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![]() “There is a point where, in the mystery of existence, contradictions meet: where movement is not all movement and stillness is not all stillness; where the idea and the form, the within and the without, are united; where infinite becomes finite, but not.” - Rabindranath Tagore "To meet everything and everyone through stillness instead of mental noise is the greatest gift you can offer to the universe." |
![]() Embodied Mindfulness: A Somatic-Expressive Approach to Stillness
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“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.” –Viktor Frankl
Embodying mindfulness, and being mindfully embodied, is a major challenge in modern times. With so much literal (and metaphorical noise) overwhelming our senses, cluttering our psyches, and degrading our attention, how do we access the spacious place of the still point – let alone even know it exists? How can we build our capacity for taking pauses, from the small increments in our speech patterns to the longer intervals of rest?
Contemporary research has given us so many good reasons to practice mindfulness, and yet for many people, the practice of stillness remains challenging and out of reach. I developed Embodied Mindfulness: A Somatic-Expressive Approach to Stillness to make contemplative practice simpler, easier and more do-able for the modern mind.
This distillation of four decades of research and practice around meditation, somatic inquiry and movement has been taught for the past 20 years to diverse audiences worldwide.
People who initially insist they cannot meditate or find stillness painful and/or overwhelming discover relief in Embodied Mindfulness's focus on the inner landscape of the body through the orchestration of multiple channels (breath, vocalization, contact, movement and kinesthetic tracking).
These embodied practices combine inner sensing, active expression, and individual exploration to occupy the mind with something to do for the body to settle which, in turn, calms the mind and builds the muscle of equanimity.
The Embodied Mindfulness template is currently used worldwide by people ages 20-85 and at all levels of physical conditioning. Yoga and movement teachers of all types, therapists, educators and life coaches, as well as people seeking more calm and ease in their lives, can benefit from this integrative approach to the body and its expression of lively stillness.
Jamie McHugh
"We have a rich cross-cultural legacy of both contemplative and expressive practices at our disposal. How do we draw upon and update them to meet the conditions of the modern mind living in an industrialized body within an urban environment?" -Jamie