Laban Movement Analysis: Caution - May Do Exactly What It's Supposed To Do

While there were a lot of things that took place over the course of the past year of the certification process in Laban Movement Analysis, I have to say that most of it has been sucked back into the recesses of my mind and body only to resurface quite frankly when it's good and ready. I feel like I haven't had a generative innovative interesting idea about the system since I left Utah this past summer. But one thing I am certain of is that the system will be an integral part of the rest of my life.

A couple of major discoveries and experiences that came out of the work for me were of both a personal and a professional nature. I went into this program hoping to get some further clarity and focus on where the next part of my life would lead me. I was in a major transition moving out of the hustle and bustle of New York City and into a slower more personally meaningful life reconnecting to the things that are really important to me (i.e. family, husband, baby, stable career.)

I found the program required me to return to the old saying, "Be careful what you ask for. You just might get it." One of the many experiences that occurred I'm still processing. It concerns my experience learning to soften the area of my chest and ribcage. Sounds pretty simple right? I mean I have some tension and a holding pattern where I don't move my upper chest very much. So I change it, do the re-patterning work to gain more access to softening and malleability in my chest. But what was so profound for me was the connection to my emotional state, my values, and my psyche. Some might say . . . "Okay wait. What is she talking about? How did we get here? I thought we were just talking about some minor physical adjustments." Gaining access to more movement in my chest meant more for me and did more for me than just giving me more access to mobility. My emotional state shifted. Let me explain.

I grew up with my mother ushering me off to every possible class and event she felt a "cultured," well-preened young lady would need to have. By the age of two years old I had won my first beauty pageant. I continued on the beauty pageant circuit while also taking ballet and other dance classes, modeling, you get the drift. Now in understanding the verticality of the torso that so much of the modeling, ballet, and pageants require I realized I still had a lot of values in and around the idea of maintaining a vertical, presentational, held torso. For me I realized this torso represented control, grace, poise, intelligence, and a general holding in of emotions. It was important to me to present myself less as a passionate feeling being and more important to present myself as a poised, graceful, intelligent woman who had been exposed to enough in life to know how to behave in an appropriate manner in public.

I know. That's a lot. But it wasn't until I began to soften my chest that I really felt what releasing that tension meant for me. Softening in my chest felt for me like I was being lazy and apathetic. I felt like I was sinking down into my emotions and not covering up all the stuff I sensor when navigating social situations. I didn't feel long, lean, and graceful. I felt like a sloppy water bag of emotions. In this process I had difficulty getting motivated to accomplish the daily administrative business of the day. All I could do was sit around slouching into my feelings that I normally just push to the side so that I can focus on getting my work done.

It wasn't really until I attempted to explain the experience to others that I really realized the value of the work. I would explain to people how so much of our identity and how we think of ourselves in the world is expressed in how we carry ourselves through the world. If you could think about a politician that would begin to slouch, or maybe a military person who decides to move in a very floaty Indirect way that mimicked daydreaming these would be huge shifts to how the person carried themselves in the world. So much of how we think of ourselves is represented in how we move our bodies, how we walk, how we sit, etc. It's important to note that even some slight adjustments to how we move our bodies have the potential to open up difficult or even invigorating discoveries about why we move the way we do in the first place. Laban Movement Analysis is a powerful way in which to get to know more about who we are and why we are the way we are, both in terms of our physical way of moving through the world and the way we think of ourselves in the world.