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ABOUT FORMATIVE EMBODIMENT

Formative Embodiment (FE) is a novel approach to key yet under appreciated elements of successful therapy.  

FE has three main pillars in its approach. The specific way FE integrates and uses these pillars is what gives it its uniqueness and effectiveness.

1. Formative Process – Starting with conception, the human organism develops a form, going through many stages from the first cell to a fully formed body. This format
   ive process continues actively one’s whole lifetime:  genetic coding, social and familial influences, as well as personal choices, all combine to provide us with the forms, behaviours and capabilities we need to function and to manage our lives. The development of effective forms to survive and thrive is a priority for the organism. This formative impulse is at the heart of FE.
2. Somatic orientation – There is no real understanding of our experience without direct listening to the body. FE evokes untapped bodily resources, organized around homeostasis, to support healing and general competence in life. It is in great part based on research in neuroscience and on biological self-regulating strategies.
3. Energetic foundation – The human being is powered by an energy circuitry.  The circuitry has been mapped in a number of ancient traditions, such as yoga and Tibetan and Chinese Medicine, and has its modern version in quantum science.  Energy is the body’s currency, and vitality its great joy.  FE explores and works with interferences and blockages to our vitality and core energy.

Some of the specific components in this process include:

• A simple yet operative understanding of how brain and body work together, creating our foundational, orienting memories and internal body maps.  They also optimise self-regulation and self-management (which include boundary-making and the containing of arousal, activation and overwhelm.)
• An acknowledgement of the centrality of action and behaviour in structuring our lives, taking into consideration our biology and genetic inheritance, our survival needs, our social and cultural contexts, and our personal goals, desires and dreams.
• The continued conscious participation in building skills, forms and behaviours to competently and satisfactorily handle the many critical life situations we find ourselves in – work, relationships, family, health-related.  We are always organizing, sustaining, modulating, or disorganizing an act or a role in life – what steps do we take in each of these essential tasks and transitions.
• An effective language – both verbal and somatic – that helps us to access our deeper life processes, to recognize and orient to them, to build on them, and to modify them as we create a life narrative that fits us ever more satisfyingly.
• In general, finding the path from thought, feeling, sensation and emotion to effective and satisfying action, essentially coherent embodiment.

All of the above is built upon a conceptual and experiential synthesis of powerful somatic and formative models of human process – the Formative Psychology of Stanley Keleman, Cranial Biodynamics, Polarity Therapy, and Pre and Perinatal Therapies and Focusing, among others.

This material can be integrated into various kinds of practices, including somatically oriented practices such as SE, manually oriented practices such as Cranial approaches or Polarity Therapy, and classic psychotherapeutic practices with an interest in somatic and formative principles.

 Introductory Weekend Formative Embodiment Course

Read more about Formative Embodiment in Jim Feil’s latest article in the Craniosacral Therapy Association’s January 2020 Fulcrum Journal article. You can read the PDF version here.

Formative

Embodiment

January 2020 CSTA Journal Article by

Jim Feil

Click here to read full Article