Our Vision
To create a world where babies and adults of all ages get the touch, support and movement they need to thrive.
Our Mission
To nurture resilience, healthy interdependence and connection by educating about touch, handling and movement.
We serve babies of all ages: infants, toddlers, parents, caregivers, adults and elders.
We do this by using principles of Body-Mind Centering to support each person’s developmental process of learning, exploration, change and growth. We offer classes and workshops, training for professional caregivers, and writings about our ideas and work.
Our Values
Our core values are AGENCY, COMFORT, CURIOSITY and MOVEMENT. The principles we teach, facilitate, explore and live from arise from these values. We believe these values can guide us toward becoming more resilient, self-regulating and relational.
Why AGENCY?
We define agency as the ability to make choices, have an impact, take risks and learn from experience.
We shape and are shaped by our environment and interactions. A healthy sense of agency involves participation, connectivity and interdependence.
Through a sense of their own agency, babies and toddlers can fully participate in their emergent sense of self, in relationship to their environment and others.
We cannot empower another person; empowerment comes from within. As caregivers, our role is to respect and nourish a child’s sense of agency and empowerment – while also respecting our own agency.
Why COMFORT and CURIOSITY?
We believe that babies (of all ages) learn best when they’re led by their curiosity. A sense of safety and comfort comes before and supports curiosity. When a baby doesn’t feel safe or comfortable, it’s more difficult for them to be curious.
We as caregivers are the baby’s environment, and we help shape their sense of comfort. By being present and meeting their basic needs for safety and comfort, we encourage their agency and ability to self-regulate.
Why MOVEMENT?
A baby’s earliest experiences of touching and being touched, being moved and learning to move are significant, and play a formative role in their relationship to learning and their sense of agency.
A baby who is supported in exploring their physical movements – touching, reaching, shifting, and pulling – builds a felt, experientially-based support for “grasping” the metaphorical. The ability to change, to make transitions, to adapt, and to shift perspective play out first in movement.
When a baby finds their way to a new skill through their own agency, they can more fully own the skill and build upon it. A child’s process of learning a new skill is not only about getting the skill itself – it’s about learning how to learn. Progressive, experience-based education can begin at birth and support lifelong learning.
Our hope is that babies of all ages can learn to MOVE through the world led by their CURIOSITY, supported by their COMFORT and empowered by a sense of their own AGENCY.
Read more about our values and how they play out in practice.
Read about our principles.
* * *