Integrating mind and body has been a part of my life for over 40 years. With a strong foundation in sports in my youth, I took quickly to Hatha Yoga when I began meditating in 1972. I practiced for 8 years and taught for 3 before I took up Kung Fu, Chi Kung, Tai Chi and other Taoist healing arts in 1980. After learning a number of martial art forms I began teaching Tai Chi. I taught the Long Yang Style for 12 years while I was living in a community founded around the teachings of Rudolf Steiner. More and more the teachings of Anthroposophy were becoming the ground of my spiritual life and though I loved the Tai Chi movements it was no longer as fulfilling as it once was.
It was then that I was introduced to Spacial Dynamics and its founder, Jaimen McMillan, in 1995. Immediately after meeting Jaimen I joined the 5 year training, which I completed in 1999. Through Jaimen I was also introduced to a movement art developed in the Waldorf Schools called Bothmer Gymnastics. The Bothmer exercises offer an experience of the planar forces of space. Spacial Dynamic exercises offer an experience of the creative forces of the spiral, vortex, and the sphere. Both of these independent disciplines share the idea that the human being creates space. That is a big idea – one way I understand it is that we create the space we live in by the way we move. We can learn to make the space around us alive and to play with the alive space around us as we move.
In Spacial Dynamics we work with the imagination and we learn to sense the expansion and contraction of space, we consciously play with gravity and levity, and with the movement of the spiral. We are attuned to the rhythmic pulsing of movement in nature and we deliberately bring this to our movements. In this way we are healing and enlivening the physical body, the life body, the emotional body and the sense of self.
How we move reflects how we feel and even determines how we feel. How we move and carry ourselves affects how others see us and even how they feel. If we move with grace and ease, beauty and nobility then others are positively affected. The opposite is also true. We can choose how we live in our body and what we create in the space around us. Anyone who practices moving in a spacially alive way knows how it is possible to change one’s emotional state by playing with the expansion and contraction of space and moving with a certain grace and beauty.
I offer classes one morning a week near the Sanderling Waldorf School in Carlsbad. Call for information – 760-754-1148.