Chris: So, what is the Anat Baniel method?

Anat: It is a method that helps you move more fully into your life; both in terms of your body, a stronger more flexible body with less aches and pains, and also clearer thinking, more energy, more interest in life, and more creativity.

Chris: Doctor Fielding Price was one of your early mentors. Can you share with our listeners what that was like?

Anat: Getting with Doctor Fielding Price was actually magnificent. I started doing his work, not directly with him, when I was about seven or eight years old through my dance teacher. Then in my very early twenties when I was in grad school to become a clinical psychologist I found him and started studying with him. It was a remarkable experience personally because I felt enormous transformation in my body. For instance, I used to be a dancer. Anybody that has ever studied dance knows you do hours and hours of the same movements by the bar and things like that. When I started doing the work with him I would do a 45-minute movement lesson, and then I could do things in dance, in ballet, that I could not do in my whole life. So, I realized that there is another way to approach the body to get a better outcome. Also, I found emotionally things shifted for me in very important ways. Then I took a training program with him and got so interested that when I could, I was working as a psychologist and as a clinical psychologist, I shifted over to doing his work. Then over the years I evolved it to become my own method. What I call my method is now the Anat Baniel method. I will speak to the principals that I now ascribe to, some of which of course are also the principals of his work. The principals are: first of all the most important one is that our brain is the CEO of our life. It is the CEO of our bodies; it is the CEO of our thoughts, and our feelings, and emotions. So the stronger and the healthier and the better our brain is, the better we can do. Everyone knows that. The simplest example is if anybody ever drank too much and then tried to use their key to open their front door and all of a sudden they couldn’t quite figure out how to fit the key in the door, something you do daily without even thinking. That is because your brain was a bit off from too much alcohol. The brain, we usually don’t feel it, but it is extremely important. With the Anat Baniel method, I have developed what I have called in my book “The Nine Essentials” to specifically promote the quality of the functioning of the brain. The first essential is met with attention. So, all of us know that movement is important. Really, movement signifies life, if we really stop moving we are dead. It is not enough to just move or exercise in an automatic mindless way. Scientific research shows that when we move and we do not pay attention to ourselves, to our feelings, while we move through our movement that our brain does not do anything new. But, if we start paying attention to our movements, immediately the brain starts forming new connections and looks for better ways to do what we are doing, and we also find ourselves creating new ways of moving and becoming very creative in our thoughts and in our problem solving. So, our first essential is moving with attention. For instance, something as simple as when you prepare your coffee in the morning start paying attention to how you move your arm, how tightly you move your hand. Or if you are a yoga practitioner, when you do some kind of yoga pose notice how you move, where you can maybe reduce some of the tension. This is the first essential. You can do it in any movement that you do. It does not have to be any specific movement. If you do it for two or three times a day for two minutes, you will find out that your body actually starts shifting how it feels. Some aches and pains can start disappearing, and you will have more energy, you will have more vitality. This is because your vitality is associated with the vitality of your brain. For instance if you are sitting right now and you can lift your right arm. Normally we can lift and lower it, we don’t have to think about it. We know how to do it. Then if you lift your arm and you start paying attention to the feeling in your elbow, and then in your shoulder, then you start paying attention to the feeling in your rib cage on the right side if you are lifting the right arm, and then in your spine. You notice is there movement there or not. Most people in the beginning when they do this they move their arm only the shoulder and the neck muscles work. The back and the chest and the pelvis are dead they are rigid. But once they start paying attention and feeling the different areas in your body: your hips joints your leg your knee; they will come to life and all of a sudden lifting the arm will completely change.

Chris: I am actually doing that right now and my arm is amazingly heavy. What does that mean?

Anat: It means you are not using enough of the rest of your body. Let me, for instance, tell you lift your right arm again and just see if you can start also reaching a little forward as if you are trying to touch something in front of you, and at the same time let your pelvis roll forward. Let the back arch just a little bit. Just feel the movement of your arm and feel the movement of your pelvis. Do this maybe two times and then stop for one second. Then again, lift the arm as if you are reaching a little forward but just feel the sole of your feet. One foot gets a little more pressure when you do that. Then put the arm down again and then lift it again and see if it is a little lighter.

Chris: Wow, that is really fascinating.

Anat: It happens immediately, the changes in the brain. The changes in the brain; the brain moves from doing automatic patterns to creating new connections instantaneously once it gets the conditions. That is why things happen so fast. Most of us, as we grow older, we start moving parts of our body in isolation from the rest of the body. Our body is built to work as one harmonious system. I found that out working with musicians. I have worked a lot with classical musicians. I have worked a lot with classical musicians; San Francisco Symphony, Boston Symphony, Tangle Wood Music Festival, places like that. I realized musicians were getting injuries because they were using their arms without the back, the pelvis which has the most powerful muscles not participating. I found ways to get them to get more of their bodies to move, right away the pain would disappear, and their playing would improve at the same time. Learning switch is the second essential. Basically what it says is that our brain can be in a learning mode or a non learning mode. When we are in a learning mode anything that happens to us actually gives the brain new information, we become very creative and inventive, and feel very alive and we problem solve. If you look not at the economy, so many people are having a hard time, and it is not just that we are having a hard time but that things are different. So we need to be able to reconfigure ourselves and what we do and how we think about things. Having the learning switch on is extremely important. For young children when they are healthy that happens automatically. But, once we grow up and grow older we already have patterns that have been working for us, so we just go on automatic and use our old habits. The way to turn the learning switch on and I will say this very quickly, the book goes into more detail, is you can know that you can either be with the switch on or the switch off. By the way, there isn’t a real switch in the brain, but it’s a metaphor. You can enter any situation, for instance if you go to work and it is the same old- same old. Monday morning when you go to work, decide to enter the work situation and decide that you will learn something new in that old situation that you did not see or notice before, and that will turn you into a learner. I got this poster of Einstein from one of my students yesterday, and the face of this man is the face of a man with all of the lights turned on in his brain. He is just everything got him to think of something new, that is the learning switch. It actually gets you to have this joy and appreciation. One of the prizes from having the learning switch on is not just that you are more effective and successful in your life but also that you feel that sense of newness and appreciation, absolutely. The next one I call subtlety, which is counterintuitive for a lot of people. That is to improve yourself, to have more vitality, to improve the movement of your body or your thinking. You need to reduce the effort, the force with which you do things. For instance, if you are trying to be better your golf swing, most people try to get their muscles to work harder, to work harder, and the thing to do is to actually do it with less effort. Not when you are playing at tournament, and then just do the best you can. But when you have time to practice, when it doesn’t matter if you hit well or not, reduce the effort with which you do things and you will see how your brain will start working for you. Because what that does is it makes the brain feel more and more subtle differences, and that is the source of information for your brain to give you a better pattern. When you do something and it doesn’t work as well as you want to or you fail at it that means that your brain hasn’t figured out yet how to do it. Your brain needs information, so reducing the force in exercises, in the way we talk to our children when we are trying to get them to do something we want them to do, all parents know that one, and in our emotional interactions with our partners. So that is the third essential. So for instance, if you do an exercise routine, bending down to touch your toes, bending sideways or whatever exercise. Very often in an aerobic class, it is hard to do because the teacher paces it very fast very often, but you can just move to the back of the room and you can just do smaller movements and do them with less and less force. You will see within seconds all of a sudden your body will get more flexible. If you are trying to stretch, instead of going down to touch your toes and forcing, instead go less than the full amount. In a minute, I will give you another variation that will make it so within seconds you will drop down to your feet more than you have stretching for the last year or two or ten or twenty. For more interviews on health, mind, body and spirit go to Michael Senoff’s

Chris: So, the antitheses of that hard work, sweat, get that done mentality that is pretty popular.

Anat: Absolutely. What I say is when you want to get to do something better, you want to get subtle. You want to reduce the force so you get intelligent so your brain will figure out for you a better way to do it. When you find out a good way to do it for you then you do it harder, then you do it faster, then you go longer. But you don’t go hard from the start and you don’t just go hard all the time. So if you go three times a week to some exercise class and you just go one-two-three, one-two-three, that is okay, is better than not doing it but you don’t get better and what you really are doing is grooving in the pattern even more. That is why people get those pains, aches, and also why we age. We stop having a growing inventing brain. Youthfulness, health, vitality is associated with a brain that keeps growing and having new possibilities and connections just like when we were healthy children. I would like to move to the next essential, which I call variations. Variations mean doing things in different ways. One way to do variations, and everybody knows now to work against aging, you have to have things that are new. If you just do the same old-same old, it doesn’t work very well and we feel dead in our own lives. One way to do variations is to travel to a new country, or go and eat a new kind of food, or meet new people, which is very good. First of all, we can’t just go to a new country every day or meet people all the time, but there is a way we can bring uniqueness to our life all the time in our daily life. That is to do what we do in slightly different ways. I call it do mistakes on purpose. For instance if I always hold a cup in a certain way or I always talk a certain way or I always do a movement the right way. For instance if I take the movement level first, let’s say you do a yoga pose and you were told to do it a certain way for the pose, and it probably is the right way for the pose. For you, if you are not doing it perfectly or even if you are, but most people are not doing it perfectly. How are you going to get better at doing it? Introduce intentionally small little mistakes: put the head in the wrong direction, put the shoulder up instead of down, round your back instead of arch it, do it lying on your back instead of sitting up. Then go ahead and do the regular pose and in seconds you will find that the whole movement is improved for you. It happens really in a few seconds. That is a way to do variations. Another way is very important in interpersonal relationships, especially with people that are close to us like family members. We tend to say the same thing, have the same tone of voice, have the same conversation, the same fight over and over again. One of the ways to try to bring life to the relationship and improve it is to bring variation. If you usually use a stern voice, use a sweeter tone of voice. If you say certain things then say something else, or if you say don’t say something and then say something different. Say something that you think is completely the wrong thing to say that you think will be the worst thing. For instance, with my daughter when she was younger, there is always the struggle to get them to do homework with most kids; anyway I had to with her. One day I just looked at her and said “Sweetie, just don’t do any homework today. Just do whatever you want. Have a lazy day today.” The shock on her face was unbelievable. It was amazing how much more ready she was to do homework because she was worried about the teacher being upset about her not doing homework and it changed the whole dynamic. We are going to continue our conversation with a parent that has experienced the Anat Baniel method for their child. The method works for many different challenges that children with special needs can face. Anat Baniel has worked with children with cerebral palsy, autism, autism spectrum disorders, Aspergers syndrome, sensory integration problems, Scoliosis, generic disorders such as Fragile X, Down’s syndrome, ADD, many different learning disabilities, and feeding disorders. The Anat Baniel method offers a lot of hope for a lot of different conditions. Today we are talking with Kevin, father of Parker, a young boy that suffers from cerebral palsy and has had tremendous success in being treated by Anat Baniel of the Anat Baniel method.

Chris: Your son has been working with Anat Baniel and the Anat Baniel method for a while now. How did you guys find Anat and what kind of things have you been working on?

Kevin: It is really interesting. Anat kind of found us. A neighbor across the street of ours had a contact through Australia. This woman was coming all the way from Australia to see these folks up in San Rafael. It just happens to be where my wife was born and raised. In fact we go and stay up with grandma and grandpa two exits from the center where Anat practices. Our little boy has cerebral palsy, and was diagnosed at age two and a half. We did about 12 months of what we call traditional therapy, which was stretching exercises for his spastic muscles in his legs and ankles and such. They got him in leg braces and put him in a walker to get him in the position that would ultimately get him walking. So he was two and a half when we started down that road. We did that until he was about three and a half. After about a full 12 months of doing what the tradition western doctors had prescribed for us, at his 12-month evaluation his range of motion had actually decreased and his muscles had become more spastic than when we had started therapy 12 months earlier. It was a little bit concerning if nothing else. Fortunately for my wife and I as soon as we got this diagnosis of cerebral palsy we started educating ourselves as best as we could as to what was this, what were we dealing with, and what was going on. We learned very quickly that this was a brain injury. All cerebral palsy is, is brain damage. It is the presentation that determines the therapy. In our case, it was physical disabilities with very tight spastic leg muscles. So we went down the road of doing the stretching and such. Nobody ever addressed the injury in his brain in the first 12 months of traditional western medicine. They confirmed that there was a brain injury; they said “Yup, there is the part of the brain that was damaged at whatever point.” It can happen either in utero, it can happen at birth, it can happen to you or I Chris if we walk down the street and trip, hit our head, and get a brain injury. That brain injury would fall under the classification generally of cerebral palsy. Then it could affect our speech, our cognition, our mobility, our physical presentation, any number of things simply based on this brain injury. Parker’s presentation was a physical one, so the western doctors focused on that “Oh look, his leg muscles are tight then we need to stretch them and we need to put braces on them.” There was never any mention of the injury to his brain. In our 12 months of trying to educate ourselves we came across a couple of different schools of thought. A lot of them were to teach the brain or re-teach the brain to take over the function. We have this little teeny portion of brain that has been damaged. We all know it is common knowledge that we use such a small portion of our brain in general operation. There is all sorts of stuff there that is not being utilized or is being severely underutilized. So when we were turned onto Anat and found that her whole idea was that we can re-train the brain to take on these functions, it made total sense to us. Now we are dealing with the actual problem, with the brain injury instead of trying to work it backwards through the physicality, we are now working from a neurological standpoint. Some of it is even used in the way they re- train stroke victims. The big advantage to stroke victims, if there is one, is that they had the proper function at one point so they are relearning it. For these kids that are born with brain injury they never knew the right way to crawl or to talk. Whatever has been affected, they never knew it the right way. Generally, what the system will do is it will find a way to make something happen. So Parker would crawl but it always looked really funky. His back wasn’t involved. It was like there was a broomstick up his back. With his mobility and his spasticity his presentation looked like his spine was totally fused. When he would crawl, his shoulder blades didn’t move at all. Those looked totally fused. His hips and his pelvis didn’t move at all. So, yes, he crawled, and for lay parents like us we thought “Look, he’s crawling.” It was not until we met Anat and she said, “We are looking for the quality of the movement” that is where we started to understand because these kids never knew the right way to do it their system comes up with a way to do it, and often it is not quite the right way. They pick up a bunch of these bad habits. So we go to therapy with Anat, after three days, one lesson the first day, two lessons the second day. We go back to the center on the third day and the practitioners ask us, as they had each day previous, “What have you guys seen? Have you seen anything yet?” On the third day Samantha and I looked straight at them and said, “Well, he had arches in his feet this morning” which he had never had before. Traditionally his footprint from infancy until this third day of therapy looked like a brick with toes. Now on the third day suddenly he had arches on his feet. They looked straight at us and said, “Apparently we are doing some good then and we are going down the right path.” The other amazing thing that we have come to learn with this therapy, and we had been told from the get-go but it is hard to believe until you witness it yourself, is that they are not going for small changes, they want to see big changes, like he now has arches in his feet. That is exactly what we have seen with this method. We go once a month for a week. We do two 45-minute sessions, one in the morning and one in the afternoon, for five days straight. Every time we have come home and often during these sessions, we will achieve an amazing milestone. It is things from suddenly being able to swim. Parker has been doing swimming lessons since he was four months old. One of the sessions that we experienced at the end of last summer in August, literally on Tuesday I would not have considered him water safe. He would be the first one to dive into the pool, float to the bottom, smile and wait for someone to get him, not at all water safe. On Wednesday we are playing with him in the pool and he takes all of those months of swimming lessons, puts it all together, puts his face in the water, looks straight down at the bottom of the pool and starts pulling himself across the surface. I am Chris Costello reporting from Michael Senoff’s

Chris: So, what is this like watching this work with your son?

Kevin: It is the reason why we have devoted our lives to it at this point; to utilize the resources, both time and money, to go once a month and participate in this. We would not be doing it if we didn’t see these kinds of results, and we see them every single time we go. There are improvements in balance, improvements in mobility. What is amazing is the systemic differences that we see. Our focus is to get Parker’s legs working properly and to get him upright and working on his own. Right now, he walks but he uses a walker and the quality of his walk isn’t 100 percent; that is the direction that we are going. What we have found is on that path toward that ultimate goal of getting him to walk independently we find that his hand eye coordination increases, that his recognition of letters and sounds and abilities cognitively are much sharper than they have been. One of these other experiences we had during the week with Anat is on Tuesday. He has always been interested I the computer, we do loads of computer work at our home office, he has always been interested but never been able to do any navigation, didn’t have the coordination to utilize the mouse. This was either a Tuesday- Wednesday or a Wednesday-Thursday rollover. On the day prior, he couldn’t do it, totally frustrated, the day after he wanted to play on the computer. We set him up at the computer anticipating the same outcome. He sat there for two hours navigating the entire Disney channel program: playing games, looking at projects, the whole thing. Not suddenly “Oh, I suddenly I can point and click the mouse”, but full navigation of the entire Disney site. Those are the kinds of changes we see on a regular basis. Again, if it wasn’t something I was visually seeing first hand I would probably be skeptical and shake my head and kind of go “It can’t be. I know the brain is an amazing tool but it can’t be.” Not only have we seen it in our little boy, but also we have made lots of friends there at the center that we see there at the waiting room and we chat and things before and after. We see them on a monthly basis and every single month you look at them and go “That is not the same child that I saw last month.” Some of these kids are pretty severely affected. We are fortunate with Parker being very mildly affected with his brain damage. But the kids that you see as being more text book, that are really debilitated; amazing changes. Their eyes would never focus and now they will look right after you and respond to questions. It literally is unbelievable.

Chris: Kevin, do you have an email address that people can contact you if they need more information?

Kevin: I do. I have a couple of them. You can check the Anat Baniel website directly at http://anatbanielmethod.com and my personal email is kolenick@msn.com. The thing that I can tell you is that if in your heart that you don’t see your children improving. That you just hear the stories from the “experts” that this is the best you are going to get and this is always the way it is going to be. That is not at all the case. This method in particular, we have seen kids that are on the autism spectrum, we have seen severe brain injury kids, and every single one of them we have just seen amazing improvements. I would say check this out. Even healthy kids that you think can do just a little better. The brain is an amazing organ and with the method that Anat uses we can all benefit.