Hartley Linda - The Fluid Nature of Being

First published in Great Britain in 2022 by Handspring Publishing, an imprint of Jessica Kingsley Publishers

An imprint of Hodder & Stoughton Ltd

An Hachette UK Company

Copyright Linda Hartley, Mari Winkelman, Rachel Lambert, Mari Joyce, Raima Drsuty t , Beverley Anne Nolan, Anna Aleksandrovna Titova, Frauke Burchards, Anna Feoktistova, Penny Collinson, Heike Kuhlmann, Paul Beaumont, Daria Shamina, Anna Khasina, Maren Hillert, Jane Okondo, Barbara Teresa Erber, Maria Leticia Fernandez-Rua Santaf, Maria Grudskaya, Gaelin Little, Ais t Kriukely t , Agnie t Laurinaity t 2022

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Body-Mind Centering is a registered service mark of Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen.

The rights of Linda Hartley to be identified as the Editor of this text have been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Acts 1988.

Notice

Neither the Publisher nor the Authors assume any responsibility for any loss or injury and/or damage to persons or property arising out of or relating to any use of the material contained in this book. It is the responsibility of the treating practitioner, relying on independent expertise and knowledge of the patient, to determine the best treatment and method of application for the patient.

All reasonable efforts have been made to obtain copyright clearance for illustrations in the book for which the authors or publishers do not own the rights. If you believe that one of your illustrations has been used without such clearance, please contact the publishers and we will ensure that appropriate credit is given in the next reprint.

This book is a guide for personal exploration and is in no way meant to substitute for any type of medical advice allopathic, Western, Eastern, Indian. It can complement a healing protocol. Ultimately all movement ideas are to be visited with gentleness allowing your body responses and related sensations to guide you.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library and the Library of Congress

ISBN 978 1 91342 6 491

eISBN 978 1 91342 6 507

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Dedicated to our dear friend and colleague Ania Witkowska, who left too soon.

Linda Hartley , MA, RSMT, BMCA reg, Dip Psych CTP, has studied, practiced, and taught in the fields of somatic movement and dance, somatic and transpersonal psychotherapy, and Authentic Movement for almost five decades. In 1990 she founded what became the Institute for Integrative Bodywork & Movement Therapy, and has been developing and running a 3-year Diploma Program in Germany, the UK, Lithuania, and Russia since that time. Based on the practice and principles of Body-Mind Centering, and integrating in-depth studies in Authentic Movement and Somatic Psychology, IBMT is an International Somatic Movement Education and Therapy Association (ISMETA) Approved Training Program.

Lindas studies in the somatic dance approach of Release Work (Mary ODonnell Fulkerson), Tai Chi Chuan, and Buddhist meditation, and the Process Oriented Psychology of Arnold Mindell have also informed the development of a holistic approach to learning, growth, and healing. She practiced for 30 years as a somatic movement therapist and somatic and transpersonal psychotherapist, and has taught for numerous organizations across the UK and Europe.

Currently, Linda focuses her time on her writing and teaching the Discipline of Authentic Movement in North Norfolk, UK, where she now lives.

She is the author of several books, including Wisdom of the Body Moving (1995), Servants of the Sacred Dream (2001), Somatic Psychology: Body, Mind and Meaning (2004), and Contemporary Body Psychotherapy: The Chiron Approach (Editor, 2009). Information about these and some of her articles and chapter contributions can be found at https://www.lindahartley.co.uk/index.html.

I am honored to lend my hand to the welcoming of new life, the birth of this book. Being a midwife to game-change is awe-inspiring. Tonight, under the full moon, human life spawns concern in me as I read about femicide in Mexico. Yet, the somatic field and this book give rise to solutions, the good news being that somatic movement is touching psyche and body amongst the women there who are scared by day-to-day occurrences and possible death. Somatic movement is powerful: it relieves body and soul in its educative process, perhaps not always preventing violence but ameliorating its effects. This is a book about pathways to change, specifically the routes of Integrative Bodywork and Movement Therapy (IBMT).

Through myriad paths this book provides a tending toward what is still somewhat unknown. It offers gateways to new routes, like neural circuits being set down and, through practice, becoming habituated. It communicates new possibilities for artists, educators, and therapists. New circuits are laid out through thought patterns sensory experiences and movement responses. Experiencing the knowledge held within these pages helps myelinate new cultural options. The expanding choices validate the exploratory. At our Moving On Center, we talk about engaging the improvisational mind. This mind thinks outside of the box only because of necessity one must be quite creative to survive when living on the margins. It would be interesting to know if that is why these pathways have yet to become the norm. Sadly, I believe it is because peo ple who are able to live in relative comfort prefer not to rustle the status quo, which more often than not is unaware of the interconnectedness of all beings. To widen choice, reset neural networks, and stabilize ones options, we need to focus on the improvisational aspect of attuning with the moment, deeply awakening to self and our dependency on our beloved surroundings. With reading and doing, feeling and sensing, we can make these options more normal.

Linda Hartley has been birthing newness for decades, midwifing embodied shifts in consciousness through her books and educational systems. She has a long history of supporting the emergence of what was once a new field: Somatic Movement Education and Therapy (SME&T). She is of a new generation and an older one too. This book represents the solidifying of the new, its maturation, sitting within a new genre that comes with the passing of time. IBMT is a grandchild of various influencers Body-Mind Centering, Authentic Movement, Somatic Psychology a third generation of Somatic Movement practices if one begins when the field began to be called somatic. If you take a more expansive decolonial perspective, it has grown over thousands of years, and is returning to its roots.