Dear Somatic Movement Conference Participants (and a few other friends):
I have Bill Evans to thank for inviting me to speak at the Somatic Dance Conference in Pt. Townsend, Washington on July 20, 2023 because it opened the door to a big challenge. For years I have felt the wide gap between my profession, which I describe as “a brain-centered approach using movement to address the challenges of children and adults with any form or degree of brain injury, gap, or delay,” and the amazing community of Somatic practitioners whose work may also include brain-injured children and adults in their practices through mindfulness, attention to the body, and what its movement evokes.
It was both a privilege and a massive challenge to wrestle with my own concepts of the broadest definition of what movement work is and begin constructing that bridge. My own thoughts matured over the months I was considering this keynote speech. My purpose in bringing the discipline of NeuroDevelopmental Movement® to this conference was to broaden the view of somatic practitioners and incorporate the concept that movement as therapy can go even deeper than we had thought in the past.
While my colleagues and I bring a great deal of mindfulness to our work, my clients are those who cannot and may never bring mindfulness to movement (nor do we need them to in order to achieve healing). These clients include adopted traumatized children with a wide range of mental health diagnoses that are the result of the disorganization of the nervous system caused by trauma, even some including the trauma of surviving mandated abortions in China. My clients include TBI survivors who may start this program in a coma, or individuals with strokes who can no longer access parts of the brain that can relate movement to feeling, thought, or growth. The list also includes autistic children, not one of whom has ever cared to pay attention to their breathing, and most of whom do not realize that they DO breathe. It includes schizophrenic and criminally insane adults. The kiddos I work with are rageful, defiant, lost in a world of rocking and scripting, terrified; some are cerebral palsied. They are also the less impaired ADHD, learning-disabled, anxious children who missed a bit of their development.
There is a beautiful thing that happens in dance/movement therapy, wherein emotional bridges can be made between the schizophrenic client or the autistic client and the therapist. They then feel seen, affirmed, and part of a larger social community. I love this. I love that so many of you do this.
However, in my practice, my goal is to address the underlying neurodevelopmental gaps that are the foundations of schizophrenia or autism. My goal is that those individuals are not only affirmed, but also lose those diagnoses. My goal is not simply to find a better bridge to the world of these mental illnesses, but to work towards their resolution.
In my lecture we discussed many clients who have recovered and are no longer considered schizophrenic, or autistic, Tourette’s syndrome, or ADHD, etc.
THAT is my goal, and we get there through movement. Of course, since every brain is a universe unto itself, we can never predict or guarantee that any given client will have that stunning result: “No longer meets the criteria for the diagnosis of autism” or “No longer fits the diagnosis of schizophrenia.” But it can happen when a NeuroDevelopmental Movement® assessment is used to determine a program of restorative reflex, movement, and sensory activities. And it happens frequently that my clients lose their diagnoses.
As I and my colleagues dive more deeply into the work over these decades, we have seen more clients who do experience a release from their diagnosis and their symptoms, and we become better at targeting the neurodevelopmental gaps so that we can effect more of these outcomes. It is a decades-old, but at the same time an emerging science.
We saw this result in the project done in Denkendorf, Germany in the late 1980s where a population of schizophrenic and severely bi-polar adults living in a ‘Reha’, was put on a program of NeuroDevelopmental Movement® and within three years 90% of these clients, who were expected to live in the care facility for the rest of their lives, were deemed symptom-free and left the facility to go on and lead normal lives.
The tool we used for these recoveries was movement: NeuroDevelopmental Movement®, which addresses the levels of the brain that are inaccessible to thought, reason, emotion. These levels of the brain do not speak in English, German, or Korean. They do not speak in the language of emotions, feelings, or awareness. We are addressing those levels of the brain that can be reached only through reflex, movement, and sensory experience, largely the brain that is developing before the child’s second birthday. Before the second birthday the brain learns 75% of everything we will ever know and its primary trigger for growth is movement. So, it becomes imperative for me to share with more movement practitioners that we need to reach those levels of the brain as well. To reach those brain levels, we provide reflex, movement, and sensory stimulation as they occur in the Developmental Sequence. The Developmental Sequence is our birthright, and in replicating it we can restore a great many of our foundational skills.
We did an experiment in the middle of the lecture and it was as much an experiment for me as for you. I asked a group of you to get down on your bellies and move forward. The results were varied with some people using arms only, some people pushing with one leg, and some using homologous upper and lower body movements.
Then I asked that same group to “crawl” based on your understanding of what crawling is. This second pass across the floor had more of you doing a full cross-pattern activity, using arms and legs in a way that you have learned in movement classes. Some of you changed the activity completely from the uninformed original crawl that you were doing before I gave you a cortical picture of what I wanted.
The original activity was a reflection of lower, pre-cortical levels of the brain and it is THIS activity, not the informed crawl you did just after, that is a stimulant for the brain. The uninformed brain continues the activity causing reflexes and neural pathways to mature the tummy crawl into a fully integrated activity, while at the same time triggering all other functions at that brain level to stabilize and mature.
So, my “crawlers” (along with other activities they do) will develop better horizontal eye tracking, more accurate perception of strong sensory stimulation, and a relief from stress due to the potential for rebalancing cortisol and oxytocin levels when that level of development matures. My crawlers develop better arches in the feet, stronger and more appropriate lordotic curves in the spine, and the beginning of lower arm supination/pronation, which is critical for later fine motor skills. They will integrate their Moro reflex and stimulate mirror neurons that connect us deeply to other humans, among other gains.
If I had told them how to crawl in a cross pattern none of the above listed gains would have been made.
This, I hope, demonstrated the point that I was trying to make, that the cortical brain can understand what is expected in a movement and perform it, but this is not the access to the levels of the brain that are so often the source of a client’s challenges.
I am excited to share my insights with you. When we can acknowledge both the facts that movement IS the driver of development AND that 50% of the brain cannot respond to language, logic, awareness, or feelings, THEN we open the door to new options for healing.
If I have made the point that a “brain-centered approach using movement as the primary tool” and a “movement-centered approach that can be applied to brain development” are two different things, then I get an “A” and you get an “A”. (And YOU get an “A” and YOU get an “A”!)
Bette Lamont ©
Because I had a couple of inquiries about other apparently similar modalities such as reflex integration, I will also share a short paper that was on my Facebook group:
Why NeuroDevelopmental Movement® is like Eating Chocolate Cake
NeuroDevelopmental Movement is a basic, but complex and effective approach to growth and healing, but much like other approaches that we clever humans have turned into healing modalities, we have made developmental movement, as a general category, less holistic and effective by failing to see the whole system of a brain growing itself by moving in its environment.
We humans like to divide things up into their component parts to understand them, but once in practice we all know it is better nutrition, for instance, to eat an orange than a Vitamin C tablet, better to eat a range of vegetables than take fiber supplements.
I have watched over several decades as therapeutic “brain programs” have used just reflex integration as an integrator of function, or just sensory integration, or just movement, and watched as programs are developed solely to “balance” the two cortical hemispheres.
To me, that is like consuming a chocolate cake by eating just the flour one day, just the sugar the next, just the cocoa powder the next, just the baking soda…. etc. This does not end up being a chocolate cake!!!!
Development is the subtle, interactive upward spiral of reflexes, movement and sensory skills, in the presence of balanced non-traumatizing parenting and healthy biochemistry that will resolve gaps, injuries, and delays in our children and our brain-injured adults.
This is why I love the NeuroDevelopmental Movement® process: because it leaves out none of the basic elements of healthy development, organizing the program so that stages come on board in a sequential way with the neurological, emotional, social, academic, and physical health of the client all in mind at the same time.
I am so grateful for this work.
Bette Lamont©
Further exploration of NeuroDevelopmental Movement®
If you have questions about how your movement practice with developmentally impaired clients could be enhanced, please feel free to inquire.
My email address is:
developmentalmovement@gmail.com
I have a tremendous library of articles about my work on my website at:
Please join my Facebook group. We would love to see you there:
Thank you all for your beautiful work with your students and clients. And thanks to Bill Evans and crew for the opportunity.