Click Take A Break

(Part I is 26 minutes. Part II is 15 minutes)

It is the adult version to a WTM lesson called: Pancake Body, p. 40 of the book, A New Sensory Self Awareness

Deepen your own sense by experiencing a lesson and you will deepen your children’s experiences.

My words are not getting through to my child…

There could be many reasons a child isn’t listening. Often, if the child is not listening, it is not intentional. Younger children feel through their bodies to listen. For children, listening is a whole-body experience. The body carries the dialogue of sensations, both physical and psychological. For example, some children love to get buried in the sand, roll in the waves, play through movement but are not aware this movement is helping development and listening. READ MORE

The WTM Bridge is a new orientation of enhancing the biological nature of listening and thinking. The practice is not a tool but becomes a natural way of how the body wants to work with the brain. When the body-mind experiences this awareness, the brain, body, and mind all work better. Become aware of this interconnection, and we can enhance it. The Wellness Through Movement (WTM) methods give the experience of how.   

What is essential to ask if you are a parent or teacher is, “Could my child be feeling something in the body that is getting in the way of listening?” Here is a checklist if your child is hyperactive.

Also see on Parent page:

(√) My children are climbing the walls

I need to know what to do when my child isn’t listening…

The program, Get Sensational Attention (GSA) has been proven effective in increasing the ability to listen, lengthening attention, and in healthy wellbeing. The GSA program is not actually “a program” but a culture. Once learned, it weaves into any school, classroom, or family culture. This program offers steps on opening a child’s inner world of the body to an emotional reaction. Questions in the User Guide develop a child’s ability to communicate more clearly. 

Why are our children hyper or fidgety and needing to move? Imagine being a bundle of energy and being told to sit still. We need to be able to control our children, but telling them to sit still can feel to them like a time bomb ready to explode. Getting exercise or movement releases energy, but there is a more sustainable solution. Most parents understand that children’s movement is important. If you build on the concept that movement patterns have an internal dialogue between the brain and body, brain development and well-being improve. The methods we teach have been tested and proven successful. ( Methods)

I want an alternative to medication to help my child…

There is an alternative to using sedative medications to manage your child’s behavior. Hyperactive children have little awareness of their behavior and how it disturbs others. Think of your child’s behavior not as misbehavior but as behavior that shows how to uncover the answers of what type of help he or she needs. Movement reveals the internal dialogue between the body and brain. When you help children’s brains feel and reeducate what is happening in their bodies, it clarifies how their actions affect others. The WTM methods help children learn the bridge between their actions and their brains by first teaching spatial awareness inside.

Click SCIENCE and FELDENKRAIS for more info.

I know my hyperactive child has something special…

Children who have a lot of energy have a gift. The question is, “Can my children learn to use these gifts?” Let’s watch what the body is trying to do to learn about these gifts. The overly sensitive children that need to move are given sensory stimulus activities or medications to calm their systems. These tactics, though valuable for a time, are not sustainable. 

Hyperactivity is like being a live wire without the ground wire. The results? Children feel over sensitized with no place to go. Being sensitive is not a problem if the children’s nature is grounded. There are roadblocks between movement, senses, and intention when children aren’t grounded. Imagine children having all kinds of energy, but their bodies won’t behave because they just want to jump, tumble, climb, and run. Think of their movement as a morse code trying to describe how they need to feel whole. The sensitivity is trying to use movement to synchronize the senses with feeling and thinking. 

Over eight years, every child within the spectrum (hyperactive, ADD, and ADHD) that we worked with needed a sense of groundedness and stability. Feeling stable on the ground helps children sense where they are in space and their relationship to the circumstances they face. Children’s development starts from the feet up. Researchers, Esther Thelen and Linda Smith showed that if you suspend a toddler in a swing and offer a ball, the toddler reaches for the ball with the feet as if the feet are hands. (Thelen and Smith, 1994) Movements from the toes and feet are primal reflexes of motion to engage the feet into the legs and lower body. The lower body alignment helps with posture. The intelligence of movement in the feet is trying to organize the alignment of the legs into the pelvis and spine. This is how a child finds stability and why groundedness is so important. 

When a child feels grounded, the senses can plug into the whole child, mind, body, and spirit. Getting grounded orchestrates and synergizes the senses so they work together. Children that once could not function well in their environment or with themselves came into balance. They became aware of the effects they have on others and learned their differences have gifts.There are lots of examples in the book A New Sensory Self Awareness but let me give you some tips.

We begin to teach children the sense of groundedness by first finding their bodies. We do this process by combining attention with sensation. We ask the child to lie down and tell us what is touching and not touching the floor. If the child can’t sense much or lie still enough to sense anything, we have the child notice this.  (For example refer to this lesson: Pancake body, finding an internal spatial awareness, A New SENSORY Self Awareness book ).

The second step is to use the tendencies of body movements. Certain movements help the body find ways to connect the muscles and bones to the senses. For example, if a child likes to climb, the movement may be trying to find parts of the body that can help with balance, coordination, and stability. WTM movement would then start with a GI Joe crawl. The child is on her belly and tries to crawl like a lizard. The crawl will reveal if the feet or legs are engaged with the floor. Are the right and left legs both being used to propel the body forward? The lizard crawl helps the child sense how the lower body parts work or don’t work together.

If there is an awkwardness in this movement, the key is found for what kind of motion is needed. Movement organization is not easy to accomplish if the symptoms of the child are severe. Extremely dysfunctional children need expert hands to help the child’s body sense the organization of motion between body parts. (FIND Feldenkrais Practitioner) A functional integration lesson (FI®) uses tactile stimulus from a hands-on session sending movement through the body. The sessions give these gifted children functional ways to use their energy throughout their bodies. In other words, thinking and doing cooperate, and behavior becomes calm and productive. (More A New SENSORY Self Awareness book – Part I, and Part II {TBA)

ReCap

NEEDS missing in hyperactive children

1.    Groundedness 

2.    Coordination and balance from their lower body

If children are not grounded or coordinated it can affect their cognitive function.

Click Science, Check List for more information

Click Feldenkrais Practitioner to get help.

I am in a market, and my kid starts screaming. Help!

As a parent, when our child screams and cries it’s our worst nightmare, especially if we are in a public place. There is one thing you can do right away in the market. You can stop and notice what you are feeling inside. Your children feel your energy and it can fuel the problem. A way to immediately change the situation is to help the child take long exhalations and most importantly, feel inside the body to explain her needs.

Learning this awareness in the body and doing exhalations together with the child needs to be practiced long before the grocery store. The earlier you start with the child, the better. Teaching children how to explain themselves needs to be learned long before being in a public place. 

The first step is to ask yourself, “Is this type of tantrum a familiar way of how my child communicates her needs?” If it is, that is something you need to look at. 

This very easy and simple method anyone can do and was tested with hundreds of children who were upset. At our pilot school, Kohala Elementary, Principal Garcia applied the method and he claimed, “I’ll preach this (technique) until the day I die.” It takes seconds to do. Just use long exhalations and the sound of a word. The WTM program uses the word “Home.” Here’s a link to the details of what we did. The use of sound and exhalations helps children turn their attention inside and feel their bodies. Feeling where the exhalation ends, children put their hands on that part of the body. They were then asked to share how they felt from there. The children shifted their emotional reactions and shared what was going on in a centered (yet still upset) way. 

Principal Garcia used this technique whenever an upset child was sent to his office. He believes that this technique is what helped stop bullying and improved social-emotional wellbeing and the school environment. After our pilot program was completed, the school was able to continue on its own, and Principal Garcia reported there was no bullying. 

Please Note: If the technique doesn’t work, there is more that needs to be understood about how the body affects thinking, behavior, and communication. Refer to the book or the webpage, “Biomechanics of Psychology” to learn more and what may help. (Rosasco-Mitchell, 2013, pp.13, 34, and 60)

Help me with Communication, Please…

Learning to verbalize starts as early as one day old. Check out the astounding research done in 1945 with hundreds of children at an orphanage in Hungary with Magda Gerber. (RIE approach).)The orphanage’s children showed signs of understanding their caretakers as early as infancy. What were the results of learning how to communicate? Babies seemed to wait calmly for their needs to be met. The training starts with the parent or caregiver.

As parents, we have to remember that children learn to communicate by feeling energy. Think of them as balls of sensation. Their senses, keen to the outer world, pick up every sound, light, texture, and action around them. The words have meaning according to the energy behind the word. The intonations, gestures, volume, or speed of the word all find ways into the meaning. 

In Gerber’s orphanage, caretakers talked to infants as if the infants understood. If the baby needed a bottle, the caretaker would say something like this: “I know you are hungry. Please, you have to be patient. I am getting your bottle.” Meanwhile, the caretaker’s intonation is tender, patient, and calm as she  animates what she is saying. For example, as she is talking, she shows the baby the bottle being prepared. This is not easy to do as a parent, but as a guiding force you will calm the child.

The process works for babies even one day old. I observed this when I took care of newborns from drug-addicted mommas. Typically, if a baby is screaming, a feeling of panic in the adult can amplify the situation. From the response of the adult, the baby affirms what they feel is correct. Without thinking, the baby’s body senses if the adult is panicking and may feel, “Surely not getting my bottle is a life and death situation!” As a result, the baby learns that screaming and crying is how to get her needs met.

Age Groups

Babies

The parent’s words are secondary to the parent’s energy. Watch children’s movements and physical reactions and you will see their energy. Are their actions displaying a need and can you as the parent put words to that need? Long before the brain understands words, the baby’s body will show movements in every emotion and physical discomfort (hunger, tiredness, or uncomfortable positions). Remember, we are trying to help children learn to communicate their needs. The brain learns words from the feeling in the emotions and physical sensations. With every emotion and physical sensation, there is an experience of movement. From the experience in the body and the parent putting words to the feeling, a child finds ways to identify the words.

 Children three to eight years old

It is crucial to first help children become aware of how to feel their bodies. It’s hard to understand what is meant by “feel their bodies.” Ask any child to lie down and tell you what parts of their bodies are touching or not touching the floor. The three year olds won’t know what you are talking about. The five year olds will often say, “Nothing is touching the floor.” Surprisingly, research also found most adults could not feel the details of their bodies.( For more information click: Body Ownership Rubber Hand Illusion)

Children, like all people, need to be trained to feel their bodies to become aware of what they are doing. In a playful way, we teach children to turn attention inside the body.

For example, trace their bodies on a piece of paper. Ask them what they feel is touching the floor. If they can’t feel anything, just tell them to notice that. Then do a movement activity and have them lie on the floor again and notice the differences. In this way you are teaching from-the-body-to the brain. There are examples of more movement games like Personal Bubbles Freeze Dance in the book. (Get Sensational Attention program) Once the children learn to feel the tangible sensations of their bodies, understanding their emotions or thoughts is easier for them. For children, words are the language of the head, and the body is the  language of the heart. WTM lessons teach the head and the heart to develop simultaneously. Then children learn from both their heads and their hearts.