Movement is integral in achieving physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual strength. When young children engage in movement activities, they get to build their emotional capabilities like decision-making. They also improve memory, perception, language, and other social-development skills.
People born without a disability may fail to appreciate the power of movement. Since childhood, they were quite at home with movement. However, for those with a disability, uncovering the power of movement is a journey fraught with challenges.
The What is Movement Program
Courtenay Turner started the ‘What is Movement’ program to inspire people to connect with their bodies and movement styles that resonate with them. The show interviews athletes, movement athletes, performance athletes, and athletes with disabilities who have leveraged the power of movement to build physical and mental resilience.
Courtenay has spent most of her life exploring the human psyche via academic pursuits. Yet she has always turned to movement for healing and self-expression. Her childhood experiences taught her not to see the congenital condition as something that limited her. Instead, she turned to ‘movement’ to explore her body and the potential of physical expression through movement.
She believes that all human beings are designed to move, and how they do are their creative expressions. This is a complex concept captured by the Decartesean duality that is our human experiences. Indeed we are complex creatures with an interconnected mind, body, and spirit. When people see Courtenay combine her public speeches with aerial aerobics, they see that complexity and how she can harness it to overcome her condition.
How Movement Helped Courtenay Heal In All Areas Of Life
Courtenay was born with congenital rubella. Her mother had German measles during the first trimester of pregnancy. At the time, doctors didn’t have advanced knowledge on how to deal with the condition, and they left some debree in her body. This affected Courtenay, and she developed several afflictions that include but are not limited to unilateral blindness, hypotonia affecting the limbs, heart complications, severe bilateral hearing impairment, stunted growth, and asymmetrical bone development.
Doctors told her parents that the best they could do for her was to take her to an institution where she would receive care. Courtenay is grateful that her family never gave up on her. Instead, they introduced her to movement by engaging her in exercises like putting her in a wet sandbox, building a balance beam that I played with, and other individualized sports.
The movement practices she engaged in from childhood to adulthood helped her overcome her lack of motion parallax depth perception for vestibular sense, hypotonic muscles, and poor coordination. She learned how to inhabit her physical home (my body) through movement.
As an infant, the prognosis she received was so severe that no one expected she could be walking, talking, or exhibiting excellent feats in athleticism. Yet today, she is a testament to the power of movement to heal physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually.
To Conclude
The What Is Movement program has something to teach everyone. Each program has an inspiring tale from overcomers who are a testament to the limitless power of the human spirit.
