In My Own Skin

Written by - Christine V. Bratton, PT MS RCST

The GYROTONIC® Method has been such an important part of my evolution as a body, as a mover, as a thinking body, as an animal body,  as a physical therapist, and as an observer of movement.

I was so happy when Maria asked me to write this blogpost because it gives me a chance to integrate my practice and my thinking in a contemplative way.

I started a conscious movement practice in dance classes as a freshman in college in 1970. I had been a very active kid: running, swimming, cycling, playing neighborhood games, outdoors all day in summer and winter. But I hated gym class and didn’t like the few dance lessons I went to as a little kid (I however LOVED the costumes). In 1970, as soon as I was supplied with a loaner set of tights and leotard, made out of the weird cast-iron nylon they were made out of in those days, I was completely hooked. Wasn’t too good at it, but my teacher, an astonishing 6 foot tall (as I am) Black woman named Mary Easter, encouraged me to stand tall and go for it—no slumping allowed in her class.  I was simply hooked and organized my life around getting to whatever classes I could find for the next ten years.

Inevitably, playing catch up, trying to make things look a certain way, trying to figure it out in my body, over training, I ended up with a back injury (which may have been influenced by going over the handlebars on my bike around the same time). The back pain brought me low and forced me to go inside in a way I had not done before. I struggled through my late 20s searching and searching for a way out of the pain, but it was elusive. As soon as my low back felt a little better, my neck would start to hurt. I found a hatha yoga class in 1979 (I could only find two yoga classes in Manhattan in those days!), which really helped me on my off days (I discovered my back needed a day off between ballet classes). Then in 1980 I found Jean-Paul Mustone’s “Special Exercise for Dancers” class at Finis Jhung’s Ballet studio on the Upper West Side. All of a sudden things clicked for me: breathing, maintaining the normal curves in my spine, noticing the hyperactivity of my hip flexors. It felt like magic to have some control over the way I felt.

I carried on with exercise and movement, dance classes and also being a ballet fan: I had moved to NYC in the late 1970s so that I could go see NYCB while Balanchine was still alive and working; and continued with my obsession with ballet from the outside, toying with the idea of becoming a dance writer. After a few years of journaling about all of the performances that I saw, I realized that writing about it didn’t really do it for me, and I began casting about for another way to earn a living, spending as much time as possible in my life moving, being with movers, watching movement, watching dance and analyzing how things worked and felt (and not having to wear uncomfortable office clothes). When I read an article about Marika Molnar, the PT Balanchine had chosen to be the first at NYCB, a light bulb went off in my head and I decided at that moment to become a PT and go and work for Marika. I knew nothing about the field, but I was not going to be deterred and slowly worked my way through all of the prerequisites, physics problems, chemistry labs, hospital volunteering and psychology courses, entering PT school in the fall of 1991. I did my training, did my clinical placements in a small community hospital, a big teaching hospital and with Marika at Westside Dance PT.

I tried to practice as a PT in line with PT school dogma, but after a few years, I found that what was most powerful was what I had learned from Jean-Paul in those “special exercise” classes: going inside one’s own body and learning how to move differently, from a different place and with a different, more embodied awareness,. That was the key to feeling better, feeling less anxious, being able to move forward. As I progressed, I learned that the label trainer, Pilates instructor, PT,  Alexander teacher, Feldenkrais practitioner, chiropractor, osteopath, acupuncturist didn’t matter as much as what the person was both teaching and embodying in their own practice. I started to practice with people who were on the same kind of path of embodiment that I was. I incorporated what I learned from them into my own practice as a PT and eventually as a biodynamic craniosacral therapist (BCST). I started to notice that the feeling of being settled in my own body and moving from that place reflected a kind of integration, letting the left brain calm down a bit and be less bossy, allowing the animal body to express the pathway it desired, and being able to observe and be within it at the same time. I continued to work with different teachers and practitioners, carefully selected: as I got closer to the deepest places inside there was often some fear involved or a sense of blankness that was also scary. I chose practitioners based on their ability to see when I was coping or struggling with that deep internal place and to give me time and space to move through  that territory. I started to realize that healing involves being able to revisit these scary, empty or painful places with a compassionate teacher and start to take away some of the protective layers and patterns as a  deeper awareness and ability start to grow.

As part of my BCST training, I studied anatomy with Jaap van der Waals, an amazing Dutch MD/PhD, who taught anatomy in medical schools for 40 years and eventually broke through to an understanding of anatomy as process rather than structure: an easy sentence to say and an enormously crazy concept for a PT trained in the western medical tradition to start to understand. I was well on my way as a student of the GYROTONIC® Method at that point, having studied with wonderful teachers who really feel like colleagues at the same time, when the next lightbulb went off—everything that I had learned about anatomy was such a gross oversimplification that it was almost untrue! The cardinal planes were simply a convenient way to describe anatomy and movement, but they could not define it. Jaap van der Waals teaches that all anatomy is developmental, happens in spirals and is in constant motion. If we stop it to analyze it, if we get hung up on position, then we lose this sense of dynamism. I realized then that what Gyrotonic was giving me was a way to experience movement as it truly evolves, in spirals, around midlines, grounded through contact with gravity and clarified by the addition of resistance. Jaap’s anatomy instruction also gave me a deeper sense of the integration of textures and tissues in our human anatomy. Over and over he would say, “Bones are not levers! The heart is not a pump!” In practicing Gyrotonic, with the right instructor, who can witness where you are in your own relationship with your body, you start to be able to feel the bones suspended in the fascia, the muscles wrapping about the limbs and onto the torso, the nervous and vascular systems present at macro and micro levels. Your inner awareness (interoception) of your body and your observation of your body meld into an integrated whole. This sense of integration evolves through new challenges (physical and emotional), injuries, aging, new awareness, new strengths and incorporation of new skills, and it always has its ups and downs.

But that has been the message for me: being in your body is a continuing process that does not stop. The GYROTONIC® Method taught well and specifically, helps the student feel and own that sense of process and the continual integration of healing of which our bodies are capable in everyday life as well as at peak physical demands.

Christine V. Bratton, PT MS RCST