Regular listeners to the Life Skills Academy podcast will know that we often try to emphasize how wellness and optimized learning states can be accessed through the body. This emphasis is a response to the noticeable lack of appreciation for physical awareness and movement within the dominant education cultures that determine the quality of many of our learning experiences. In this episode, we bring you another guest whose experience and wisdom in the world of movement and health can help us find comfort, capacity and wholeness in both our physical lives and our learning situations.

Jill Bodak is a self-described connoisseur of movement. An Osteopath, a writer and a speaker, she works in the realm of wellness, but particularly in the project of understanding bodies. This is a specific kind of education – to help people learn how to understand the machine they are in. Sometimes she does it through hands-on clinical practice, but recently and especially since the pandemic, she’s been having that conversation in new ways – through podcasts, online course, workshops and group sessions – where clients try to deepen our own understanding of what a body is, what it does, and how it works. It is Jill’s belief that this understanding piece, instead of the “point and label” style of learning, is the key to helping people navigate their life in a body in an enjoyable way.

Part of that understanding is to learn about being, in Jill’s words, a soft-bellied beast who declines over time. She is committed to helping her clients recognize their limits, and embrace the process of aging and decline. These are lenses that are largely absent from our educational discourse. We talk a lot about how to improve; we often forget to talk about how to decline, as we all must do, and hopefully with as much grace and understanding as possible.

If topics like this hit home for you, there’s a world of knowledge and insight waiting for you at Anatomy on Purpose, Jill’s digital education platform offering workshops, webinars, group training sessions and a whole lot of actionable information about how the body works and how it can be healed. Wherever you’re at in your journey, we encourage you to engage with resources like these and become a student of the body as a foundational part of a whole-life education.

Some topics and resources to listen for and take further:

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  • Jill Bodak & “Loved Into Being”
    
  • Anatomy Trains (BIG resource on the intersection between Anatomy, Mechanics and Real Life)
    
  • Sport Psychology
    
  • Visualization
    
  • Body-based agitation in classroom settings
    
  • Ido Portal and Movement Culture
    
  • For deep exploration of the following four topics, check out Jill’s Warming-In Workshop, available online:
    
    • We are “Circular” beings, not “Linear” ones
      
    • “Slide and Glide” vs “Stretch and Strain”
      
    • “Warming In” instead of “Warming Up” to start your day
      
    • Rate, Rhythm and Repetition
      
    
    
  • The power of Yawning
    
  • Learning through Play
    
  • Fides Krucker on the Healing power of Sound and Voice
    
  • Tom Morrison – Simplistic Mobility Method
    
  • David Belle – Parkour
    
  • MovNat: Natural Movement Fitness
    
  • GMB Fitness
    
  • Petra Fisher
    
  
  

If you haven’t listened to our last episode click here