Rhythmic Movement Training – How it Helps Adults Overcome Long-Standing Challenges

“I’m just wondering if it’s too late.”

I heard those words from the first phone call I had with a client in their mid 20s.
Everything within me shouted, “No!! It’s never too late.”

So much focus is centred on child development, overcoming learning, social, emotional or physical challenges. Rightly so. For children with these challenges grow to be adults with these challenges. Intervention and support during childhood can certainly assist in overcoming and changing the course of life for these adults.

Adults, with challenges that have accompanied them since their childhood, learn to ‘mask’ or to compensate for physical, social, emotional or learning challenges. As humans our body will always seek to protect us and we will always do our best to survive and fit into the world around us. However the very methods we employ to achieve this may just about be our downfall.

What our compensating may look like

Often our masking or our compensating involves some of the following:

  • holding patterns of tension in our body
  • walking in a particular way
  • avoiding escalators
  • avoiding eye contact
  • feeling like we react more than we respond
  • being unable to choose our response to stress
  • avoiding particular situations
  • the inability to assert ourselves
  • being a people pleaser
  • withdrawing from relationships
  • being unable to hear multiple points of view
  • being inflexible in mind, body and emotions
  • feeling exhausted at the end of a day from holding it all together
  • limiting our employment or vocational options so we won’t fail
  • forging on despite nauseating stress and anxiety to do something that seems to come so naturally and effortlessly to those around us

These compensations work just fine until the time comes when they don’t anymore.

When the exhaustion from having to work so hard to keep it all together breaks through.
When the tension becomes chronic pain.
When the reacting reaches a whole new level.
When the slightest trigger sets us off as we are out of resources to mask anymore.

So often we think these things are ‘normal.’ Are you ready to address some of your challenges that have walked with you?

It’s never too late. 

The Implication of Reflexes

So many of our childhood challenges that persist with us, take on a new look, yet have the same basis of unintegrated reflexes.

Sometimes it’s easy to pinpoint the origin.
Maybe we didn’t crawl or roll.
Maybe our birth was difficult.
Maybe we experienced an extended period of sickness as a child.
Maybe our parenting was tricky.
Maybe we experienced a traumatic event.

Sometimes there’s nothing that points specifically to a trigger.

How do I move on?

If our body has, for whatever reason, not been able to integrate the primitive reflex system then our reactions are involuntary. A reflex, by its very nature, is an automatic response. It takes away the choice we desire to have in so many situations.

The ability to choose how we respond to stress, respond in relationships and respond when tired.

Rhythmic Movement Training (RMT) is a method that can be started at any age and stage of development.

For adults who participate in RMT, the feeling of lightness, more ease in life and the release of patterns of tension in the body is noticeable quickly. Building the permanence of this change takes time but the shift can begin immediately.

RMT gives the opportunity to go back and relay the very foundations of the brain, to switch off the involuntary reactions, let go of the unhelpful patterns and begin operating in an integrated way with CHOICE.

Experience the ability to choose your response to stress. Maybe you fly off the handle when stressed, maybe you withdraw from stress. If your response to stress is automatic and feels like it’s the same intensity no matter what the stressful trigger, then RMT offers the opportunity to bring some choice and control back to your life. 

It’s Movement

And for those who feel too overwhelmed by the idea of ‘therapy’ or having to ‘talk’ through life, the good news is you don’t have to, if you don’t want to. RMT is movement, it works with the body. For when the body is organised, our emotions and our mind become organised.

For that client who wondered if it was too late…in 2 weeks they felt the change and in 6 months they discovered that it most certainly wasn’t too late.

They experienced what it felt like to be operating from a stable neurological foundation for the first time in their life. They found changes in their posture, emotional stability and mental capacity. They reimagined their schooling experience if they had had this neurological base in place.

Body first.

Experience the movement.

Switch off the reflexes that are controlling your life today.