Wellness Calendar: Friday 15 August

Movement
Lydia A. Gerhardt claimed in her book Moving and Knowing (1973) that ‘body movement is the foundation of thought’ since it merges our senses, our imagination and our thinking together.
How much attention do you pay to the way your body moves and how might you benefit from keeping your movements fresh and vibrant?
Here are some things we can do with our bodies: kicking, catching, hitting, throwing. Leaping, jumping, hopping. Hand-standing, rolling, rocking, swinging. sliding, balancing, running, crawling, stepping. How many of them are you able and willing to do?
When we think about movement, we might be thinking of the shape of our body, its design, the actions it can perform, the direction it can travel, the extensions it can make, the space it can occupy. We can also consider our moving body in relation to other bodies or objects, moving, or otherwise; or one part of our moving body in relation to another part. We might wish to see moments when our movement/body is symmetrical and when it is asymmetrical; when it’s controlled and when it’s free-form; when it’s slow/fast, straight/wavy, quick/slow; how far we can extend ourselves, or how we can circle into a ball; going forward, backwards, sideways, up and down; how high/low we can go; how we manoeuvre our way around our environment.
How many of these elements to movements might you incorporate into your structured and unstructured time? How might you use movement to communicate with yourself and the outside world?