Babette Lightner
Babette Lightner (She) from the Mississippi River Watershed near Rush Creek.
My work, Wholeness in Motion, is an on-going synthesis of 40 years exploring movement, somatic work, nature, mythology, and culture. I am part of the faculty at the VoiceCare Network and co-creative director of the Center for Sound Music Education. I am a Certified Alexander Technique teacher (30 years) and a LearningMethods™ teacher (20 years). I taught in the Professional Actor Training Program and Music Department at the University of Minnesota and have lectured and taught for many universities, institutions and organizations including the Guthrie Theater, Sister Kenny Institute, Balk Opera Music Institute, Taipei National University of Arts in Taiwan, Western University in Ontario and many more.
My explorations into human movement have taken me around the world, from dancing with a folk dance troupe in the villages of South India to performing with a post-modern physical theatre company in the warehouses of Boston. These explorations in being of the earth are life long and endless. My garden and studio are on 47 acres in Spring Valley, Wisconsin. I maintain an active residency, workshop and lecture schedule - (pre-covid 19). I work extensively with on-line courses and trainings.
I have created many video resources and am the author of Your Inner Compass, Pedagogy of Empowerment, Coordination of Being for Conductors and other articles that elucidate how your magnificent system can work for you rather than against you. The Language of Wholeness text is in draft form. I wake up grateful each morning because seeing people awed by their own capability is like witnessing a miracle every day.
My writing, teaching and video work centers on co-creatively exploring what it is to thrive and how to counter the dominant hierarchical cultural framework that is embedded in our bodies and our strategies. The work is one voice in the global movement to embody Life-Giving paradigms on a personal level for global change.
Babette’s Opinion Uncensored - recently I was putting together material for a video course called Empowered Body - From Alignent to Aliveness about alternatives to teaching alignment. I wrote the following which captures a lot about me and this work. Here it is - pure opinion, my perspective at this moment not truth and subject to change.
Ground Rules:
Don’t believe me just because I am making this video series. Don’t trust me until you’ve tested out what I am offering. Along the way ask often: How does this have relevance for me? What do I feel, think about this? Am I safe, comfortable, challenged, searching?
All abilities can engage with this material, it just takes a little creative adaptation to make it work for you if you have limited mobility - micro-movement and imagining movement can be as or more powerful than large, gross motor movement.
Pet Peeves that inspired this work around Empowered Body- put in the form of requests:
Stop telling me what to do with my body or telling anybody else what to do with theirs. YOU don’t have the information about what does or doesn’t work for anyone else.
Stop treating your body or mine like baggage, like you or I can apply for a new and improved set.
Stop talking about body/mind integration or wholeness and then only value cognitive, objective information as if your system, a million year evolutionary system, doesn’t know how to work well.
Stop idealizing specific states of being as if there are only a few good ways to be present, embodied, or feeling. Put another way: stop limiting your options or mine about how to be and feel in this world. This kind of idealization is a great way to support hierarchy and power-over systems.
Stop thinking you are isolated from others or the planet.
What I am doing or have been exploring that has become WIM:
Start noticing I am part of and dependent on this planet from everything from the air and water I intake to the ground and gravity that allows me to move and exist.
Start meeting and mining the richness of all my states of being, pleasant and unpleasant, exalted and shitty. There is information here, in the lived and met reality of any moment.
Start registering the sensations (signals) within myself.
Start learning to understand this innate sensory language with an eye to the fact that cultural and personal baggage can easily create misunderstanding about what these signals are telling me, like interpreting a rigid lengthening as ‘good posture’ or gripped muscles as the feeling of strength.
Pursue the tools to more accurately interpret my sensations. WIM is all about this.
Ask some useful powerful questions like:
Are my system’s signals reliable information? Put another way: Do I have an inner compass and is it reliable if I can read it accurately?Can I use this compass to help me make decisions that support my joy, success, power and life force?
Can I use my own senses to allow full availability for the task at hand without blaming and shaming my unavailable ways of being?
How do I lead and teach without imposing my opinions and perspectives on another? Put another way: How do I lead and teach and support others' access to their own opinion and ideas, to harness the knowledge within their own compass so that they can live a thriving life on their own terms.
How do I support a person to allow their own full availability to make music or whatever they want to make without limiting their range of expression?
Ground Rules:
Don’t believe me just because I am making this video series. Don’t trust me until you’ve tested out what I am offering. Along the way ask often: How does this have relevance for me? What do I feel, think about this? Am I safe, comfortable, challenged, searching?
All abilities can engage with this material, it just takes a little creative adaptation to make it work for you if you have limited mobility - micro-movement and imagining movement can be as or more powerful than large, gross motor movement.
Pet Peeves that inspired this work around Empowered Body- put in the form of requests:
Stop telling me what to do with my body or telling anybody else what to do with theirs. YOU don’t have the information about what does or doesn’t work for anyone else.
Stop treating your body or mine like baggage, like you or I can apply for a new and improved set.
Stop talking about body/mind integration or wholeness and then only value cognitive, objective information as if your system, a million year evolutionary system, doesn’t know how to work well.
Stop idealizing specific states of being as if there are only a few good ways to be present, embodied, or feeling. Put another way: stop limiting your options or mine about how to be and feel in this world. This kind of idealization is a great way to support hierarchy and power-over systems.
Stop thinking you are isolated from others or the planet.
What I am doing or have been exploring that has become WIM:
Start noticing I am part of and dependent on this planet from everything from the air and water I intake to the ground and gravity that allows me to move and exist.
Start meeting and mining the richness of all my states of being, pleasant and unpleasant, exalted and shitty. There is information here, in the lived and met reality of any moment.
Start registering the sensations (signals) within myself.
Start learning to understand this innate sensory language with an eye to the fact that cultural and personal baggage can easily create misunderstanding about what these signals are telling me, like interpreting a rigid lengthening as ‘good posture’ or gripped muscles as the feeling of strength.
Pursue the tools to more accurately interpret my sensations. WIM is all about this.
Ask some useful powerful questions like:
Are my system’s signals reliable information? Put another way: Do I have an inner compass and is it reliable if I can read it accurately?Can I use this compass to help me make decisions that support my joy, success, power and life force?
Can I use my own senses to allow full availability for the task at hand without blaming and shaming my unavailable ways of being?
How do I lead and teach without imposing my opinions and perspectives on another? Put another way: How do I lead and teach and support others' access to their own opinion and ideas, to harness the knowledge within their own compass so that they can live a thriving life on their own terms.
How do I support a person to allow their own full availability to make music or whatever they want to make without limiting their range of expression?
Dancing roots - Karagam in Madurai Tamilnadu India in the 80's.
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Publications
Click links below for full articles:
Pedagogy of Empowerment Patterns of Joy -- Your Inner-Compass Beyond The Body Coordination of Being -- Conducting The Coordination of Bliss |
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