The Thinking Body: Discovering Your Posture through Ideokinesis  with Kate Tarlow Morgan

“Movement resides in thinking and not in muscle.”
From Andre Bernard’s Ideokinesis Class, 1982

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Through movement, touch and imagery, Ideokinesis opens the door for somato-emotional change, releasing holding patterns and relieving injury. At its best, Ideokinesis broadens a person’s mental awareness, with clear and simple engagement with the body, through feeling, perceiving and action. 

 The practice has been in development for many decades! Author of The Thinking Body (1937), Mabel Ellsworth Todd called it Natural Posture (1923) work, but she began her studies in 1906. Her student, Barbara Clark called it Mind-Body Integration, but it wasn’t until 1974 that Lulu E. Sweigard, also a student of Todd, used the term Ideokinesis for her book Human Movement Potential. For those of us who attended Andre Bernard’s classes at New York University in the ‘70s and ‘80s, Ideokinesis was the word we used to address what was yet to be identified as a wholly embodied experience. 

There will be time to move, to play, and to learn ‘constructive rest.” No experience necessary. For further information: katetarlowmorgan@gmail.com 

Kate Tarlow Morgan is a dancer, author, and teacher. She is editor of Currents Journal for the Body-Mind Centering Association. As sole archivist of The Rhythms Fundamentals®, based on the study of human and animal natural movement, Kate teaches the Rhythms approach and Body-Mind Centering© in schools and studios. Her book, Circles & Boundaries, was published the same year that she co-edited the Body-Mind Centering Anthology, 2011. Since that time Kate and Sarah Slifer Swift have collaborated, performed, and mused together on the history of dance, the alchemy of anatomy, the wiles of motherhood, and the many airs of cats. 

photo: Ernest Morin

drawing: Eric Franklin