Moving meditations: embodying Bartenieff Fundamentals through sensorial awareness of breath, bones, and gravity

This article shares a somatic approach to the practice of meditation reflecting on experiences of facilitating meditation classes for others as well as my own personal practice. I share my application of Bartenieff Fundamentals as a framework for meditation, outlining the language of the body it offers for imagery-based guided meditation – a process of embodied fundamentals. Through exploring the relationship between my practice of Bartenieff Fundamentals and a somatic approach to being in the world, I question how Bartenieff’s Principle of Breath Support may guide a practice of meditation and how in this process of embodiment we might shade, tone and strengthen meditation as a process of somatic engagement, revealing a dialogic relationship between form and fluidity, somatic moving and spiritual connectivity. The use of the voice, heightened sensorial awareness through imagery of breath, bones and gravity are considered through this practice of guided meditations: an embodying of body–space–environment as a transactional space of self-care. Presented through different modalities of formal text, notes from practice, movement scores and images, I invite readers to engage with this work through reading, moving and meditating.

© Helen Kindred, 2022. The definitive, peer reviewed and edited version of this article is published in Dance, Movement & Spiritualities, Volume 8, Numbers 1-2, 1 December 2021, pp. 57-72(16) DOI: https://doi.org/10.1386/dmas_00026_1