Watching people's body language as they interact with others can give us a great deal of information about human nature. We say far more than we realize with our bodies and facial expressions as the words we speak only account for 2% of a spoken communication. There are some signals which immediately send messages to the receiver. When you are chatting to someone and you have your arms crossed you are either protecting yourself because you feel low or vulnerable or blocking the person because you don’t want them in your personal space. This may be a subconscious signal but realistically, it is not easy to hug someone who has their arms crossed, t would be uncomfortable for both of you but most importantly inappropriate. Why? Because you are stating your boundaries clearly with this physical gesture and you are clearly excluding that person from your personal space even if you are unaware of what you are doing.

When I was teaching in the UK, I found it very revealing watching a group of 6 year olds playing school in the playground. One little girl from my class was playing at being the teacher. I recognised a mirror image of myself immediately. She stood just as I did with her hands on her hips and tapping her toes on the ground, a signal I used at the time to encourage the students to organize themselves a little faster without having to raise my voice. She was not aware that she was being me but she was very aware of the meaning of the gestures and her friends recognised it too and hurried along with the task in their playtime school. The children had picked up the information very quickly and through unconscious imitation and revisiting through play they made excellent educational use of it. Through having fun in their playtime school, and there was certainly lots of fun, their learning and recognition of the gestures went even deeper as girly giggles and laughter produce anti-stress hormones which enable the deeper learning mechanisms. We do actually learn best when we are enjoying ourselves.

The observations I made that day stayed clearly in my mind over the years, as they made me more fully aware of how influenced children are by the things we do. Children learn from us through imitation, whether we are the parents, teachers or significant others in their lives. They then pass on what they have learnt from us to others who playfully choose to copy and imitate or not. They become encoded signals, instantly recognizable. Information can be quickly passed on and on in this way with minor variations or individual changes but still the basic gesture or movement retains the meaning. Organic learning of this kind is still the deepest and most significant learning in our early years.

Negative information can also be passed on in this way which can have repercussions in our later years. If a child has a number of older family members who suffer form back pain they will assume that this is normal and will not only expect it but as they are developing their movement patterns form their parents and family members they will introduce limited and limiting movement into their lives. If a parent is always worrying about their weight their child will grow up with this being the norm and they will often follow the pattern. If a teacher shouts continuously at their students in the classroom the student learns that this is how you make yourself heard.

As a movement specialist I often have clients come along to me and tell me about a pain, ache or difficulty they are having as they walk, reach, twist or turn. When they tell me that a parent had the same problem and that they had inherited it, I can be pretty sure that the problem lies in the patterning that has taken place early on in their life experience. Our first experience of movement is watching our parents, they are our most significant role models Even before a child begins to take those first steps, it has been observing for months how people move. If a child is given the time to learn to walk at its own pace, it has a very beneficial effect on all their future learning experiences. This observation period is very important, for the more people the child sees move, the more fully developed and integrated their walking pattern will be. Learning to walk is immensely complicated. No engineer has yet been able to fully replicate the complexity of what is essentially a moving bridge, as we put one foot in front of the other.

Next time you sit in a restaurant or café just watch the immense diversity in peoples ways of walking. Ask yourself which patterns do you find easy to watch and which make you feel uncomfortable. Can you identify how you walk? What is it about your way of walking that enables people to say ‘Hi, I saw you walking down the High Street. You were too far away to call you, but I just knew it was you”.

If you can handle it, ask a friend to watch you walk and then “do” your walk. Remember much of our movement depends on the patterning we have learnt. Negative patterning can lead to problems and difficulties, whereas positive patterning leads to graceful easy movement. Many people need hip replacements simply because they have stuck to the same old pattern for many years instead of experimenting in finding their own way of walking. Their pattern may be based on a parent’s walk that worked for their parent because they had a problem with their knee or back or toe or even based on their parents' parents' pattern which may have come from some from an injury.

We spend hours at desks, working on computer, watching TV and sitting in cars. Our bodies and brains ensure that if we don’t use it we loose it. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to reclaim your movement potential so you can be a positive role model for your child. Discover what you can do, enjoy doing and do more of it. Don’t focus only on isolated exercises but enjoy whole body movement which will help you to rediscover integrated movement patterns which are easy and comfortable. Bring enjoyment and fun into your life, dance, swim, even buy some roller blades and you will begin to reclaim your movement potential once more.

Barbara Jones, therapist, trainer and educational researcher has created the TransformAction Movement Programme to enable you to reclaim your full movement potential.

TranformAction is based on a series of three movement workshops:

Arrival, Nurture and Security

visted three times on three levels:

Access, Confidence and Mastery

Find out more on Barbara’s website www.barbarajonestherapies.com and sister wesite www.thesomacentre.com