We naturally want to believe that we are living consciously and engaging in practices that foster optimal health and well-being. However, challenges and stressors of real life can easily take us down a path into anxiety, negative moods, depression, isolation, cloudy thinking, emotional dysregulation, confusion, and myriad physical symptoms including pain. In the process, we often lose (or perhaps never had) the core healing element of somatic awareness. Yet, as research tells us, mindful movement has the power to foster lasting well-being.

Join Dr. Carla and renowned somatic expert Dr. Martha Eddy, founder and director of the Dynamic Embodiment Somatic Movement Therapy Training program and author. Dr. Eddy, who has taught at many prestigious universities including Princeton, Columbia, Barnard, and NYU, brings a wealth of experience and research-back strategies that foster healing and overall well-being. Topics covered include mental health, anxiety, depression, somatic awareness, proprioception, conscious action, creativity, dance, yoga, self-awareness, self-regulation, self-expression, TBI (traumatic brain injury), stroke, brain fog, healing, social determinants of health, and the importance of support and community. As this podcast may contain sensitive information, listener discretion is advised. If you need support, please contact your healthcare provider.

 

Get the help you need:

https://dynamicembodiment.org/

https://www.nami.org/

https://www.ninds.nih.gov/health-information/disorders/traumatic-brain-injury-tbi

 

Books by Dr. Carla Manly:

Joy from Fear: https://www.amazon.com/Joy-Fear-Carla-Marie-Manly/dp/1641701218

Date Smart: https://www.amazon.com/Date-Smart-Transform-Relationships-Fearlessly/dp/1641704675

Aging Joyfully: https://www.amazon.com/Aging-Joyfully-Optimal-Relationships-Fulfillment/dp/1641701412

The Joy of Imperfect Love: https://www.amazon.com/Joy-Imperfect-Love-Creating-Relationships/dp/1641709057

 

Oracle decks by Dr. Carla Manly:

Etsy: https://www.etsy.com/listing/1757477615/imperfect-love-reflection-oracle-cards  

Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Imperfect-Love-Reflection-Oracle-Cards/dp/B0D1Z5M4YK

 

Connect with Dr. Carla Manly:

Website: https://www.drcarlamanly.com

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/drcarlamanly/

Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/drcarlamanly/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/drcarlamanly

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/carla-marie-manly-8682362b/

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@dr.carlamariemanly8543

TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@dr_carla_manly

 

Books by Dr. Martha Eddy:

Mindful Movement

Dynamic Embodiment® of the Sun Salutation

 

Connect with Dr. Martha Eddy:

Website: https://drmarthaeddy.com/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/drmarthaeddy/ 

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/drmarthaeddy/ 

YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/@bodyminddancingtm7734 

—

Watch the episode here

 

Listen to the podcast here

 

Boost Mental Clarity, Mindfulness, and Physical Well-Being with Renowned Somatic Expert Dr. Martha Eddy

Introduction

We naturally want to believe that we are living consciously and engaging in practices that foster optimal health and well-being. However, the challenges and stressors of real life can easily take us down a path into anxiety, negative moods, depression, isolation, cloudy thinking, emotional dysregulation, confusion and a myriad physical symptoms, including pain.

In the process we often lose or perhaps never had the core healing element of somatic awareness. Yet, as research tells us, mindful movement has the power to foster lasting well-being. In this episode, we’ll focus on this real-life issue. “I am a confident, secure woman. However, 25 years ago, I was given a TBI by a drunk driver. Since my crash, I have become apprehensive about my choices. I think brilliantly on some days but not so much on the next. As I type this, I realize this is a not-so-much day.” That issue is the focus of this episode.

 

 

Please note as this episode may contain sensitive information. Reader discretion is advised. If you need support, please see the special links below. I’m joined by a very incredible guest, Dr. Martha Eddy, Founder and Director of the Dynamic Embodiment Somatic Movement Therapy Training Program. Dr. Eddy is also an author and she has taught at many prestigious universities, including Princeton, Columbia, Barnard, and NYU. Dr. Eddy will be sharing her expertise on the healing power of conscious movement. Welcome to the show, Dr. Eddy. It is such a privilege to have you with us.

Thank you so much. I love your mission and what you’re bringing together for the world. Thank you.

Thank you for joining me and our readers. Before we launch into the substance of this episode, would you mind sharing with our readers a little bit about what makes you you?

A piece that maybe wasn’t in my bio has to do with my upbringing. It underlies why the form of movement therapy that I established created has what we call a social change or it’s more typical to say social justice, but I don’t use that word too often for specific reasons. Component. That is because I grew up in poverty and a lot of people, I feel, in the United States, Canada, and Northern Europe don’t understand, especially in the somatic field or in the wellness field, how poverty impacts health. That’s a big part of what motivates me to do my work and impacts how I do my work and how I make it as available as possible to diverse people. That’s part of who I am.

Thank you for sharing that and I hope we can weave in that piece. Let’s make a point of weaving that piece in the show so that our readers are more aware of how poverty impacts overall well-being. I joined with you on that when I worked with juveniles on probation. Not all of them, but many of them came from fairly impoverished backgrounds.

The lack of awareness and lack of healthy sustenance, just the basics, that issue of being in constant flight mode certainly not knowing when that next meal will come from and all sorts of things, so we can surely talk about that. One question before we get into the topic. I noticed in Dr. Eddy’s background. She’s in her office and there’s is an array of beautiful masks. They look like they’re from a variety of cultures. Could you tell us a little bit about the meaning of those masks? They’re beautiful.

I would say probably in my twenties, I started either being gifted masks or traveling and picking them up on my own. My husband, who I met maybe ten years later, also had masks from being in Korea and Italy. You might recognize some of those. When people saw that we both had a mask collection where we were living together when we got married, people gave us masks for our wedding, and then we’ve collected a few others as we continued to travel.

They are beautiful and I remember I once did a retreat with the Marion Woodman Foundation. As part of the body intense work we were doing, we each made a mask. There’s just something so profound about mask work and doing mask work with one’s mask made from one’s face to be able to see that and put on all sorts of paint and colors and it’s so healing, those practices. Aren’t they the creative practices?

Thank you for bringing that up because I come with a strong background as a dancer who trained in technique and what was called modern dance, which has morphed into contemporary modern dance, but there was always from the beginning. The room, even in a class that was called the dance class for creation for improvisation and/or composition. That’s a big part of what I bring into the dynamic embodiment style of somatic movement therapy.

It is not necessarily that people are dancing or making dances, but that their creative spirit is invited into the healing process, and whatever form that takes is welcome as well.  I can’t say that I’ve gotten the masks down in my sessions with people, but I can say that one of these is my face and another is from the Sandinista Revolution. It was somebody very specific space as well. We have two here that are from that ritualization and functional use in real life.

Creative Practices & Healing

I spoke about that body and soul intensive that I did, so I recall a time in my career. I was a newbie and was brought up in a fairly straight-laced family. Being part of these creative practices, I was asked to walk in my bare feet in the mud, put plaster on my face, and engaged in dances with other women, with our arms around each other. I felt very strange at first. I’m a very different person now.

The reason I say this is I can imagine that some of our readers may not even be aware of the power of dance therapy. They may not understand what somatic therapy is. They may not understand the healing power because they may not have experienced it. Those first doses, if you don’t grow up in that creative, let’s be in this organic space of healing, empowerment, and feeling and being in our bodies, it may be quite a leap to understand how that could be healing.

I came from that place many moons ago but have now come to a place where I get it. I’m a yoga teacher. I was doing yoga therapy. I get it from the inside out, but our readers who may not and even the person who wrote in with the TBI, the Traumatic Brain Injury, may be thinking, “What is this about? Do you think dance and movements going to be healing?” Please explain.

There are a lot of different modalities referred to there, so I’ll unpack it a little bit. Just to remind readers, I wrote a book called Mindful Movement that also will elucidate or repeat some of what I’m saying. If they want to either go deeper or just refresh these definitions, they can find that information there.

 It’s called Mindful Movement: The Evolution of the Somatic Arts and Conscious Action. I thought long and hard about what I wanted to convey in that subtitle. Conscious action is not a term I hear very often in our field, but I’m proud of it because people will talk about conscious movement. I take action in my life than necessarily like a step forward with my whole body. Those would be two ways to take action, but action is a more common term.

Conscious action is simply saying I’m aware of myself as I do something and that’s what somatic awareness is all about. It’s based on the word soma, which is a Greek word, that distinguishes a body that can be a dead body from a body that is alive. The soma is the living body. The body that feels itself. That’s the next thing I want to share. Dance movement therapy, which is movement cycle therapy and somatic movement therapy, I will distinguish these two systems, and somatic psychology. It all supports people coming a little bit to different degrees, at least a little bit, and then some a lot into feeling their bodies, which is being aware that we have something called proprioception that we can’t feel our body.

If you move your hands, that’s a kinesthetic awareness. If you’re in a position, even without moving, you can say your hand is almost a fist, open or fisted because you’re feeling it. You can look at it and see that but you can close your eyes and feel it too. I encourage you to do that. Take a position with your hand. Close your eyes. Can you say what it is? Take a different position? Can you picture it? Can you feel it? Can you feel a difference between the right and the left hand?

What’s different in terms of how close to your body or far away or up or down those are all different kinds of spatial awarenesses, but they’re based on how folded our joints are or how open they are or how much tension our muscles have. One is registering sensation through the proprioceptors of our muscles and the other is in our joints. This is the information that we don’t teach and people don’t know about.

As you’re speaking, I can’t help but feel as though I am sinking into my own body a bit more because just these simple practices. Touching our fingertips, maybe one with another digit. Making that fist. Opening it up. We can’t get into too much of a stressful place or an anxious place if we are focusing on the body. If you are putting your attention in this space, this body that we call home and a home we often lose touch with from the moment we wake up to the moment we go to sleep.

When you were describing the various kinds of troubles, if you will, that we come into the world with or into a day with, I want to connect the dots that someone who carries a lot of anxiety or has a very strong inner critic of self-judgment this might not relaxed doing something like this because they might be going, “Am I doing it right? What should I be doing?”

Anxiety and self-judgment can inhibit relaxation. Share on X

If it takes over with your head, you can still stay in a mind state that is less than optimal for healing. If you can literally, and this is what you were saying so clearly, feel it as you do it, then your mind is occupied with sensation and that can be very helpful. Be caught up in the consciousness of the action such that your feeling is alive and responsive, and all that matters is what’s happening in this present moment. It’s very much about presence and mindfulness in motion.

It reminds me of yoga, where some people go and do a yoga class and they’re worried about perfection, creating that perfect pose. I tend to when I practice, I close my eyes because we want to feel into that pose. We want to notice where the muscles are tight and where we can create some ease. Even for those of us with very busy minds, if you are immersed in a somatic practice in that way, whether it’s dance or yoga, not those focusing on the perfection but focusing on feeling the body.

TBI & Lack of Focus

That’s a sweet space, it’s very healing. This makes me weave back to the topic which seems to be about the cloudiness of thought. Lack of focus caused by the TBI, but something that we can often experience regardless of whether we’ve had a dramatic brain injury. We can get that stress-induced, anxiety-induced, daily life-induced, lack of focus and concentration partly because we don’t have it in the body. We aren’t starting from that strong, rooted place of knowing how the body is feeling. Could you talk to us about that, please?

I wanted to add to your examples of what might bring a cloudy brain. Sometimes, it can be as simple as an overload of sugar, too, like what we put in our systems. A certain amount of sugar is sometimes used by children or adults with attention deficits. A little bit of chocolate is known to help focus, but if we flood our system with a lot of sugar, it can cause a woozyiness, even. That’s just another piece of this pie. There are biochemical aspects of what we’re doing all the time.

Before I get into traumatic brain injury, I’d like to speak to yoga for a second and just say that I had fun choosing where to put more information out in the world about this approach that I will share about TBIs, which is the model I created for dynamic embodiment of thought. We’re talking about clarifying thoughts. It’s an action plan. It’s called OSO and I will explain it. OSO is also the word for bear in Spanish, which is wonderful.

I chose to write a second book together with a yoga therapist who is a graduate of Dynamic Embodiment Somatic Movement Therapy and is now a registered Somatic Movement therapist as well. That book is Dynamic Embodiment of the Sun Salutation. The reason I picked it was because the sun salutation is a flow. It’s a sequence. To me, it can be a ritual.

Some people steer away from the word ritual for the same reason we were just talking about, like beating the mud arms around other people and dancing seems maybe ritualistic. If that is for some reason based on our psyche during childhood, or if anything else is a cause of discontent or fear, the word ritual doesn’t have to be used. It’s a practice. It’s just a sequence. It’s something we can do together and repeat and it’s in repetition that are neuroplasticity comes into blossom. Meaning our nervous system can get shut down with something like a brain injury.

It can be damaged. There can be a lack of oxygen. There can be a real problem of the injury killing neurons and yet there are always new pathways that we can find and that’s neuroplasticity. That’s the ability to get the dendrites more active to allow the ends of our nerves to find new roadways so that if you are pattern inhabit had been to do this. No matter what it is, maybe you just drag your foot or maybe you were great at sport, but you want to be even better and you feel stuck in a habit or there’s been an injury. Whether it’s a stroke or a birth trauma like cerebral palsy or a traumatic brain injury where often the part of the brain impacted is not always identified.

If with any of those you want change, then I will share the OSO model which is to acknowledge what has changed. To be with that anxiety. To be present with the anger. The loss or the grief, whatever is coming up emotionally and cognitively. The lack of cognition and the diminished memory from chemotherapy. I work with all of these kinds of conditions. What are they? They are life conditions. They are moments in time that can shift and change through connecting to the body, emotions, and thoughts and noticing where we are with that.

That’s the Observation, the O in OSO. It can be self-observation or reflection from an external source. Sometimes, we’re too caught up in our problems or our story to see ourselves. People go to therapy. People come to a somatic movement session, whether it’s a class, a group, or an individual session, and then get the opportunity to become more aware.

Sometimes, we're too caught up in our problems and our story to really see ourselves. Share on X

We call that a witness of oneself in a certain way. We’re able to witness a little bit from the outside where we are in the moment and then feel it. With that, then, for instance, in my role as a therapist or educator, I would want to support what’s working well, because we got to where we got. That is the S. It is to Support. Often, people will go as a practitioner or in a method of fixing somebody go straight to supporting what isn’t working.

Let me show you something new. My therapists are trained in dynamic embodiment. To spend the time to withhold that hair caregiving instinct, whether it’s words, touch, or movement, and say, “Just be with the person. Find out where they’re at. Let them tell their story. Listen to their tone of voice. Hear the rhythm of the movement of their voice or watch the move and truly be present as a witness.”

When you present as a witness, then there’s this opportunity to notice what’s working well. Whatever this person has done to cope is a helpful defense or helpful next step, and to celebrate that, take time with it and build confidence around it. Once there’s a, “Okay. We’ve done that. I’m ready for more,” if the person feels ready for more, then we could also see what’s in the shadow.

What has not been tapped into his resource? Whether it’s a part of the body, a way of thinking, self-care, or heartfulness, what do we need to draw forward to be more at ease? To spend time with oneself but also in this relationship with the somatic movement therapists, the dynamic embodiment practitioner finds that someone cares about you and takes time to be with the vulnerability.

The last phase is play. There’s still an O and that is to offer Options. That’s where that creative force we were talking about before comes in. It can be there from the beginning, but once you’ve tried on a new behavior, it’s like buying a hat and then going out and wearing it in different settings and finding out what outfit it goes with or how people respond to it, whether it makes sense in the sun or whether it’s better off on a rainy day.

You might have thought one thing, but it’s not working. Being able to take time with just trying things on you’re learning newly. The support that you felt from therapists through touch, the ideas in movement, whether it’s about alignment or quality of movement. You’ve been doing that with so much effort. Can you do it with more ease, more flow, and more breath support? I’ll stop there and just say what OSO is again. It’s Observing another self or another. Supporting and then offering yourself or if you’re the practitioner, Options to someone else.

What a stunningly simple yet complex approach. I say simple and complex because even though OSO sounds simple, we want to observe by ourselves or others. We want support. What is working well? Leaning into the strengths. When the person is ready, we want to offer the options or have ourselves offer the options. We can see when we lay it out, particularly if you have a practitioner supporting us in creating this space, how we could shift over time. Gain more clarity and ease.

I love that you use the word ease because, for many people, underneath all of that stress, anxiety, pain, confusion, lack of clarity, and lack of focus is that loss of ease. It’s such an important piece of it. I’d love to take it back to the sun salutations because I’m a big believer in ritual if we look at it as a soothing practice that we can repeat.

Having evening rituals around tea, getting ready for bed, or the ritual of laying out dinner plates, if we look at it in a somatic sense, for example, this will sound goofy, but every morning when I’m brushing my teeth, I do my teeth in a forward fold. I’m lengthening my back. I’m stretching my body and at the same time, I have a ritual of giving all my blessings to people while I’m doing that.

It’s a very interesting practice. I do it because it works for me but it is a ritual and an important starting place for my day. For those who aren’t comfortable with that tribe, Dr. Eddy said you can call it whatever you want. When we have meaningful rituals that make us feel better about ourselves, body, mind, and spirit, they can be wonderful guideposts throughout the day.

They can help with clarity within the morning, honoring that morning fogginess but also moving out of it. They can also be nice grounding places at lunch to pause and have a ritual of five-minute meditation or something like that. At night, having a ritual around getting ready for bed. Taking back to Sun Salutation, for those who don’t know, I was on your website and I have seen your books and have read aspects of them and they’re beautiful works.

The Sun Salutation, there’s even a little video on it on your website. As a yoga teacher, I agree with the Sun Salutation. It’s almost as if it offers the body a complete round of waking up. It’s going into every aspect of that being and saying, “Stretch out here. Lengthen here. Embrace this.” Could you tell us why that particular ritual, that sequence?

It’s very straightforward, which is probably the sequence I’ve been doing the longest in my life. I could go back to plies, maybe, but that doesn’t have as you say the variety. You go up and down. You’re getting ready for a jump, which is fun, but so plies are knee bends or almost squats, but done in a more balletic way. You’re keeping your body upright and light as you descend, which is no small feat. It’s worth practicing, also. I’m proud that I still can do them.

With the Sun Salutation, I have been thinking about it a lot with prayer practices from other cultures as well. The Muslim, numerous times a day, folding, the sun salutation or whether people do a moon salutation. The idea of both folding and unfolding the spine, prostrating and feeling the Earth and reaching up to the sky are deep practices of humans relating to our relationship to the planet. That is why I love it so much.

The idea of both folding and unfolding the spine, prostrating and feeling the Earth, and reaching up to the sky are profound practices of humans relating to our relationship with the planet. Share on X

I need to also get more rotation into my day. I love that I learned Tibetan yoga, which was circling nine times from different joints in the spine. Circumduction is the anatomical or kinesiological term for making a circle with the top of your head on the ceiling and then doing it from any vertebra or hip joint. These are all wonderful practices and yet there’s another reason I chose the sun salutation and again, it shows up in the subtitle of the book, which is Balancing the Chakras and Neuroendocrine System. It’s pathways for balancing the chakras and the neuroendocrine system.

We talked a little bit about the nervous system and fogging us, but it’s important to note that our hormonal state, which I referred to when I talked about sugar, because then insulin comes in and that overall could be part of some fogginess. Also, fogginess can come from overexertion from the adrenals and then just being exhausted.

Maybe fogginess is from a lack of the thymus making T-cells to fight off viruses. Feeling weak and not clear because you’re busy fighting off viruses and you haven’t stimulated your antiviral system to be as active as it could be. When you do the sun salutation from the perspective of dynamic embodiment, we’re working with the spatial clarity of what we call counter tensions, which is from one of the influences of my work, which is called Laban Movement Analysis, where we work a lot. Even imagining movement inside the sacred crystals the geometric platonic solids meaning the little tetrahedron, octahedron, and then the cube, which most Western rooms not an Anglo, but Western are alike.

Some are more oblong or rectangular, but we can feel the corners so you can see the corner where that mask descends to the other corner of the room and then you can go up to that corner and down to this corner. Feeling that the space that we occupy is a support for our bodies is part of the work. That’s more architectural, but we can feel that with the sky and the Earth as well.

I take those Laban principles of establishing tensegrity which is biotensegrity are these tensile forces through our fascial system and allowing them to support either our organs, muscles, or glands. In this case, in working with the hormones, establishing these tensions, I believe, also creates a resonance that starts to wake them up. You can tap, squeeze, and make it sound, but you can also just pull like you’re pulling a rubber band. Anybody who plays a string instrument understands that you have to tighten the bow and strings to the right amount. When we use our body with counter tension, we can tighten our inner cordic and energies to stimulate the glands. I’ll stop there because it’s a lot.

It’s a lot and it’s fascinating, yet what you’re making me think of is in more ancient times. Our ancestors may have been doing a lot of this naturally. In the post-industrial revolution, we are sitting in chairs, couches, cars, buses, or planes a lot. Our very recent ancestors were not doing that. They were naturally reaching into trees. They were reaching to the ground. They were stretching and moving. They were dancing. They were connecting hand-to-hand, dancing in circles and had all of these rituals and daily practices by necessity.

Reaching into streams to try to get that fish. Washing the clothes in the streams. A lot of the movement that you were talking about was a natural part of their life cycle from dawn to dusk. It sounds as if much of what you are doing is offering people methodology for getting their bodies back into a alive and aware state. Truth be told, at least from my experience, the more I am in my body, the better I feel. The more attention I’m paying to it, the more in sync I am with it.

We think about it, as you’re saying, even with sugar, right before we started the episode, you got water with elderberry in it. We were talking about saying how I would like water with cranberry juice in it, but most cranberry juice these days has added sugar that we often aren’t mindful of because we’re in a rush about what we’re putting in our bodies and we may not even be aware that that good drink or drinking is high in sugar which is not good for the system.

There’s no shame or blame here, but you’re asking, and you brought up sugar, which I appreciate that you did because we do want to be mindful. Everything that we put in our bodies, every movement, every action we are taking, and every situation we are putting ourselves in is going to affect the tenseness in the body. Our ability to think clearly. Our ability to feel really well this beautiful container that is the home of the body. You have made it very understandable.

Before we close, I know that I could talk to you for ages because you have so much wisdom. I know that you had said when it comes to specifically traumatic brain injury, because it is such a complicated issue, as you said there are times when somebody who has TBI can’t identify the specific part of the brain that was affected. It’s not like other disorders we can go right to that part of the brain that says, “The speech area was affected here. Broca’s area, this or that.”

You would maybe say for those who are suffering from chronic illness or something like TBI that there might not be a quick fix or a specific fix, but that one of the big ways to move forward is to embrace the OSO program as much as they can on their own. If that isn’t sufficient, reach out to somebody who can help them move past the confined space that they are in, dictated by the illness, and where they are with it.

That is accurate. There are resources, too, that could be one-on-one to be witnessed. That can be so important. Sometimes, just being able to tell your story and have someone watch your movement and reflect what they do see, whether it’s your friend or professional that’s skilled at this exact thing. It’s so helpful. It’s great to have self-awareness. It’s wonderful and free.

A friend who’s willing to be non-judgmental, caring, and compassionate as they share their observations is wonderful. A trained registered somatic movement therapist or educator is someone who can not only see you and maybe have language for reflecting that’s quite sophisticated, but all so have their own life experience of embodiment as a way to resource their support for you and in an embodied way. We believe a lot in transmission. If you are seeking a practitioner and you don’t vibe with them, they just make you uncomfortable, don’t push through it. Find someone you feel comfortable with because trust is a key part of the healing process. That would be a classroom teacher, too, or a movement teacher.

That trust factor in all of our relationships from romantic partners to friends, to work to therapists, to doctors, or everything. I do want to offer this piece you made me think of it. A dear friend of mine has an ailment and having trouble walking. I was doing a visit and noticed that he was getting up from his chair and immediately reaching for the wall. He was going from one frail position to another, which is not strengthening his muscles, but leading him into it, a jagged weave, and so I was the observer.

I’m not a trained physical therapist, but I said, “I just want you to notice what I’m noticing here. Perhaps, if you’d like to hear this, maybe if you’re able to stand and get a support, a cane, or something right there to help you use your muscles and strengthen your muscles and then walk rather than fling yourself to the wall, that might be helpful.”

Movement Programs for Well-Being

He later texted me and said, “Thank you for caring. That helped. I’m going to do that.” Often, when we are in our habit, we don’t see it. We’re just doing the best we can to take that next step literally or metaphorically and so sometimes a witness, especially if it’s a very trusted person, whether it’s a professional who we’ve hired or a dear friend, we can benefit from having somebody take that time to attune to us. There’s so much magic in the power of caring and attunement. You embody that. I already adore you. I’m so grateful for you and for you sharing your time with us. Before we close, is there anything else you would like to share? You have offered so much, Dr. Eddy.

I would go back to my dancing. Even though I said I grew up in poverty, I was living in a neighborhood that was poor. We’re talking about torn-down buildings, rubble, no trees, and inner-city and yet full of amazing human beings and a lot of love and a lot of good parties, and wonderful smells and foods. My parents had the resources for me to go to dance classes.

I mentioned that I would go to these dance classes in the next neighborhood over and get to be creative as well as learned strategies for more flexibility, balance, range of motion, and all of that. What I want to share is that that dancer still lives in me and it’s been one of the ways that I maintained memory around what I learned about anatomy, kinesiology,  physiology, and health by creating dance phrases.

Since about 1981, I’ve been teaching dance classes. Some of these phrases that I made up are still alive and I train teachers to do them. They’re all about self-care. Some are more rigorous and might involve like a sit-up and others are more just finding the breath and allowing for expansion and then exhaling. Letting go of the weight of the head or letting your spine wriggle.

That’s called body-mind dancing, and I want to invite people to feel that they can go to a body-mind dancing class with me or with any of the 55 teachers around the world, both online and in person. The first class is free in most cases. You can ask for that. I was surprised. It turns out a New York Times dance reviewer was coming to my classes when they were large. I even know she was there and then she wrote an article and then the classes blew up. There are 363 students on Zoom.

She got that it was a chance to recuperate, to be both tired if you’re feeling tired and then find movement that would and we’re guiding it. I say we because it could be any one of us in the teacher groups, the certified teachers of body-mind dancing. We’re taking a pulse on the mood and there was often anxiety or isolation.

Through this one-hour class, at the end of class people are asked, “How are you feeling now?” They felt connected, maybe to themselves or maybe to others. They felt joy that they hadn’t felt in a week because of this middle of COVID and they lost a loved one or they were in their grief and they were okay with it.

I wanted to invite people to body my dancing. Also, because I was referring to chemotherapy, in 1999, I was invited on a 25th anniversary of the concept to design an exercise program for women with breast cancer and it’s called Moving for Life now. It started as moving on aerobics because we, Dr. Annie Rosen and I, were researching and the internet was happening in ‘99 so we could look. We’ve found that in Europe, they were working very differently with cancer than in the United States.

My mother had died from cancer. I lost her when I was young, 33, and she was 63. It was a transformative experience around death and dying in both good ways and very difficult ways. Yet this is my gift back to her. Moving for Life is the new name. We have a DVD that can be streamed, but we have online classes as well.

As long as we possibly can, we’ve been trying to keep them free. That may not be possible forever because there’s not as much support anymore for breast cancer programs. Susan G. Komen is no longer giving money for community programs. New York State is no longer giving money for community programs in breast health. We open the class now, so it’s for anybody with a chronic disease or just getting older. Creaky bones, wanting to dance for the first time in their lives. That is being funded by New York City discretionary funds of council members, but we have to pay it out in advance and then they pay us back at the end of the year. It’s tough running a nonprofit and running a system that’s free, but people have been very generous and we’re happy to have it. Come when you can while it’s free.

We will put out good energy that your coffers get filled from donations that you well-deserve because you have such a good cause and movement. We take our bodies for granted yet moving these bodies, oiling the joints, lubricating, and all of who we are, we lose touch with it. It is one of the core components of well-being and keeping ourselves well and healing when there’s trauma in the body, dance movement helps at whatever level.

 

 

Whatever level somebody can accomplish, one step forward. That’s movement. That’s a good thing. Last but not the least, we had started with the piece about poverty and had promised to circle back and just wanted to touch on that for a moment. You were fortunate in your poverty to have had community. I think that that is one of the things that can make poverty more bearable and less isolating.

Not that it’s ever good to be impoverished, but I do think that for those who are impoverished financially but also socially, physically, psychologically, and all those realms, which often happens, especially if there is inner intergenerational transmission of violence. That is something that is so important to remember. That movement can help there. Dance classes can help there as they helped you because you are gathering community.

Even if it’s a virtual community, you can see outside your small world of impoverishment. Not all impoverished people have access to computers, to any form of resource that will get them this support, but we can hope that it comes in the future in wide-reaching ways to allow those who are impoverished, isolated, and hurting to be boosted up in the world.

That’s beautifully stated. Thank you so much. People may have heard of social determinants of health, what we call upstream vectors. Up the stream, if industry is dropping pollutants and then we’re drinking the water downstream, it’s in the ecosystem. Poverty is an upstream factor. It’s something that seeps into the body, and whether it’s fogginess from lack of food at all is a huge problem with children.

I work for the schools around attention issues. If you don’t have the right balance of healthy food, you can start to get the jitters and that can look like ADD or ADHD. You get misdiagnosed or it can foster a behavior pattern that is going to become part of a learning disability. That is born out of all kinds of things. If you’re not doing well at school, do you progress further in your life to get a job? What work do you take on? Is it within the system or not? Is it working for you? Are you feeling humbled or shamed by the dominant people, the class, and the leadership? All of these topics are so important. In my training program, we have something called the Socially Conscious Somatic Forum, where we come forward with different discussion points.

 

 

It could be about poverty. It could be about bias. It could be about what it is to be fat and how we are treated in a fat body and accepted or not accepted or developing reactions to phobias, and all kinds of topics like that, even if we’re not solving them. Solving them, to me, is social justice, when you change the law and change the policy, but if you’re becoming conscious of it, we’re doing social somatics and social change. We’re changing our thinking and our minds and that feels very important to me.

I’m grinning ear-to-ear because we’re closing on a topic of movement. When we can have healthy discussions, listen to different perspectives and be curious, and want to learn, grow, and help other people grow, that is movement. Just where we started, it’s all about movement and allowing ourselves and others the freedom to move. Dr. Eddy, thank you so much. Where would you like our readers to find you?

It’s pretty easy. Just go to DrMarthaEddy.com. Within that, if you go to the community page, you’ll see about five other websites I have, but the other one that we talked about is DynamicEmbodiment.org, especially if you want to find professional training. The calendar is the same on both of those. If you ever forget it, just DrMarthaEddy.com. You can find the classes that are just one hour. Some are free. Some are a donation. Others are $20 or you get them discounted if you take a view of them. We have workshops that are about twelve hours. We have longer investments of time, body, and attitude in order to become a professional in this field whether it’s through dance coaching and/or movement therapy.

Thank you. What better investment can we make than in this body, this psyche, and this beautiful being? Thank you for your luminosity, Dr. Eddy. It has been such a joy and privilege. Thank you to our readers. I so appreciate you and your support.

 

Important Links

• Dr. Martha Eddy
• Dynamic Embodiment Somatic Movement Therapy Training Program
• Mindful Movement
• Dynamic Embodiment of the Sun Salutation
• Socially Conscious Somatic Forum
• Dynamic Embodiment
• Traumatic Brain Injury
• NAMI
• Dr. Carla Manly’s Website
• Dr. Carla Manly on Instagram
• Dr. Carla Manly on Twitter
• Dr. Carla Manly on Facebook
• Dr. Carla Manly on LinkedIn
• Dr. Carla Manly’s YouTube
• Dr. Carla Manly on TikTok

 

About Martha Eddy

Martha Eddy, DEP, CMA, RSMT, EdD, and Licensed TBMC, is an international advocate of Somatic Movement Education & Therapy and speaker on Health, Wellness, and the BodyMind connection for over 30 years.

The author of Mindful Movement: The Evolution of the Somatic Arts and Conscious Action, Dr. Eddy has a new book coming out this year titled Dynamic Embodiment of the Sun Salutation. She is a lecturer on embodied cognition, eco-somatics, the interaction of neuro-motor and socio-emotional development, and the role of the body and movement in peace education and violence prevention.

She is the Founder and Director of the Dynamic Embodiment® Somatic Movement Therapy Training program, Co-Founder and Director of Programming and Research at Moving for Life, and Co-Founder and Director of Somatic Studies at Moving on Center. Since 1981, she has served at Laban Institute as faculty of special programs, certification programs, President, Executive Director, Advisory Council member and Senior Research Associate.

Dr. Eddy has served on the certification program faculty for the School for Body-Mind Centering® and on the boards of CORD, NDEO, and as President of ISMETA. In 2017, she received the National Award for Outstanding Leadership in Dance Education from NDEO.

Her teaching positions have been at universities including but not limited to: New York University, Princeton University, Teachers College, Columbia University graduate program, Barnard College, University of Connecticut, Hope College, Hampshire College, San Francisco State University in the Kinesiology department, and with low-residency programs at Montclair State University, St Mary’s College (Bay Area) MFA, UNC-Greenboro Masters in Dance Education.

Dynamic Embodiment® Somatic Movement Therapy is Dr. Eddy’s forty year blend of Laban/Bartenieff Studies with Body-Mind Centering® that conveys how to maximize embodied cognition for deeper psycho-physical understanding. The method is based in a process called OSO – Observe, Support, Optimize Options. The underlying course work – Laban Movement Analysis, Body-Mind Centering(R), Perceptual-Motor Development, Bartenieff Fundamentals, and Embodied Anatomy and Physiology are all linked to these degree programs: – Marymount Manhattan College, St Mary’s College in the Bay area, and UNC-Greensboro.

Dr. Eddy worked with Linda Lantieri and the TIDES/Inner Resilience Program post 9/11, working with over 900 teachers. In 2003, she founded the Center for Kinesthetic Education to provide professional development and pre-K-12 programming within NYC public and independent schools with a focus on how to use movement and dance for self-regulation, expression and health. She has engaged nationally in research using her CKE assessment tools and curricula. In this capacity, she has been facile in working with administrators, educators and students involved with inclusive classrooms and shaping movement experiences for anyone with behavioral, physical, and emotional disabilities.

Dr. Eddy developed Moving For Life in 1999 to help women with breast cancer as part of the community outreach for Moving On Center in California, which also taught skills in Participatory Arts, Social Somatics, and Movement Therapy. In 2014, Moving For Life became its own non-profit tax deductible entity in NYC. Moving For Life DanceExercise is now effectively providing programming to older adults and people of any age affected by cancer through movement and wellness programs and has been featured on NPR, NY1, CNN, Fox News, the NBC Today Show and CBS News. Martha received the John Mack Arthur Founders Award from Komen of Greater NYC for outstanding service in the cancer recovery community in September 2020.

As a dance advocate, she collaborated in the development in 2008 and is part of the ongoing steering committee of Global Water Dances. Global Water Dances guides choreographers worldwide to develop dance works that inspire environmental awareness through site-specific performances about water concerns. Over 200 cities in over 60 countries have been engaged.

Dr. Eddy has received hundreds of invitations internationally to teach, lecture, dialogue with different communities – university, corporate, dance, and health among others. She maintains a private practice with a small group of individuals each year while still maintaining an active speaking schedule and guiding performance events. Graduates of her programs – Dynamic Embodiment® Practitioners (DEP), Certified Teachers of BodyMind Dancing (CTBMD), and Moving For Life Certified Instructors (MFLCI) are beacons of light and social action internationally.