Understanding Body Awareness: Movement, Breathing, and Expression
Understanding Body Awareness
Body awareness is a gradual and slow process. Personal experiences are transferable. Muscle Independence: The first stage of the learning process corresponds to an exploration of each muscle to isolate the work of a single muscle acting on a particular limb. This involves perceiving each muscle, each segment, each zone independently.
Fluidity: Derive organic movement, control, and feel how natural (organic) movement develops, how energy flows, and its extent. All movement involves prior mastery of the basic muscular function: contraction and relaxation, or contraction-relaxation.
Relaxation Techniques
Relaxation is a technique that leads to voluntary muscle relaxation and psychic rest, leading to immobility, part of the flow of a sequence of movements. There are two types of “loosening”:
- Loosening-relaxation: The contraction disappears instantly, with a quick and complete abandonment of muscle strain. The action is to stop the force of gravity without any resistance.
- Controlled distance: A passive mechanism that consciously stops the inertia of active muscle, which controls how the strain is carried out.
Relaxation can be partial or global. Global characteristics include leading the person to realize and experience the weight of their body attracted by the force of gravity, supports, and surfaces in contact with the ground, with more passive muscle involvement.
Body Schema
Each person develops a mental representation of their own body as an organized structure. Tactile, visual, and kinesthetic sensations converge in this representation. Henri Wallon highlights the interaction between the development of body awareness and the psychological development cycle. The notion of one’s body develops and completes the development of personality through all that the child perceives in the environment.
The kinesthetic sense aims to regulate balance and coordination in body movement.
Breathing
Natural and spontaneous breathing is a function that is normally performed without active participation of the will, but can also respond to conscious and voluntary control. Breathing exercises are designed to raise awareness of this natural process, improve and extend respiratory capacity and ventilation, ease of control during movement, and correct anomalies related to that function.
Types of Breath
Abdominal, thoracic, clavicular, and comprehensive.
Relationship Between Movement and Breathing
Coordination of movement and breath responds to three different cases:
- Natural adaptation to the process of respiratory flow without obstructing movement.
- The use of breathing to promote relaxation.
- The use of breath for noise emission during movement.
Organic Movement
In natural movements, muscle contractions gravitate on one or more other muscles, thus producing a succession of work by agonists and synergists while the antagonists contract or relax. This sequence of contraction is what causes the movement. The passage of energy through the different zones helps to understand the flow of organic movement.
Introduction to Body Language
Effective communication involves proper body language. Body language and tone are expressed by function. J. de Ajuriaguerra calls this “tonic dialogue,” a constant dialogue with the people around them, a constant “to receive and give.” What is truly important are the underlying causes of the expression, not the encoded movement.
The Tonic Component
The tonic component is integrated into the expressive field in three ways:
- Social contacts between the degrees of muscle tension and space. Antagonism.
- Social contacts between tone and mental attitudes in static postures.
- Relationship between the degree of muscle tension and mental attitudes in gesture and movement.