Sensing in Motion

Movement is basic to all of life. Movement of our bodies shapes our basic physical structure and experience, our perception, and our personalities. Awareness within movement is paramount to understanding our relationship with personal and shared development, to perception, to body image and more. Is it possible to understand our culture through understanding how we move? Is our movement related to how we relate to people of other diverse ways of knowing the world? Can we understand ourselves, our society, and ask relevant questions about social change by understanding the psychology of our movement?

This course will set the inquiry to ask these and other relevant questions. This course is a comprehensive curriculum of evidence, exercises, and practices to raise awareness and to become conscious of our own movement, perceptions, and sensations, in relationship to our development within a variety of contexts. We will look at movement through a cross cultural lens, in understanding others through their bodily movements and non verbal cues.  

This course will provide experiential learning opportunities for movement, dance, play, mindfulness and meditation, and will survey some of the literature of Somatics, Dance Movement therapy, human rights, cross cultural perspectives, and developmental psychology. This course will also provide a supportive community of learning, practice, and fun to help develop awareness in movement, mobility, and connection. It promises to be a refreshing and revealing experience that will spill into every aspect of your life.

Research is revealing that we develop throughout our life span, so as a child begins to crawl or an adult learns to play an instrument, we are learning through awareness and practicing movement. In developing awareness of movement we are engaging our embodied life at the edges of our nervous system, our developing edge, and at the edges of what is known and unknown. Growth, mobility, and movement are interdependent and woven into the formation of the experience of our selves in relationship with our environments. Mindfully playing in this experience supports a full participatory engagement with our life, our body, our deepest interests, and directions. Basic actions shape how we are physically formed and are continuously forming: breathing, walking, posture, and gestures. The basic unity of movement is a simple and profound interface, a window into our experience. Embodied awareness or mindfulness is a way to deeply listen to our experience in the moment. The results of body awareness have a growing body of empirical evidence that suggests that it is a worthy domain of information to begin to include in our ways of being in the world.  

Texts: The Body Has A Mind of Its Own. 2008 Blakeslee & Blakeslee and Playing with Movement:  How to explore the many dimensions of physical health and performance.  2022 Todd Hargrove and a variety of articles available on canvas.

Credit/Evaluation: Regular and on time attendance:  Informed & engaged discussion, because Fairhaven is seminar style learning and this class has an experiential component,  it is vital that you each take a passionate approach to this subject, form opinions, explore the literature, 
reading, and exercises and make a sincere effort to connect personally with the course focus and to bring this personal connection to class to share.  Completion of reading and completion of all assignments.