Integrative Movement Facilitation

Examples + Applications

IMF at Work

We can move through the strategies one by one and determine what might need to happen first to nudge a student into a deeper sense of self-efficacy, motor skill development, and overall competency. 

The checklist follows a specific, but flexible, progression which prioritizes your student’s physical, neurological, and psychological capacity to learn, then their body’s ability to feel, implement and hold change, and finally negotiate complex movements and transitions with neurological, psychological, and physical resilience.

Prioritization Checklist:

  • Vagal health: (physical and neurological preparedness and receptivity)
    • Are they accurately relating to their environment and physical experience with ease and malleability, with curiosity and objectivity?
    • Are they able to focus, be thoughtful, listen well, take direction, and is there a willingness to be in not knowing?
    • Do they feel safe and able to relax into their learning experience?
  • Somatic awareness: (capacity for felt-sense awareness on a myriad of levels)
    • Are they receptive to sensing movement beyond muscular and joint sensation?
    • Are they able to negotiate movement from different types of awareness: proprioceptive, interoceptive, exteroceptive, neuroceptive)?
    • Can they differentiate their thoughts about how a thing feels and the way it actually feels?
    • Are they able to choose breath patterns that not only facilitate movement quality but attentional quality?
  • Whole-body recruitment and integration: (establishing positive compensation, healthy versatility and variability in movement)
    • Are they able to efficiently effort through their whole system when moving (particularly in challenge)?
    • Are they able to feel and move from a place of balanced effort from both proximal and distal initiation?
    • Are they able to organize effectively when working from varied points of load, instability, and with relationship to different environments/contexts?
    • Are they able to use different strategies of breath and movement
  • Motivational, emotional steadiness and resilience: (mental/emotional relationship to their physical experience)
    • Do they express intrinsic motivation driven by goals that have personal and genuine meaning?
    • Are they able to be objective about their experience?
    • Are they able to deprioritize getting it right and put value on the experience of gathering information for growth? 
    • Are they inquisitive and interested even when the work is extremely easy or difficult?

In-depth Exercise Exploration – Saw

Let’s look at how we can use the checklist to evoke greater skill acquisition and more complete whole-person integration in an exercise like saw. 

Common challenges: Students don’t like this exercise in general because it highlights the most common limitations in our modern bodies: tight low backs and tight hamstrings, a lack of rotation and hip mobility. Given this, we often hear groaning, see eye-rolling, and feel a lack of investment. If this isn’t the case, if students are mentally engaged and willing, the fact remains that the exercise itself can be elusive and challenging, which dampens motivation and insites frustration.

  • What to address: 
    • Addressing mental/emotional resistance, which manifests both in a tension body and an unoptimized brain, via toning the vagus nerve
  • Possible tools to apply:
    • Vagal toning + tuning – Begin your session standing (or you can incorporate right before saw), engage in a revitalizing breath practice, heel bounces to stimulate facial hydration, rocking and bouncing to heighten proprioception, interoception + exteroception. Incorporate lateral stretches and rotation right away. Incorporate movement of the eyes, stretching ROM and initiate movement from the eyes.
      • Box breathing – In for 4, hold for 4, out for 4, hold for 4
        • Inquiry – With eyes closed (still standing or lying down), inquire into areas of strength, flexibility, and openness in the body. Ask the question: how can you make saw easier today? What would you do to make it feel better?
      • What to address:
        • Priming the body via release work to hydrate the facia, increase proprioception, and improve mobility
      • Possible tools to apply:
        • Sacral release –  Lie down with a soft, medium-sized ball under the sacrum (orange Franklin balls work well). Roll right to left across the sacrum, rock right and left shifting weight into each hip (rotation), arch and curl.
        • Side-lying arm circles – Lying on one side, knees at 90 degrees, arms stacked and extended directly in front of you. Circle the top arm up and around allowing the whole body to respond and move. Keep some part of the hand on the ground as you circle. If you can’t, immediately reverse the direction. Repeat 4-5 times and reverse directions before going to the other side.
      • What to address:
        • Fostering integration of the whole body for better cooperation and nurturing of what IS working well
      • Possible tools to apply:
        • Cue and encourage strength and engagement in the moments when it works for the body in front of you. Cue and encourage movement and adjusting when the body needs more wiggle room and space for negotiating stuck spots. As an example: All the knees to bend and straighten as needed. They don’t need to stay in any one fixed position. Allow the pelvis to move during the twist phase accomodating a low back and/or hips that can’t tolerate as much mobility. Encourage feeling into how the whole body can feel good (and challenged). This part is all about fostering choice.
      • What to address:
        • Somatic inquiry to help develop awareness of shifts and changes that can be applied internally from the student by listening better to what could elicit the highest value experience. (Which is very different than trying to get the exercise “right”).
      • Possible tools to apply:
        • Invite curiosity about inhaling and exhaling at different moments in the movement. What feels like it offers the greatest connection and freedom in THEIR body?
        • Ask any of these questions: What’s important, today, about getting it “right”? What is right? Why is achieving this exercise important to you and how will it support you in your life?

IMF at Work and Things You Can Do Tomorrow:

Challenge: A student has stopped progressing or is stuck in a new limiting pattern or belief.

Strategies: Using all teaching strategies + integrative movement priming, patterning, and exploration

Purpose + application: Invite possibilities and insights through disruption or a shift in vantage point.

  • In their own words. Invite them to describe to you their experience of the movement using their own feeling words or imagery. You will likely have to give them examples to begin the exploration.
  • Do something weird. Play with initiating from a different place than normal, someplace odd, uncomfortable, strange, out-of-the-box. Still safe. Just 
    • Example – Instead of initiating extension from the engagement of the belly, ask them to allow the belly to remain soft and move the eyes as far as they’ll go before letting the head move. Then move the head as for as it will go (without painful discomfort) before the neck moves, etc.
    • Example – Cue the movement from an internal organ. What would it be like to roll your brain into the back of your throat to begin extension?

Challenge: A student is experiencing frustration with not being able to achieve a movement or exercise and is generally acting out, possibly showing up late, not efforting, expressing self-judgment or judgment toward others.

Strategies: Open questions, positive framing (reframing), vagal toning/tuning + integrative movement priming, patterning, and exploration

Purpose + application: Reconnect to motivation and movement potential, optimize the brain for learning, and cultivate curiosity

  • In this order:
    • Movement – Begin your session standing and engage in a revitalizing breath practice, heel bounces to stimulate facial hydration, rocking and bouncing to heighten proprioception, interoception + exteroception. Incorporate lateral stretches and rotation right away. Incorporate movement of the eyes, stretching ROM and initiate movement from the eyes.
      • Suggested breath sequence for vagal tone:
        • Box breathing – 4 in, 4 hold, 4 out, 4 hold, repeat.
        • 4, 7, 8  breathing – 4 in, 7 hold, 8 out, repeat.
    • Sound – Make exhales audible, sigh, hum, or create some kind of sound.
    • Inquiry – With eyes closed (still standing or lying down), inquiry into areas of strength, health, vitality, openness etc., in the body. Ask the question how can these attributes lend themselves to a fulfilling movement practice, how can they be used, leveraged and enjoyed as a focus of their session/class.
    • Open questions – Possible addition after inquiry if in a private setting. Asking these specific types of questions can also be done at the beginning of a class or session depending on the person’s receptivity.
      • What’s one thing in your life right now that you’d like to be able to do differently?
        • How can this practice help you achieve that?
      • What’s one of your fondest memories as a child that involved play, being outside, moving, adventure, sports, etc?
      • If there was one thing you’d like to be able to do in 10 – 20 years from now, that would be most meaningful to your quality of life, what would it be?

Challenge: A student is dealing with discomfort and/or pain. Potentially, the actual physical discomfort is not as strong as their mental/emotional relationship to it.

Strategies: Using somatic inquiry, open questions, vagal toning/tuning + integrative movement priming, patterning, and exploration, and somatic inquiry 

Possible application: 

  • Vagal toning: Breath work as recommended above (sitting or in the most comfortable position), scalene release and cervical mobilization to promote vagal tone. Also feet rolling and calf massage, soft belly breathing or abdominal release can be useful for down-regulating the NS.
  • Differentiating between body dis-ease and mental/emotional disease.

IMF at Work in My Work:

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