,” you must understand that that was very attractive!

In the description it said, “We will be exploring the concepts of Effort-Shape from the work of Rudolf Laban.” So I took the class, and that is when it all began.

This is before, I believe, even the magazine Somatics existed, where Thomas Hanna coined a term for our field. Within those years that I was in college, there were starting to be journal articles in magazines like Dance Magazine in particular that were about the body therapies. And I knew that I was exposed to this work because I knew of Irmgard Bartenieff, and she was being featured in the dance world.

I was also meeting Moshe Feldenkrais, who was running his training program in Amherst, Massachusetts. And then my own teacher of dance – while I wasn’t majoring in dance, I was studying social sciences – happened to be next-door neighbors with a woman named Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen, the founder of Body-Mind Centering.

So I was very, very lucky to be a person interested in the body and movement. For me, it was performance enhancement: how do you improve your performance as a dancer through understanding your body – with experiential anatomy, with a frame like Body-Mind Centering, with a framework for how to observe movement, with the body in space, with Effort, which is exertion, energy dynamics, and with Shape – how we shape our posture, what it expresses about our movement.

I got exposed to all of that when I was 16 and 17. And then by 19, I was really invested in studying with Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen. Then I decided, since she didn’t have a certification program yet in Body-Mind Centering – I don’t know if she had the school, but she didn’t have certification – so I went to New York to study with Irmgard Bartenieff. I knew she was elderly, and it was time to study with her then.

So those are my early roots.

One of the things that’s important for me is that I noticed, especially the people studying Ida Rolf’s work or Feldenkrais’ work, they seemed to be really into just the one teacher. But here I had two amazing teachers: Irmgard Bartenieff and Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen. So I already knew there were others. There was Feldenkrais, there was Alexander. I knew it was more than just one individual – that there were many people. That was important for me and led me, years later, around 1985–86–87, to Jim Spira, James Spira, who created the first association, the International Movement Therapy Association.

He had this vision of us all coming together and being a bigger force in the world. I liked that idea. So that’s when I got involved with ISMETA.

By 1988 I was involved, and by 1990 I had my own training program that was an early ATP – Approved Training Program – of our governing body, ISMETA.

It wasn’t until about the mid-90s that, to honor the dance therapists but also the Feldenkrais and Alexander community – who really didn’t identify with being therapists, they felt they were educators and were already using the term somatic educators – we realized that was very helpful for us on the board. We were like, “Oh, we can be different than dance/movement therapists. We can be somatic movement educators or therapists.” So it was a very natural evolution.

Peter:
So when you started, you felt that it was more about improving your performance. Did that approach change later?

Martha:
For sure. It’s been beautiful. This is now my fifth decade working, moving into my sixth decade with this work. As I age, it’s much more than just that.

In working with clients, there are people who will pay money for improved performance, and I’ve worked with those people. But there are many who are in pain and really want help. In the early years, even though Irmgard Bartenieff taught something – her Bartenieff Fundamentals – that could be used therapeutically, we understood that, because she was a physiotherapist, a dancer who became a physiotherapist using the Laban work. Her work was clearly being used therapeutically.

As I learned that work, I felt I was equipped to work more with injury. But I wanted more knowledge to really be strong in it. So by 1990, I was also one of the founding members of the International Association of Dance Medicine & Science, which used to have a very strong somatic component.

The founding president, Dr. Alan Ryan, felt that somatics is science and science is somatic. He’s a physician, an MD. I really enjoyed the mood of that association at that time.

Over time, the dance, the movement, the action and expression of movement found its way into just the morning warm-ups. Then all the presentations became much more physiological – written papers, read papers, panels. So I became less interested.

Now it’s interesting: the psychology – originally represented by just one psychologist, Linda Hamilton, who was married to one of the orthopedic surgeons – started coming in. She would say, “Well, there are eating disorders, there are all kinds of mental components to dance issues and dance performance.” She brought in somatic wholeness through psychology as a full psychologist.

It’s wonderful now to see many more papers and presentations looking at the mind–body relationship, even if they’re not necessarily movement experiences.

I’m a big proponent, and I write about this in my book Mindful Movement, whose subtitle is The Evolution of the Somatic Arts and Conscious Action. I write about representing somatics by representing the body–mind – that the mind is in the body, in the tissues, in the cells. Our emotions are part of our mind, our mind states, our mindsets.

So performance was one part. But then it moved into injury, developmental issues – because both of my teachers, Irmgard Bartenieff as a physiotherapist and Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen as an occupational therapist, studied neuromotor development. They present, through movement – which I love – an embodied learning not just of anatomy, but also of what Bonnie calls neurocellular patterns, and what Irmgard would talk about as body organization. Developmentally based in the reflexes, the righting reactions – she understood all of this.

I was trained in both, and they’re basically the same. One of my life works was to bring the two together: to take the subtlety of what Bonnie was doing with children as an occupational therapist – and adults – but really understanding from in utero to birth and through the first year of life neuromotor development and neurocellular patterning; and then Irmgard, who had been working with people with polio in the hospital, adults lying in bed. She created a whole set of exercises and explorations lying on the back.

So Bartenieff Fundamentals was teaching us how to work with adults in a neurodevelopmental way, but more comfortable for their bodies. We’re no longer curled up, pudgy, full of fat to keep us protected when we’re on our knees. So, being on our back, we can do the same patterns in a more comfortable way.

All that to say: as I started working with people with neurological problems, they could have been affected in utero – fetal alcohol syndrome, mothers drinking too much alcohol, the baby having alcohol in their bloodstream. It could have been birth traumas: cord around the neck, meconium getting into the fluids of the baby, delayed birth, needing a very fast cesarean section to survive – different kinds of birth trauma. And then in childhood, maybe already having some kind of delay. Not necessarily a trauma, but learning issues: not speaking, not paying attention, what we call joint attention – where the parent is saying, “Look at that,” and the child is not responding.

All of these kinds of things started to come into my work. With that came my own compassionate, informed understanding of how to go very slowly with trauma, but also how to unwind it in the body.

So that was a big shift – from performance to actually working with injury, chronic health issues. I have a whole program for people going through cancer called Moving for Life, which is online and free. I also work with neurological problems. It could be a stroke patient in their 60s, 70s, 80s, or 90s.

Peter:
Are there some general principles you could share when it comes to working with trauma or traumatic experiences from early life?

Martha:
There are two things. One is that, as somatic movement therapists, we can help people re-regulate. If they’re still in some kind of panic or anxiety, or having a panic attack, we can help them calm their nervous system.

I was actually one of the first people, over 15 years ago, to teach workshops called Calming the Nervous System, because I was the person in the School for Body-Mind Centering teaching the neuroanatomy. I understood the limbic system – which now is being described in very different ways – and the striatum, and working with the brain in the embodied way we do in Body-Mind Centering. Through dance, I also understood expression and the importance of moving from a tense state into flow.

So there’s a way we can co-regulate. We can help people calm down, their nervous systems come into a balanced sympathetic state, rather than a hyper-sympathetic state. A state of “I am present, I am feeling sympathy, I am in touch with you,” versus parasympathetic, which is more internal nurturing, self-care.

Polyvagal theory, for instance – I love the idea of it, I love the work of it. But for years I’ve been teaching about the eye nerves, the 12 cranial nerves. The vagus is just one glorious nerve. Yes, this whole idea of dorsal and ventral is very important. I like to talk about “peri-vagal” – using the vagus to connect to the autonomic nervous system.

But the eyes have their own autonomic nervous system. Working with the changes of dilation and constriction of the iris is through the ocular nerve. That’s a different nerve, not the vagus nerve.

So “peri-vagal” is the work I teach.

Peter:
That’s beautiful. For example, we also have the trigeminal nerve...

Martha:
Yes, the face – the facial nerves, all of them. To really give each nerve its beauty, its strength, its expansiveness is what I’m looking for. We know what compression on a nerve does in the spine – it hurts, it pinches, it occludes activity and communication, probably including things like calcium distribution from the parathyroid. All kinds of things.

That’s also true here in the vagal region. The weight of the head and how we carry our head impacts the core. So, for sure, this vagus nerve is easily impinged, just like any other nerve. But there’s also impingement around other cranial nerves.

I trained and worked together with John Upledger – I trained in his brand of craniosacral therapy with other teachers, and then got to do work with him on my own father. We can free up space through the craniosacral rhythm around those other nerves. When I do that right now, in this moment, my vision gets better.

Peter:
Could you give some short, small exercises as examples of how you work with the cranial nerves?

Martha:
A lot is with imagery. Right now we’re here in Benicàssim in Spain, and we have mountains on one side, the ocean and the sound of the ocean behind us. Imagery from nature can be very healing.

I think of my colleague Eric Franklin, but also others who work with ideokinesis, my dear friend Glenna Batson, who wrote The Body in Motion on neuroscience and dance performance, applied to many other aspects of movement. People in the lineage of Mabel Todd and Lulu Sweigard, and then Andre Bernard – they use imagery from nature, but also everyday things, like an umbrella – we’re out here in the shade – to help posture, alignment, and movement.

I got exposed to that work very early, and I love it. So did Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen. She worked with an incredible woman named Barbara Clark. So imagery is what I’m getting at.

You could begin with just feeling the eye, and then remembering the visual cortex is in the back of the skull. I’ll bring in a couple of things. There’s the actual anatomy: the eyeball and, through the optic nerve, half of the information goes directly to the same side of the brain – left eye, left brain; right eye, right brain – but the other half crosses. So some of the information from the visual field is going directly back, and some is crossing to the other side of the brain.

Working with the visual cortices could be one eye on both sides or both eyes going straight back. Those are some things we can play with.

Today, for this moment, let’s just think in general.

Peter:
So one eye?

Martha:
Do you mean moving the eyeballs or just imagining it? For now, just imagining the connections, the pathways.

So the eyeball is steady in the eye socket, which is already multiple bones – the sphenoid, the ethmoid, the frontal bone, the zygomatic – they’re all coming together. Here, we can just settle the bones of the orbit of the eye socket and remember the fatty cushion the eyeballs sit in.

That’s one exercise: allowing the eyes to rest in their cradle. If you take your head back, if that feels good to you, and let your eyes rest in the back of your head, in these sockets, you might even feel some pulls from the bones – the temple, or from below. As long as your eye doesn’t feel too squished – it’s important, because some people have eye problems and they don’t want to look back, and that’s fine. Other people can’t drop forward because there’s too much tension, so it’s better to just stay neutral.

But if you can drop back, then we’re moving toward the pathway of the optic nerve behind the middle of the eyeball, through the skull and into the visual cortex. To feel the nerve, you want to feel space, length, depth, front-to-back between the back of the eyeball and the weight of the brain resting in the skull.

Then move that. The movement could simply be: as I change my positioning, can I maintain that spaciousness in my face and in my skull versus collapsing, scrunching? We often do this in the neck, but you can also feel it as tension in the jaw.

You can also imagine the tension in the brain itself, like a headache. I don’t want anybody to get a headache, so don’t go there too long. Make space, feel the space.

This is what we call counter-tension in the Laban work – working, in this case, with the sagittal dimension like a bow and arrow, letting it grow.

Peter:
Wow, amazing. And so connected also to the craniosacral work.

Martha:
Exactly. Yes, allowing the bones to know that they’re moving subtly – that there’s a dance of the bones, and there’s a blood-fullness in the marrow of the bones. They’re healing. That’s the anchoring.

Peter:
So, can you do this with a person who is in pain or struggling with their eyes, or is it too complicated?

Martha:
I actually teach an eye-renewal class. I call it Eye Care, “I care / eye care,” and it’s online. People come in from wherever. I know best how it goes for the people who come back regularly. We do talk during class.

The structure of the class is: they share what’s going on for them; I design a class based on that, teaching principles of the visual system. Then we turn off the recording, and at the end we just talk again: “How are you doing?”

Sometimes people say – this is very typical in somatics or somatic movement work – that they may feel more discomfort at first because we’re opening up areas that have been held and restricted in sensation. We’re bringing up proprioception. I truly believe proprioception then informs our body-mind and says, “Oh, how can I rebalance? How can I self-regulate? How can I co-regulate?” The “I” here is the cell talking: “I feel it. My thalamus is registering pain. But now, what can I do about it?”

Often it’s about freeing the flow: more blood-fullness, fluid flow, breath, and also spaciousness.

You asked about principles. In the trauma work, I often refer people to work with a somatic psychologist or a body psychotherapist – sometimes they’re the same person. I will also just spend time in the moment helping people feel their weight, and then find their flow. So they’re in their bodies – that’s the weightedness – then the flow is the breath or the fluids. We do different things for that.

Then we come into space. Does it feel like we’re too close, too far? What is it like to go into your internal space? For example, right now I feel a little jammed here. What’s it like for me to let go and make more space downward and upward?

Maybe there’s a right–left imbalance, so I just feel that and not change it, just notice it, and allow a little micro-dance, a little micro-movement – what Steve Paxton, the contact improvisation forebear, called the small dance. Just let that happen.

Then I might be ready to take in light, or to look. It might be scary to look, so it might be just looking at something near, or something very far. It might be scary to look at another human being. We’re honoring those distances, that space, and what causes us to tighten and constrict versus stay present and open.

Peter:
During your years in somatics, do you feel that people are getting more tight in general, or is that too much to say? Is it harder for people to connect with somatic sensations?

Martha:
I don’t know. I live in puritanical United States. People have been disconnected from their bodies for generations.

As women, we were burned at the stake. And obviously, what we’ve done in our country with enslaved peoples is horrible. That kind of intergenerational trauma is resonant in everybody, because there’s guilt on one side and horrible treatment on the other.

So for me, I haven’t seen an increase. Certainly, the pandemic shifted the use of the eyes and the need to turn your head versus just shifting your gaze – there are so many ways in which everybody’s aware of the stress on the planet, even if they don’t admit it or want to talk about it. I think they’re feeling it. People who have been through hurricanes, floods, tornadoes, fires are living it in their cells, in the smoke, in the lack of water – all of that.

So, for sure, I do believe we live in a traumatized world because the earth itself is traumatized, and we’re traumatized. But I’m not so sure it’s that different... Maybe 150–200 years ago, when more people were working in nature – farming, being outside, cutting their wood. Industrialization and technology have really changed things.

I feel that we are mutating. We have to decide if we like that or not. Maybe we don’t get to choose, but maybe we can choose what kinds of mutations feel like they meet our desires for consciousness.

Peter:
With this high level of intergenerational trauma and stress, what could be the first steps to invite a person to down-regulate, to slow down and feel, without making it too overwhelming?

Martha:
Titration is very important. I studied homeopathy and the Bach flower remedies in the early 80s. That was an important concept for me: do little bits at a time.

I also had a lot of experiences with my own vision. I was told to wear glasses when I was about 14, maybe younger – 13 or 12 – and I didn’t like the idea. I thought, “Why can’t I stretch them, work that out?” My sister had prisms and did exercises, so I said, “I’ll do the exercises. I don’t want glasses.” I remember stomping on my glasses and they wouldn’t even break.

My parents were great, though. They took me to a developmental optometrist, and he said, “Your eyes aren’t bad enough for me to help you. I can help people who are legally blind – they’re not actually blind, but legally they’re not allowed to drive. I can help them. But your eyes aren’t bad enough.”

Honestly, I know now that if your eyes are just beginning to get bad, it’s easier to reverse than when you have layers of habitual protection on top of the trauma, the problem, the stress. Then it takes longer to peel away the onion, through all the layers.

So titration is important: going slowly. With my own vision, I had an experience of totally clear vision, and I wasn’t ready for it. The blur had been protecting me. Not being able to see at distance was emotionally safer for me than I was ready for.

So with my own visual work, and I say this to people: it can be slow or it can be fast, but you have to be accepting of it. If you’re not ready, we can go slowly. I feel the same about certain trauma.

First of all, trauma is not just the event. You can have a traumatic event, but being traumatized is usually because the resiliency factors that support moving out of the sensory stimulus weren’t there – whether it’s your own inner resiliency or, more often, resilience in relationship. Who is the community that comes around you, that hugs you, that helps you move?

With that in mind, for this larger group of people – maybe not with a specific incident, but dealing with something like COVID – moving together in a group is one of the most beautiful ways to shift energy, to shift a mindset. I did a course with the Shift Network, teaching my Calming the Nervous System work – they renamed it Resetting the Nervous System – and then another course on somatic movement and the Dynamic Embodiment approach to somatic movement, to help people move in different rhythms to release, to protect, to soothe, to understand that all of these rhythms are needed.

Doing it even in an online community can feel less lonely, less isolated. You feel the energy, even online, of others with you – that you’re not alone. With that, there grows a kind of field of healing, an energy of healing, that I really appreciate.

So part of titration is: who is my community, who is supporting me, and can I trust them? Or are they going to re-trigger me, even by accident, because they’re not sensitive or knowledgeable enough? So finding your people, finding who you trust, is really important – whether it’s a therapist, an educator, a family member, or a friend.

Peter:
Yeah, so moving together, doing it slowly, and finding your community. These are the three main points.

Martha:
Yes. And I’ll share that I do have a larger arc of healing, which is based on the merging of my Laban/Bartenieff studies with my Body-Mind Centering studies, with my life experience – both as a dancer and as someone who had to code-switch.

I’ve noticed there’s a new book on somatics and code-switching. Code-switching is when you go from one culture to another and the body language changes, or the way you speak changes. In typical language, code-switching might be, even in the same language, using it differently in a different region of Finland.

In the embodied sense, we’re looking at body language, non-verbal communication, how the body speaks and movement communicates.

So those are the names of courses I teach. I also work with coaches – therapists, mentors, coaches – who aren’t necessarily going to become somatic movement educators or therapists, but want to use this work in a meaningful way to help people open to their own authenticity.

The principle I work with is what I call OSO: Observe, Support, Offer options. The first O, Observe, is not an analytic observing, it’s a compassionate witness. I’m with you, I’m seeing you. We do that even in cellular awareness: “We are together. I see you. I hope you see me.” Just being present, not having to fix or do anything. That’s also acceptance: “I accept you as you are.” To me that’s the first place of safety around a traumatic event, especially if someone wasn’t there for you in that moment. We can at least say, “We’re here for you, however you are right now.”

Ideally, you’ve attracted people you can be there for. If a client is in such a rhythm that you can’t relate to, I highly recommend referring them to somebody else, because you want to really love the person and feel very compassionate at the very least.

From there, the S is Support. How can I support, as a therapist or educator? I’m not looking just to support the problem. What is working well? Support what is there.

Just like we talked about the eyes before: first we establish the support of the bones. That support is there; now the eyeballs can relax. Now I can maybe imagine this bow-and-arrow line lengthening into the depth of me, between front space and back space, between the back of my eyeball and my visual cortex. I can settle there, really feel into it. With that, I can start to breathe differently through my nose, swallow differently, clear the lungs, and really let things shift.

So it’s that support of what’s working and then supporting what has been in the shadow that needs support. Both Rudolf Laban – who spent time with Carl Jung – and Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen use the word “shadow.” It’s a beautiful concept: we have a collective unconscious; there are things we’re not aware of. They can be found in another person, or in a touch from another person, or in a rhythm from another culture, if we tune in. That’s attunement.

Then the final O is Offering options. Playing. I’m an educator – my doctorate was actually on the use of embodied conflict resolution. At the time, there were very few programs in conflict resolution, and very few that were embodied, so I went into violence-prevention work where martial artists were involved. Some people say, “Martial artists? Why is that violence prevention?” But you’re learning to be aware of what’s out there, and your last choice is violence. You’re doing everything to avoid it or stop it, to not hurt somebody else – especially in Aikido, which is the system I studied.

The “options” in education are also what we call transfer of knowledge. For instance, I can learn in the classroom that one and one equals two. But until I’m playing some kind of game where I put two things together and show you, “I have two.” It’s my information. Now, I’ve transferred that knowledge into real life, and now I can teach it to you. “I have one, you have one, now you have two. Can I have one? Now we each have one.” This kind of exchange is how we learn.

Similarly, in somatics, I believe it’s very important to help people off the table. In Dynamic Embodiment we do a lot of table work, floor work, hands-on work – deep tissue, light tissue, all layers of tissue. I went ahead and studied more of the connective tissue massage of Bartenieff and craniosacral therapy, and also lymphatic drainage, to get more hands-on than I had in Body-Mind Centering.

But then we need to play with it. We need to use it. We need to make it our own. That’s OSO, and I believe it’s very important in regulating people who are still in an unresolved traumatic state.

Peter:
Yeah, I used to talk about carrots. So we have the normal carrot, the performance carrot – that’s the orange one. And then we have the black carrot – that’s pain.

These two types of carrots are motivating people, because we are very reward-driven as a species.

Martha:

It’s how our brains work.

Peter:

But can we also introduce somatics in a meaningful way for people who are not performance-driven and not in pain?

Martha:
Yes, absolutely. And how do you do that?

Usually, even if they’re “not in pain,” they’re quite competitive – not always, but often. That is a kind of pain, a motivational pain: “I want to do better, I’m not enough.” I prefer people to feel, “I want to do better because I’d like to be the best I can be – my personal best,” versus getting angry at someone else. But competition can be strengthening.

My very first scientific research was on non-pharmaceutical interventions for the treatment of hypertension. I was looking at high blood pressure. My sister was a meditator, a teacher of Transcendental Meditation. I knew meditation was known to reduce blood pressure. I was a dancer and mover, and I could see that I could actually reduce my blood pressure by exercising – we were measuring it. I went on to do a degree in exercise physiology.

We can reduce blood pressure by exercising, but what I found working with people with high blood pressure on medication was interesting. Some people preferred meditating, others preferred exercise. Some would exercise and their blood pressure would go up. Some would meditate and their blood pressure would go up. It just wasn’t the right form for them. They didn’t relax. Their mental state wasn’t ready for deep meditation. So moving – if you will, moving meditation – to a different rhythm where their heart engages with their own rhythmicity and hormones was helpful before they could really learn to meditate. Others could do either.

That was very informative for me: different people are different, and calming down isn’t always the first step. Sometimes it’s expressing out.

I have that as a model in conflict resolution as well: get in touch with what you’re feeling, then ground. Some people need to ground even before they can get in touch with what they’re feeling. Then, from grounding, find what it is you actually want. Then move into how you communicate it. That’s part of the coaching work I do.

Peter:
Yeah, it’s beautiful. Because this is something I’m thinking a lot about: how can we engage people in their own well-being…

Martha:
Yes.

Peter:
…without pain, without performance-driven anxiety?

Martha:
Yes. And the answer is pleasure.

From this puritanical American perspective, just introducing people to sensuality and pleasure is scary territory. So you have to do it maybe first with food – “Let’s just taste our food.” Anything that wakes up the exteroceptors. Then maybe we can get to the interoceptors: “How does your stomach feel as you’re eating? Oh, you can feel your stomach. Is your liver beginning to respond at all? Just notice that.”

We have to get people feeling and sensing to be more somatic – able to feel and move from within. Because we can move, but that’s not necessarily conscious movement.

That’s the meaning behind my subtitle, The Evolution of the Somatic Arts, because I do think it’s a creative process – what we do as therapists and educators, or what an individual does alone or with friends as they dance or move or just sense their bodies. It’s a creative process. It’s recreational, too.

Within that, what is the response to the sensation? Do you feel you’re inhibiting the response? For example: “Oh, I was told never to move forward with my breast,” or “I was told to keep my eyes down when I’m talking to an adult,” or “I was told to always smile.” These things are living in us.

If we can hear, “Oh, I’m doing that thing I was taught. Is it what I really want?” Then we come back to grounding. I can have the bigger witness of myself noticing my sensation but also having a dialogue with my superego. I can train it to be compassionate and say, “Hmm, I’m noticing I’m doing that. Is that what I want? Do I really want to smile right now, or am I not feeling that?”

Peter:
Super important. Is there anything you’d like to add here about connecting with yourself in different ways, connecting with the healing properties or the natural movement properties of the body?

Martha:
It’s very popular to talk about the nervous system right now. I’m very thankful again to my teacher, Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen, for bringing in her influences. Sempé Fay was a doctor who used the term neuroendocrine. Now it’s fairly familiar, but there’s also neuroendocrinology, neuroimmunology – all the crossovers.

I want to bring in that when we talk about the autonomic nervous system, we’re not just talking about the nervous system. We’re really talking about the glandular/hormonal system as well. I’m very thankful to have learned about the glands and their functions in an embodied way in Body-Mind Centering. It actually prepared me to go into my applied exercise physiology master’s degree. They accepted my knowledge in embodied anatomy as my anatomy requirement, and I felt ahead of the curve with a lot of the study – from the Krebs cycle and how we absorb energy, how sugar runs through our body, to understanding stress and high-level stress.

I teach a course called The Continuum of Stress to Trauma so that we understand it’s a lot of the same physiology. It just gets stuck or repeated in different habitual ways, depending on whether it’s repeated abuse, abuse from a family member, or abuse from society or nature. The physiology is what we have, and the endocrine system – the neuroendocrine system – is very important.

I value in my own work that I’ve been able to do violence prevention, embodied peacemaking, and embodied conflict resolution through a deep understanding of the neuroendocrine system.

What I want to get to is that everyone can find a movement ritual. Some people don’t like the word ritual – it feels too religious. I don’t mind the spirituality of it, but really ritual just means a repeatable practice, something you can come to – once a week, every day, three times a day, once a month. It doesn’t really matter. If you can do something several times a week, it becomes a touchstone, a place where you feel you know yourself.

For me, it was the sun salutation. This is the 50th anniversary of first learning the sun salutation. In 1975, I went to a yoga class with Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen, taught by this wonderful woman, Jeannie Erlbaum. That practice resonated with me to keep my spine and body alive.

Then I chose to layer in the chakral energies in a physiological way, using my movement science and dance science. Dance science doesn’t really go there yet, but I’d love to take it there. Working with the neuroendocrine system along the spine within the sun salutation – which is just stretching, folding, going to the ground, coming back up, and then rolling or hinging at the iliofemoral joints. This kind of prostration.

Right now, I have a student from Egypt who is looking at Muslim prayer in terms of similarity – using the glands to support that. So this idea of folding and unfolding, bowing and un-bowing, saluting nature.

All I’m saying is: you might have a different movement ritual. Maybe your movement is simply, “Every day I’m going to stretch.” Try it, feel it, do it, and see how you actually feel. Take the time to feel what’s different today. Through your fascia: are you stretching the same? Through your eyes: where are you looking? Just notice: “How am I today inside my practice?”

That becomes an anchoring and a jumping-off point. It could give you a new goal like, “I’d like to feel more range.” Without being punitive or punishing, you can say, “This is what I want,” and go for it – an intention.

In the Laban work, we set intentions through our Effort life. “I want to be light. I want to be strong. I want to be direct. I want to be inclusive.”

So that’s what I would say: find a ritual, find a practice, and use it as a place to check in, to feel your body.