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Somatic Conditioning™ as Physical Education

When you were a baby, nobody needed to teach you how to lift up your head, nobody needed to teach you how to start crawling and nobody needed to teach you how to start walking or even running.

Children automatically develop these magnificent and complex movement patterns. Unfortunately, some of that freedom for development is taken away by our ‘stressful society’ the moment children enter our educational system. Having to sit for hours and hours while having to behave according to certain protocols is suddenly more important then jumping over a creek. While enjoying their PhysEd class, they will 'run', 'play soccer or ball', or will be involved in other 'athletic activities.' Do these programs actually teach our children any 'specific fundamental movement patterns' ?

The ones that make us stand straight with awareness towards others. It is the task of the PE-teachers to strengthen and condition those organic movement patterns that are deeply rooted into everyone’s system so our children will all know how to move appropriately. For the rest of their lives !

The better we move, the better we function. Our spinal cord is divided into neurons that make us move and neurons that give us the ability to sense (touch, pressure, heat & cold and sensing as in somatic awareness from the inside out). Travelling up along the spinal cord, these neurons arrive in the brainstem and diverge from there to almost every other portion of the brain (and vice versa). Without movement we can not live and without sensing we cannot live ! Movement and Sensation are connected in a ‘Sensory Motor Feedback Loop’ with your brain.

So we better get good at it ! When teaching children motor skills (as in Physical Education), how important would it be to return to the fundamentals of human movement before throwing or kicking a ball ? For instance having the ability to move your shoulderblade freely in all directions while maintaining a balancing posture and while maintaining eyecontact with your hand and while maintaining an absorbing bounce through the knees all at the same time. How important will it be to teach our children how to control and reverse the ‘Stress Response’ that we are all exposed to over and over again ?