What is Brain Gym?

Brain Gym is a system for empowering learners of any age by using movement activities to draw out hidden potential and make it readily available.

The Educational Kinesiology Foundation was established in 1987 in Ventura, California, as a nonprofit/educational organization. The vision was to bring wholeness and ease to the educational system as well as to other facets of life. The Edu-K process continues to evolve around the concept of creating safety and then trusting learners' unique leaning styles to emerge as the Brain Gym movements and balances set them free.

What can Brain Gym help with?

The Brain Gym program is distinctive in that it prepares learners to learn. Learning is accomplished with less stress, and creativity occurs using more mental and physical potential. It enhances, rather than replaces other programs or curricula. The Brain Gym movements interconnect different dimensions in the brain, allowing individuals to easily learn through all the senses, to remember what has been learned, and to participate more fully in the events of life.

Brain Gym can assist in situations where physical and perceptual abilities are not fully developed. Spatial awareness, a concept of wholeness and closure, the ability to focus attention and perceive an organization or a structure are requisite learning skills which are not available to some individuals.

These skills depend upon an innate understanding of our bodies and how they move in space. Individuals only repeat those movements that are comfortable or familiar. It is as if the person lacks permission to move in an integrated and coordinated fashion. Brain Gym and other repatterning procedures associated with this process encourage individuals to discover new ways to move that are more functional and coordinated. This process builds self-esteem, trusting the learner to work through mental aspects as physical blocks are released.

The movements also assist in clearing emotional stress that can affect us both mentally and physically. Reported benefits include improvements in such areas as vision, listening, learning, memory, self-expression, and coordination in children and adults. Teachers typically report improvements in attitude, attention, discipline, behavior, and test and homework performance.

FAQS

Can the use of Brain Gym activities or balances affect health, or alleviate stress?

Research over 30 years shows the correlation between brain organization (dominance patterns), attention deficit, allergies, and auto immune deficiency. Balance of the left and right cortical hemispheres depends on cross lateral patterning, including binocular vision, binaural hearing, and contralateral movement.

Common sense tells us what research has validated: chronic one-sided behaviors (monocular vision or excessive left or right handedness), especially without the context of whole body movement, polarize the sympathetic and parasympathetic divisions of the autonomic nervous system, adversely affecting learning, behavior, and immune response. Both as a result of and a possible cause of these one-sided behaviors, chronic anger, frustration, and depression become part of a cycle of habituated adrenal response and the related high levels of cortisol in the blood.

Does the person need to do the exercises every day in order to benefit from the program?

Doing the Brain Gym movements every day is fun, easy, energizing and reinforces positive movement and postural habits. Once new learning patterns are mastered, they become automatic and one no longer needs to do the movements daily in order to benefit from them, although they will still find Brain Gym helpful during times of stress.

Is Brain Gym the same as movement therapy, yoga or other exercises?

Brain Gym is similar to, yet different from, other movement programs. Brain Gym helps to increase flexibility and coordination, as other programs do, yet it also provides specific activities to facilitate brain function for the physical skills required for such activities as reading, writing, and spelling.

The Brain Gym process encourages the practice of setting intentions to engage the brain thus encouraging a Brain/Body connection. Brain Gym is fun, easy, and requires no special talents or coordination skills. Brain Gym is a good warm-up for all exercise programs.

What is Edu-K's Relationship to other Systems of Education and Kinesiology?

Educational Kinesiology is based on a unique integration of the learning process with kinesiology, the study of muscles and their movements. The intention of the Edu-K work is to invite the emergence of latent potential through the vehicle of the body – the repository of thoughts, feelings, and movement patterns. The Edu-K processes offer a structure for the continuous interweaving of thinking, feeling, and sensation – the integration of mental and physical functions.

Edu-K enhances (it does not replace) other educational and kinesiological approaches to growth and development. Edu-K is oriented to goals, and to daily life function and performance, rather than to a medical or mechanistic model of the body.

In Edu-K, the body is seen in terms of the situational or environmental context of the individual's moment-to-moment needs, motivations, and interrelationships. The individual does not need to change, as they are in a growth process. He or she is fine just as they are.

Presenting challenges or behaviors are valid just as they are. New learning is possible as a sense of objectivity and choice develops around old patterns. Muscle-checking is used primarily to anchor their new learning. The Edu-K process offers a multidimensional approach to balance emphasizing the learner's discovery of movement patterns that release physical, mental, or emotional holding, making latent potentials more available.

Fee Schedule

Please click here to view the fee schedule for Brain Gym.