For information on private lessons/individual session in movement education please see individual session on the study options page. Thanks.

The following is about the movement classes I teach primarily in group settings:

Wholeness in Motion™
The Knowledge to be fit for life!

Wholeness in Motion™ offers an underpinning for approaching any activity with physical wisdom. It develops your own experiential criteria to sense what works for your body and what doesn't. The class gives you a healthy foundation for strength & flexibility by awakening your natural balance & support. You'll gain freedom from struggles with obsolete concepts of posture/alignment and replace them with confidence in your inherent stature & a new model of internal suspension.

Come & savor the joy of moving to delicious music from around the world. Taste 15 different body/mind/movement/dance/martial arts approaches woven together in this sumptuous class. Ground your week in the miracle of wholeness, in the miracle of what is!

General Description:

Wholeness in Motion™ is an experientially delicious foundation for allowing all the movements of your life to support fitness as you're guided to move like the whole, balanced, flexible, buoyant, powerful being that you are.  Walking, bending, reaching, lifting, folding, expanding, getting to floor and rising again are just some of the fundamental movements of life. Many of us unconsciously do these everyday movements in ways that strain, tense and stiffen us over time. Wholeness in Motion™ helps you discover your:

• Built in ease & freedom to move
• The perfect strength for the tasks at hand
• Connection to your miraculous self and the world in which you dwell

The class flows from simple floor movement to dynamic, energizing movement  accompanied by music from around the world. The movement draws from a wide range of disciplines including Anatomy of Wholeness™, developmental movement, yoga, Tai Chi Chuan, Bartenieff Fundamentals, modern and ethnic dance, Alexander Technique, mindfulness practice and much more.

How it is distinct from other movement approaches:

Wholeness in Motion is a radically new approach to teaching movement designed to give you the means to determine for yourself what is healthy, useful and right for you. It challenges posture, alignment and direct body positioning/controlling approaches to teaching movement. This approach is based on a new and profound understanding of human structure as an open, whole suspension system that is coordinated by intentions. Any positioning into good posture or controlling alignment conflicts with the ability of your amazingly sensitive system to respond fully, efficiently and as a whole. While a sense of alignment, positioning and gaining core strength can feel wonderful in comparison to your original habits, Wholeness in Motion puts you in more direct contact with your free, open, spacious and perfectly working system. Flexibility, strength, free upright stature and knowledge of how to listen and respond to your own system with confidence are natural consequences of this approach to movement training and education.

In-Depth Description

Wholeness in Motion™ - Babette Lightner
Bringing balance, freedom & wholeness into all you do.

Wholeness in Motion™ is a new approach to exercise specifically designed to help students directly integrate the benefits of class into all aspects of life. Common everyday movements like bending, walking, and sitting make up the core of the movement material. As you experience freedom and balance in all your movement you'll learn to detect the early signs of strain and injury, giving you a foundation to apply healthy, easy, powerful movement in everything you do from mowing the lawn or picking up a laundry basket to running a marathon or playing the violin.

Many of us feel stiff or weak and want more flexibility and strength. What most of us don't realize is that the stiffness and weaknesses we feel have much more to do with how we are going about all our daily activities than with aging or lack of exercise. How you move in everyday life is the most important influence on your general fitness. Many of us bring imbalance, stress, a rushed approach and consequently much more effort to our daily life movement. This unnecessary effort focuses forces on parts of our body, causing tissue damage and distortion, fatigue and even chronic pain. It is an anatomical fact that our body adapts (adjusting functional muscle length, bulk, and fibre type) to the average way we move. We are always in the perfect fitness for how we go about things. We often take our very same ways of coordinating movement right into exercise classes which just strengthens the tension patterns we've been doing all day. Certainly an hour or so of exercise will be better than none and can give wonderful results. But how much better will your state of fitness be if you bring free, open, balanced movement to all aspects of your life?

Built into Wholeness in Motion™ is an approach to accessing your system's innate ability to move with freedom and balance in which forces are equally distributed, giving you strength and flexibility where you need it. You learn to listen to the early warning signals that guide you out of effort and into a whole, balanced, free way of moving. Because the class is built on everyday movements, the translation of class material to everyday life is a natural outcome. The class flows from simple floor movement to dynamic, energizing movement all accompanied by music from around the world. You experientially discover the logic of your body. You literally become more in touch with yourself, giving you the foundation to navigate your life with greater ease.

Please see Curriculum and Underpinnings for details of class content.

 What does Wholeness in Motion offer you?