Last week, I went to a meeting at my son’s high school to re-visit the school’s mission statement for the athletic program. The principal had us go around and circle the phrases and words that we wished to keep. One of these phrases referred to making athletics an “enjoyable and rewarding” experience.
Interestingly enough, “enjoyable” turned out to be a hotly contested word. Many of the parents and coaches present seem to feel that the word was unnecessary (“if you have a rewarding

On Fridays, I have a regular 3:30 appointment with Luis. This is a great way to end my work week, because the only thing eleven year-old Luis loves more than music is laughter. We didn’t always know that – when Luis showed up at The Lydian Center for Innovative Medicine, he was scared, angry, uncooperative, constantly clinging to his mother, and so unstable structurally that couldn't even really sit up. But a couple of my colleagues did their magic, and by the time they sent Luis to me for

I’ve just returned from visiting my parents. They still live in the house I grew up in, and every time I visit them, I re-enter the country of my childhood. The old neighborhood has changed some in these fifty years – many of the little bungalows have pushed up second stories, the wide canopies of elm trees had to be cut down, and the empty lots where we played hide-and-seek have been built up. But the streets still form the ancestral map, running the exact same directions toward the exact

A twenty year-old college student came to see me a couple of weeks ago. She said, “I think I might have Attention Deficit Disorder.”

“Why?” I say.

“I’ll be sitting in class and I keep looking at my cell phone to see the time.  Sometimes it’s three minutes.  Sometimes it’s one minute.”

I asked her to draw a picture of her daily activities, so we could see what priorities emerged. As she was working, she stopped to pull her cell phone out of her bag. “It’s my brother,” she reported,

I don’t watch the news.  And when I listen to it on NPR, it’s usually in five-minute increments. The older I get, the less tolerance I have for being bombarded by pain from every corner of the globe.

Some years ago, I had a conversation with an older woman who grew up in the rural south. She heard her first radio broadcast at the age of sixteen. “The announcer related that there had been a murder,” she said, “and then, in the exact same tone of voice, went on to say that today, the weather

Movies and novels used to be my bread and butter . . . but not in the last ten years. I think about the characters, and I spend enough time thinking about clients, friends, and family without adding a host of fictional people to the list.  And, as I wrote in my last entry, No News Is . . . , I can find sheer amount of suffering in any given half hour of the news to be overwhelming.
But among the things I do like to watch, at times, is a BBC series called The Vicar of Dibley, which aired

I know that I’m writing this blog for the EARLY Childhood Movement and Music Association, but ten or fifteen years after that toddler is sitting on your lap singing “The Itsy Bitsy Spider,” he may be holding his first rock band rehearsal in your basement.  Here’s my report, live, on-location:

Last week, my son’s homeroom teacher asked him to get a few kids together to play at a creative writing event he was hosting at the school. First task:  find a name for the band.

These days, you

If “Slap-Clap” is my favorite kind of body percussion, my favorite song to do it with is “Jambo.” This Ella Jenkins classic has been my basic opening song for thirty years. Ella is a heroine of mine – someone who has been spreading authentic, multi-cultural, easy-to-sing-and-play children’s music all over globe for longer than I have been alive.  And at 86, she is still performing and teaching!

“Jambo” means “hello” in Swahili, and “Sana” means something like “together.” That’s it – those

My “hands-down” favorite type of body percussion is “Slap-Clap.”  This simple alternation between slapping thighs and clapping hands is pure genius.

Clapping, by itself, can get tiring, both for the body and for the ear.  You have to hold your arms up to do it, at roughly the same level, and we don’t have the same kind of muscle control for lateral movement as we do up-and-down.  And, for the listening ear, a series of claps can get motoric. It’s possible to lose the sense of the rhythm in

It is natural to want our children to participate in the things that give us pleasure! But "helping" children to perform actions for which they are not developmentally ready may not be the best way to teach them these things. In Waving Bye-Bye, my most recent blog entry, we explored what happens when a child’s arm is waved for him. http://www.ecmma.org/blog/movement_matters/waving_bye_bye   After “Bye Bye," the next most common reason for an adult to manipulate a child’s limbs is probably

How many times have you seen a mother scoop up her baby to leave a gathering, brightly call, “Bye bye!” – and wave her child’s arm? Children generally are very stoic about this procedure – but what are they learning?

Imagine the feeling – you are suddenly moved from the floor to adult eye-level. While you are taking in the people and scenery from this new perspective, you your arm gets waved back and forth. Does this movement have anything to do with you?

Or better yet, have a friend wave

In most cultures throughout history, all the people sang and danced and played games.  There might be designated “experts” – the village dance bands, the traveling bards, the Olympic athletes, the court composers – but music and movement were activities that engaged everyone, for recreation and community, for self-expression and healing and for play.
In many modern cultures – especially here in North America – this is no longer true. Many children are now being raised and educated by adults

On attending The Play Is The Thing: The Serious Work of Play, a conference sponsored by The New England Consortium of Artist-Educators and Professionals, Sept 23, 2010 in Brattleboro, VT. For Part I, see the previous post.

Touch

A plain white ball lies in juggler Michael Moschen’s open palm.  It does not move.

My sister was diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor, he says.  I did not want to close my hand.  So I did this for a long time.  And suddenly – this happened.

The ball has

The Play is The Thing:  The Serious Work of Play

I just came back from a conference on play, sponsored by NECAP (New England Consortium of Artist-Educators and Professionals).  It was a beautiful fall day in Brattleboro, VT.  Lots of interesting people, inspiring workshops, great food.  I had fun.

But having fun was not a foregone conclusion when my day began.  Driving, I debated about whether to focus my attention on the on the first or second half of the conference title.

I was

In her new book, Playing in the Unified Field,  noted researcher Carla Hannaford talks about coherence.  Coherence is a term that scientists use to describe the stabilization of wave forms.  A regular light bulb creates an "incoherent" series of waves that move in no discernable pattern.  But when the beams are focused into a "coherent" pattern, the result is a laser.

Researchers have extended the term "coherence" to the wave forms emitted by the heart. Coherence is correlated with

Welcome to Movement Matters!   We can talk about anything we like in this blog, because there is nothing that is not movement.  Very little of the universe is solid, and none of it stands still.   Scientists are now telling us that the physical world - tables, chairs, apples, oranges, our own bodies, even our planet Earth – is just a series of wave forms that move slowly enough for us to sense them.

In this blog, we'll explore different kinds of movements, and the ways that they affect our