Liberated Being (health: holistic fitness and movement, alternative medicine)

Today I’m talking with Amy Matthews. Amy Matthews, has been teaching movement since 1994. She is a Certified Laban Movement Analyst, a Body-Mind Centering® Teacher, an Infant Developmental Movement Educator, and a movement therapist and yoga teacher. Amy is also the co-author of the best-selling book Yoga Anatomy, and together Amy and Leslie teach The Breathing Project's Advanced Studies courses. I will also be moderating a symposium called Beyond Anatomy with Amy at The Breathing Project soon- the first weekend of April. In today’s conversation we’re talking about Laban Movement Analysis and body mind centering, developmental movement work, and what that means for infants- how they can get a solid foundation for personal agency and emotional regulation through movement, and how developmental movement work helps adults as well. We also talk about embodied teaching, how teaching is its own art form and how it can call forth student’s personal agency.


Katy Bowman is a biomechanist and the founder of Nutritious Movement. She is the author of several books including Move Your DNA, Whole Body Barefoot, and her most recent collection of essays, Movement Matters. In today’s conversation we’re talking about the ecology of movement. How does your movement affect not just your health but also humans everywhere, even ones you’ve never met, and how does it affect the health of the planet as a whole? We discuss the real impact of our sedentarism and our drive for convenience, and how movement can be a very profound and impactful form of activism.


Ep 62: Beyond Anatomy

I’m talking with Leslie Kaminoff, Amy Matthews, and Peter Blackaby about our upcoming somatic symposium in New York this April called Beyond Anatomy. There is a vast amount of information about the body out there (and in here within the show)- so how do we discern what's applicable and useful and not simply make ourselves crazy with information overload? And what is ""beyond anatomy"" to each of us? For me this is a fantastic way to kick off the whole of season 4 as I am dedicating that season to interviews related to what happens- what happens inside yourself, in your life, in your community- when you dive deeply into the body experientially, rather than simply intellectually. This doesn't mean we're chucking the importance of learning critical things like anatomy- but it does mean there's more to the story. Much, much more!


Ep 61: How Liberated Body Changed Me with Brooke Thomas

Bo Forbes turns the tables and interviews host Brooke Thomas with her own and listener questions. Brooke's personal path with her own body, how learning through the podcast changed the way she sees the body, how she parents based on what she's learned, her current practices (particularly in natural movement and somatic meditation), and what the road ahead looks like are all covered in this closing conversation for season 3.


Ep 60: How Mindful Body Awareness Heals with Cynthia Price

I’m talking with Cynthia Price. Cynthia describes herself as a bodywork researcher, and is an Associate Research Professor at the University of Washington in the Biobehavioral Nursing Department. Her clinical and research expertise is in the development of body awareness, or interoception, to improve health and well-being. She is the creator of an approach towards educating people in body awareness called Mindful Awareness in Body-Oriented Therapy or MABT for short, and is the founder of the Center for Mindful Body Awareness. Her research studies have focused on the use of MABT for multiple health conditions including Substance Dependency, PTSD, chronic pain, and HIV. Interested in the processes involved in learning mindful body awareness, Cynthia studies qualitative aspects and underlying mechanisms of the MABT approach. She is an author of two scales to measure interoceptive awareness: the Scale of Body Connection (SBC) and the Multidimensional Assessment of Interoceptive Awareness (MAIA). Committed to increasing health care access to underserved populations, Cynthia works with local and international programs to provide and improve complementary and integrative health care through her research, teaching, and service. Cynthia’s work is essentially getting at the heart of what I’m most excited about in approaches towards the body. Cynthia and I talk about what MABT’s components are and how it helps people with a diverse range of challenges in clinical settings, how and why she came to do this work, and, more broadly, why we disembody, how individual that is, and what we gain when we cultivate a relationship with our bodies.


Ep 59: The Architecture of Living Tissue with Jean-Claude Guimberteau

Today I’m talking with Dr. Jean-Claude Guimberteau. Dr Guimberteau practiced for many years as a hand surgeon specializing in microsurgical replantation and transplantation. He is the co-founder and former scientific director of The Aquitany Hand Institute, and was the director of research at the French Society of Plastic Reconstructive and Aesthetic Surgery. Many of you know him best for his groundbreaking work exploring and defining the movement of tissues beneath the skin using an intraoperative endoscopic camera to record living tissues, and to develop concepts related to the new paradigm of biological structure in human beings. You can view some of those videos on YouTube, and the DVD and illustrated book, The Architecture of Human Living Fascia, explores the subject very deeply. In our conversation today we talk about how he transitioned out of performing surgery and into this discovery of form. We talk about the multimicrovacuolar collagenous absorbing system, or MVCAS for short, and what it has to do with form, how we are volumes, that the traditional anatomical view point of movment happening in 3 planes is incorrect, how each movement is unique, and that structurally we are an apparent, yet intelligent, chaos.


Ep 58: Parkour with Julie Angel

Julie Angel received her doctorate researching Parkour, and she has a new book out, Breaking the Jump, which chronicles the birth of this movement. The book, and our conversation, wind up tackling the larger issues that have emerged out of Parkour- like how the origin and effects of this movement is about something so much bigger than athletics or physical training; Really how it was and is a way to evolve as a human. We also get into our cultural biases to, on the one hand, abuse ourselves with physical training, and on the other hand be so obsessively careful and terrified of movement or of leaning into the edges of one’s capabilities that we wind up without much middle ground. We also discuss Julie’s personal journey from a sedentary academic to someone who also does Parkour and how that has changed her and how she sees the world.


Ep 57: Your Body Is Your Soul with Jaap van der Wal

Jaap van der Wal is a phenomenological embryologist who is looking for the soul via the embryo and teaches about this all over the world through his Embryo in Motion project. In our conversation today we talked about the dualistic time we are living in and how we make the brain and/or the genes the most important “parts” of the body- how we conceptually consider the body a machine that comes in parts, and the way we separate the soul from the body. Jaap discusses how the embryo challenges the notion that we are our brains, that genes do not cause what happens in a body, that motion is primary and form is secondary- or that we are always a present tense alive process that is performing, and hence creating, the body , what fascia has to do with all of this, and that the body does not have a soul, it IS a soul.


Ep 56: Embodied Cognition and Its Effect on Health with Cathy Kerr

Cathy Kerr is the director of the Mind In Body Lab at Brown University. Her research focuses on whether brain rhythms underlying body awareness and movement are actively modulated by mindfulness and movement practices such as Tai Chi and Qigong. Her hope is that understanding how these therapies work will have a positive impact on conditions like aging and chronic pain or functional disorders where these approaches have shown the clearest therapeutic benefit.

She joined me today to talk about the focus of her research broadly, but also to discuss a specific research study that is in progress which is looking at the effects of qigong on distressed female cancer survivors, and tells us a great deal about qigong’s effect on inflammation.


Ep 55: A New Paradigm of Anatomy with John Sharkey

In this episode I am talking with John Sharkey who is a Clinical Anatomist, Exercise Physiologist, and European Neuromuscular Therapist. He has developed the worlds only Masters Degree in Neuromuscular Therapy which is Accredited by the University of Chester, he is on the editorial board for the Journal of Bodywork and Movement Therapies, the International Journal of Osteopathy, and the International Journal of Therapeutic Massage and Bodywork.. He is also a member of the Olympic Councils medical Team and a founding member of the B.I.G, otherwise known as the Biotensegrity Interest Group). He has also authored several books including the 3rd edition of The Concise Book of Muscles which we talk about in the interview.

John and I are talking here in great depth about the old paradigm of anatomy and biomechanics and what the new paradigm holds. This is critical stuff here. We are on the brink of a new understanding of the living human body and it’s time to look at the old models, look at where they come from, and to look at why they are outdated. So if you’re interested in living tissue vs. cadavers, biotensegrity vs. biomechanics, continuity of form vs. origin insertion, and how individual human anatomy is and what that changes about our often dogmatic approaches to the body this episode is for you.