What is a Movement "Quest"?
These group Awareness Through Movement® sessions, which we call "quests", are tailored to improve spinal connections throughout the body using small, slow movements. Watch the video below from Future Life Now to see what a quest would look like.
Why are they 'Movement Quests' and not 'Movement Classes'?
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I call them 'Quests' because the more you engage in these explorations with deep curiosity, the more value you will gain from the experience. As a learner in this method, you're an active participant in your own journey toward finding a new way of moving and living that works for you. In these quests, it is vital that you are the protagonist -- I am only here to facilitate your learning.
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Unlike a class where the teacher demonstrates and the student copies, in our Movement Quests, the learner has agency over finding their own uinique way of engaging with the movement puzzle. As the practitioner, I have been educated in 'many ways of doing the same thing'...I utilize my somatic knowledge and awareness to ask questions and direct your curiosity. This facilitates a different type of learning, in which the learner finds that a new option emerges organically after guided exploration.
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In the quests on which you embark, I seek to empower you. In this technique, I hope that you will learn how to find options that will make you an expert on your own self-use, and therefore an expert on your own pain management.
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What is Awareness Through Movement®?
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Awareness Through Movement® quests are individual adventures, conducted in a group. The students are guided by the verbal instructions of a certified teacher to make slow, gentle movements while paying close attention to specific parts of their body and their breathing.
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By paying attention to our bodies and our breath, and noticing how certain parts move more easily than others, what works and what doesn't seem to work, we increase our awareness of our own habits. Once we are aware of our movement and breathing habits, we can decide if they are helping us or causing us tension or pain. If they aren't helping, we can actively choose to use the new ways of moving and breathing we learn in the Awareness Through Movement® Quests.​
Awareness Through Movement® works with the nervous system to bring about change.
For example, is the way I have always walked the reason I have knee pain?
If so, it is time to learn a new way to move.
To make changes to those movement patterns, we need the brain to learn new ways and choose them over the habitual movements that are causing unnecessary tension and/or pain.
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Awareness Through Movement® doesn't require you to be flexible, nor does it involve stretching or holding positions.
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It also doesn't involve any practice to perfect positions. Instead, we explore small, gentle and innovative movements to become aware of habits that may be causing us movement difficulties, inefficiencies, tension, or pain, while also learning new ways of moving.
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There is no need for regular practice of specific moves or intensive training to receive benefits.
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There are no repetitive movements and no physical conditioning is required.
Even if you already feel great and that you are in peak form, you can still benefit from movement quests: you can learn to do what you already do well, more easily, with less effort, so there is energy left over to go even further.
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Weight lifters find the weights seem lighter.
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Tennis players and golfers find their swing more effortless.
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Runners go farther.
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Performing artists feel they can dance or play the night away.
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​Students will often do the quests lying on the floor. But if they have pain and can't lie on the floor, they can do the quest on their bed or in a chair.
The quests often have applications to specific functional movements:
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getting out of a chair,
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sitting down into a chair,
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balancing over one leg more than another,
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getting down to the floor,
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changing from sitting to lying on the floor,
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rolling over from your back to your stomach,
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rolling over from your stomach to your back,
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moving from lying to sitting on the floor,
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getting up from the floor,
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walking, and
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walking up and down stairs.
We all learned to do these activities as very young children. What we may not have learned though was how to make these movements easy, while using minimal effort. But it didn't matter, because we were young and strong and our method worked. Until it doesn't. With injury and/or age, these are often the movements that we start to lose. Once we feel we can't move freely and easily, we begin to limit our activities and our world becomes smaller and we become more fragile.
Kinetic Quest wants to help people of all ages and abilities improve their mobility so they become free to move and breathe easily, effortlessly, without unnecessary tension and pain.
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This is accomplished by offering Awareness Through Movement® quests.
These quests can be attended live, in Vernon, at Knox Presbytarian Church on Alexis Park Drive, with noon-hour classes Monday through Friday, beginning May, 2024... and they are offered every day, at multiple times of day via Zoom, where you can join from your own home.
Interested?
Learn more about our offerings here!
It is the brain that decides how to move our breath or move a leg or arm. As children, our nervous system learned how to move and stored that information in our brains.
Over time, we developed habits in the way we breathe,
the way we walk, the way we dance, the way we climb stairs,
the way we sit, the way we stand, the way we get up from
the floor, etc.
Habits are an essential part of being human. They allow our brains to not think through every single thing we do every day. They help us survive.
However, it is important for us to ask if these habits
are helping us or hurting us.