Introducing the world of Body Learning

I’ve always been quite a heady person. I like to think, to see with my mind. It’s a quality from which I get a lot of fulfillment. Though I noticed something important: the mind is an endless place. For every answer, there’s a new question; for every conclusion, another layer of “what if.” It can easily become an endless loop towards an even louder mind. Especially in a healing process, this can be challenging.

This is where body learning comes in, and what the new Amsterdam Academy for Body Learning stands for: bringing back the human quality of perceiving the world through our bodies. Enabling people to make the shift from paying attention only to the mind, to having attention in the body and the outside world. When we learn to perceive reality through our body, we naturally have all the resources available to be the alive, powerful and creative force we were born to be.

The physicality of a thought

A personal example about body learning: letting go of my jaw was not just letting go of my jaw. Because, in truth, an entire world of thoughts, conclusions, and beliefs was sitting in that tension and rigidity. I tense up because I don’t want to fail, because I don’t want to feel the pain of losing, because I’m afraid of doing it wrong.

Learning to release that tension opened the door to letting go of conclusions like “I’m not good enough”. The discovery was clear: thoughts are physical. When we work with the body, we are inevitably working with our thoughts; mind and body are both part of the same organism.

The Gap Between Mind and Body

Why, then, do we so often feel as if our mind and body are separated? Why do we keep hearing phrases like: “Get out of your head, and into your body.”

Well, your mind is designed to learn from the past and predict the future. But your body is always here—present in reality. Since we’re no longer running away from tigers, the mind has more time than ever to think about stuff. We’ve become so busy with having a mind, that we’ve forgotten how to be a body. We’ve forgotten what it means to experience the world through body attention, rather than only through the mind’s interpretation of what we see.

Inner World and Outer World

So, when we learn to shift our attention from the mind to the body, we simultaneously shift our attention from the inner world—questions, interpretations, conclusions and personal historic experiences—to the outer world, where life actually happens.

The outer world is where you connect, where you create, where your dreams are manifested into reality. It’s also where you face your struggles and your fears. It’s real. And we are designed to survive and thrive in reality—not in endless cycles of our mind’s interpretation of it. Luckily we have this magical substance called attention and our ability to direct it. This is the glue that closes the gap. And it’s a skill that can be learned.

About Body Learning

Body Learning is the ability to learn about oneself through the body—say: somatically. It’s the acknowledgment that we are bodies, rather than minds who happen to possess a body. Everything we go through in life leaves its trace in the body—our thoughts, emotions, habits. It’s all physical; it’s all somatic.

Where traditional therapy excels at creating a mental map of where you are now, body learning takes it further. By discovering patterns that are driving you away from your body and into your mind, you gain the awareness and power to change and stop them—to let go of tension, to stop behaviors that no longer serve us and to heal chronic symptoms that are related to stress and fear, creating a new and more fulfilling way of being.

Amsterdam Academy for Body Learning

At the Amsterdam Academy for Body Learning, we train people to become practitioners in this wonderful world of body learning. We work with methods that make it real. One example is the Grinberg Method®, a system that has been around since the 1980s. This unique bodywork approach, consisting of ancient ways, contemporary insights and the powerful Four-Elements Theory, combines guided attention, touch, breath, and movement to help people recognize how they create and maintain patterns of limitation.

If you’ve ever felt the limits of purely mental approaches, or if you’re curious about how deep and transformative it can be to truly listen to your body, I invite you to explore with us. At the Amsterdam Academy for Body Learning, “body learning” is not just a concept—it’s a lived practice, a doorway into experiencing reality, and a skill you can share with others.

Would you like to learn more?

Follow us on Instagram: @academyforbodylearning, @leanderruivenkamp
Or go to: www.academyforbodylearning.com
Next Online presentation for becoming a certified practitioner: 16 September, 19:30
Find us on Hipsy to see future events and presentations.