What Is It?

Integrative Movement Facilitation is a whole-body, whole-person approach designed to intentionally produce long lasting and positive physical, physiological, and psychological shifts through movement. It is a process through which educators and therapists can teach movement and support multilayered exploration of the body and the self while working within the scope of our specific role or license. Whether under the umbrella of physical or occupational therapy, general rehabilitation, fitness and exercises, health and wellness, or counseling, IMF supports all movement modalities and therapeutic approaches.

Purpose + Outcomes

Integrative Movement Facilitation  is a dual-purpose process through which movement educators and therapists can do two things:

1. Address and work with all aspects of their student, within the scope of the body, but not limited to the physical. The IMF framework allows teachers, trainers, and movement therapists to skillfully acknowledge emotional, intellectual, and psychological resistance — particularly as it relates to trauma and fear — and facilitate students in developing awareness of their full somatic experience in the process of changing movement habits, patterns, and body-image beliefs.
2. Promote holistic and non-hierarchical tissue integration regardless of the particular movement modality or area of dis-ease, injury, or dysfunction. From this perspective we are able to optimize the body’s positive compensatory patterns, insight greater potential despite dis-ease, injury, or dysfunction, and affect greater balance in the function of the nervous system, in particular the vagus nerve.

Vagal toning and nervous system tuning:

IMF allows us to assess whether the student needs NS up-regulating or down-regulating. (See teaching strategies). Although most students generally need the latter it’s important that we don’t overlook the body and system that is overly slack and non-responsive. 

A majority of our tools will be in support of creating a clearer pathway of communication via the vagus nerve from and to the body, which in turn addresses both up and down regulation, however it’s important to apply the more active movement tools appropriately depending on which direction we want to nudge a student.   

This aspect of IMF is heavily informed by the Polyvagal Theory formulated by Professor of Psychiatry Stephen Porges and is designed to help students better regulate between the different aspects of their nervous system: fight, flight, or freeze response of the sympathetic nervous system and the rest and relaxation response of the parasympathetic nervous system. 

From this perspective we are also concerned with how we can help support a students’ neuroception awareness. Neuroception is a concept coined by Porges that helps explain how our brains assess risk in our environment particularly in relationship to people and social engagement. Although we can’t intellectually shift our neuroceptive responses through cognitive reasoning we can train the body to be more physiologically accurate in how it perceives. 

Sensory organ integration and body awareness:

Our objective is to learn how to initiate movement from the sense organs, engage them in the process of movement, cueing to the sense organs as well as the viscera to better connect a student’s inner and outer experience. By moving from the sense organs we give the body an opportunity to expand its movement potential as well as develop greater exteroceptive and interoceptive awareness.

It is not just a distal to proximal approach that we’re promoting within this strategy, but to add options to our often over prioritization on proximal to distal movement strategies. In doing so we can better incorporate the whole system and expand movement options no matter what its real or perceived limitations.  

This strategy does many things including: further tone the vagus nerve, connect to the embryological organization of the body (movement awareness and initiation of the limb buds), and develop trust in the body’s physical abilities/potential as well as the student’s ability to better trust the environment in which it moves.

Integrative movement priming, patterning, and exploration:

Achieving complex and demanding movements doesn’t ONLY require exhaustive progressing, but rather thoughtful processing. Working to integrate the hands and feet, limbs and distal joints into the the proximal joints and trunk is critical for harmony in the whole body. Integrative movement allows us to promote the interrelationship between the parts of the body but more importantly between the tissues of the body. 

By teaching and promoting an integrative movement discipline we bring our students closer to their biointelligence and a physical and psychological harmony despite areas of weakness, injury, dis-ease and discomfort. 

This area of IMF includes: breath work, release and manual therapy techniques, functional and primal movement strategies, and exploratory movement based on the work Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen, Phillip Beach, and Janet Adler among others who’ve pioneered deep embodied and embryologic movement practices.

Facilitation:

Movement Facilitation is the means by which we open students up to explicitly listening and trusting their body and their movement experience as it’s expressed in any given moment. Facilitation allows us to move beyond the early stages of motor skill development where training is key and the priority is on establishing a consistent set of movement strategies and agreed on language. In the training phase, which is heavy in telling and instructing as well as being primarily quantitative, shape and form take precedence over variation and adaptation. 

In the Conscious Competence Learning Matrix (CCLM) training guides students through the first three stages — Unconscious Incompetence, Conscious Incompetence, and Conscious Competence — which all rely heavily on the expertise of the teacher. Through facilitation, however, we are able to support students through the most critical shift — Conscious Competence to Unconscious Competence — which is reliant on the student’s inner experience. 

Most movement education gets stymied at stage 3 and struggles to find stage 4, which is affords students a sense of embodiment, enhanced awareness of self, greater autonomy, and self-efficacy.

Somatic Inquiry:

Somatic inquiry supports movement facilitation and is foundational in developing a student’s ability to listen to their body. It gives rise to trusting that the body knows what to do and what it needs in any given situation — the body’s inner wisdom. Somatic inquiry helps to establish that the body has infinite healthy movement options which expand beyond the limitations of previously held beliefs and narratives.

We use this tool to support the development of interoceptive and exteroceptive awareness and to distinguish between the different tones that are possible in the somatic experience. Through somatic inquiry we work to decipher what is happening in the body (the felt-sense experience) what is happening in the mind (thought or thinking) and what is happening in the emotional body (feeling) and that these experiences are not always dependent on each other, but can exist independent of each other. Through this type of exploration students are able to feel that they have freedom from emotional and mental pain even if the body is uncomfortable and vise versa.

Open Questions + Reframing:

Open questions are based on the change model Motivational Interviewing developed largely from humanistic psychology and used in rehabilitation settings throughout the world. Open questions promote an environment of curiosity and openness that allow students to discover for themselves what the “right” or best answers are to the movement challenges they experience, and are questions that require anything but yes or no answers.

Coupled with open questions we use positive framing and reframing, or rolling with resistance, to support a student’s inquiry process. It can sometimes be challenging to go inward and discover what the best strategies are. Through these strategies we can create a context in which it becomes progressively safer and more comfortable to inquiry.

Open questions further support movement facilitation and are used in somatic inquiry as a way of guiding exploration.