Fluid movement: Continuum Movement brings greater capacity for change

By Megan Bathory-Peeler

“Fluid movement enhances health and well-being and has far-reaching benefits beyond our capacity to name.”
Emilie Conrad, “Life On Land”

As a professional dancer and a body-worker for the past 18 years, my body has always been my playground, my laboratory, my university and my temple. Movement and sensation were my first languages and are still my primary avenues of discovery and communication. The practice of Continuum Movement, developed by visionary pioneer Emilie Conrad, is fluent in both of those essential languages: movement and sensation.
Continuum Movement is a practice that creates a context for people to explore ways of moving more fluidly. Continuum uses audible breath to create sounds and vibrations that stream through the body that, with slow, effortless, wave-like movements, awakens an ancient oceanic connection in the tissues of the body and the patterns of the breath.

People often experience a sense of profound relaxation, expansion, and connection in this place of fluid resonance. 

Continuum is the most accessible and welcoming movement practice that I have encountered. Regardless of one’s physical conditioning or level of physical compromise, Continuum is easy to do and is pain free. The work is usually facilitated in individual sessions or in a group setting. Continuum uses numerous seated and lying positions to change the body’s relationship to gravity and stimulate a variety of movement responses in the tissues. Infinitely adaptable to individual needs, Continuum succeeds where most other exercise or movement modalities cannot.
For example, people living with paralysis, cancer, MS, muscular dystrophy, Parkinson’s, cerebral palsy, trauma, and post-surgical or post-radiation recovery are able to reconnect to themselves and reclaim their own power by engaging with movements that their own bodies generate. Continuum allows people to find the self-fulfillment of becoming their own therapists.
You do not have to be a dancer to practice Continuum. In fact, dancers and athletes are often so well disciplined in the practices of their techniques that letting go of their precise control of movements and allowing themselves to be with the subtle and naturally occurring movements of Continuum can be very challenging. Learning to be with an arising movement without consciously or unconsciously shaping it from vast libraries of habitual movements is difficult for almost everyone when they start practicing Continuum.

All fluids (beyond blood, cerebrospinal and lymph) are influenced by extremely low frequency electromagnetic waves (7.8 to 8.0 cycles per second), that physicists call “Schumann Waves.” These waves exist naturally in the space between the earth’s surface and its ionosphere. In Continuum, the individual engages various frequencies through use of audible breathing that activate a flow of bodily fluids that stimulate improvements in neurological-biochemical energy. Thus, it is the fluid that is the primary healer. Coming into resonance with this fluid intelligence allows us to develop a healthy plasticity and greater capacity for change. Becoming more adaptable and having a variety of responses to what and who is around us points to the issue of human sustainability, a primary inquiry of Continuum Movement.

“The mysteries of the soul are revealed in the movements of the body.” — Michelangelo

Continuum invites us to learn from our own cells and indeed, our own primordial histories. Through its use of self-generated sound streams, Continuum creates a context of safety where it is possible for the body to deeply rest and settle. Breath becomes more spacious and global as the body tissues are liberated from a narrow focus on survival or usefulness. Where there is less fear and resistance, new growth and expansion is possible. This is as true for our spirits and our emotional beings as it is for compromised muscular tissue or the nervous system. Where there is less fear there is less compression and therefore more options for creative expression and exploration. The wave-like movements discovered in this territory are layered, omni-directional and inquisitive. Thus, it is the fluid that is the primary choreographer. I invite you to think about the spreading movement of a cell in its solution phase or the exquisite movement of the octopus, both of which demonstrate an unending capacity for movement variability and adaptation.

Mircea Eliade wrote in “Patterns in Comparative Religion”: “Immersion in water symbolizes a return to the pre-formal, a total regeneration, a new birth, for immersion means a dissolution of forms, a reintegration into the formlessness of pre-existence; and emerging from the water is a repetition of the act of creation in which form was first expressed.”

The undulating movements that result from Continuum’s fluid inquiry reflect to us a shared tissue memory of all species as they came into being. It is not uncommon to have a moment of feeling like one has the claws and teeth of a tiger and in the next moment a fin, and next, the sense of moving like an amoeba, or a sea star, and then like a baby learning to crawl. Continuum allows us to remember and re-experience these earlier forms of movement and gives us access to the primary impulse of creation. This impulse is a limitless source of nourishment and support that we can use to make new choices and form new relationships in our lives.

Megan Bathory-Peeler, CMT, is a Certified Continuum Wellsprings Practitioner who incorporates Continuum into her work as a movement artist and nationally certified massage and bodywork therapist in Greenfield. For more information about individual sessions and group practice opportunities, please contact Megan at 413.772.0078 or dancinghands@verizon.net.
Additional resources: www.continuummovement.com; “Life on Land: The Story of Continuum, the World-Renowned Self-Discovery and Movement Method,” North Atlantic Books.