“For me, Body-Mind Centering® has always been — beyond a fantastic accumulation of experience, information, and imagery that illuminates the states of being human in a body — a radical re-visioning of the learning process. Wisdom wells up from inside the body, literally from within each cell.”
Diane Elliot (part of Two Views from the BMC® Community, in the back of Sensing, Feeling & Action)
“At the core of any meditation or mindfulness and awareness practice is training in embodiment. These two words, mindfulness and awareness, beautifully reflect the embodiment principles and techniques of Body-Mind Centering®. Mindfulness practice trains us to have a mind “full” of whatever we are perceiving, to be fully present to whatever we are experiencing through our senses. In BMC®, one trains to be fully mindful of the body in its entire myriad of sensations, qualities and feelings.
Awareness, while inseparable from mindfulness, refers to the ability to fully know and understand non-conceptually. We learn to trust and open to our own experience, giving birth to innate wisdom and insight. BMC®‘s entire methodology is based on empowering the individual to investigate, research and understand in exquisite detail the experience of their body/mind. Meditation and BMC® both seek to heal any misunderstanding that body and mind are separate, to cultivate presence and a sense of wellbeing, and in essence, to become fully human.”
Erika Berland
BMCA Professional Member
Body-Mind Centering® Practitioner
Faculty, Naropa University (MFA Contemporary Performance)
“The ability to sense, feel and act authentically is primary to the actor’s craft. With Body-Mind Centering®’s rich language of the body and cultivation of embodied states of being, the performer trains in techniques of transformation; developing the capacity for flexible and authentic response to any given circumstance, character, story or choreography.
BMC® supports the actor by providing a direct link, through the specificity and embodiment of the body’s tissues, to emotion, memory and personal history, enabling the development of a genuine physical dramaturgy, physical scoring and character development.”
Wendell Beavers
Director MFA Contemporary Performance, Naropa University
Erika Berland
BMCA Professional Member
Body-Mind Centering® Practitioner
Faculty, Naropa University (MFA Contemporary Performance)
“Discovering Body-Mind Centering® has been a huge gift. I now know the magic of being human and look forward to integrating this embodiment process for the rest of my life. For me, the permission that you make space for has been the most radically transformative teaching. Thank you for creating this rare and precious space. It taught me that the guru is within – not by ideas, but by knowing in my cells.”
Malia McInerney
Juneau, Alaska
“The BMC® formulation of the Basic Neurocellular Patterns (BNP) has been at the center of my research and publishing for the last seven years. While working to identify the “encoded” presence of these patterns in music, the insights of the BMC® community, beginning with Bonnie, have been an ongoing source of information and inspiration.
Wherever I have presented, from peer-reviewed journals to international scholarly conferences to public lectures and performances, the uncanny beauty and broad applicability of the BNP propositions has lead to attentive, engaged exchanges. I remain very grateful for these concepts and for the embodied approach with which they were taught to me. They have provided a foundation for my own experiments and ideas, offering unique and indispensable perspectives on expressive action and gesture, movement-based performance, and the nature of metaphor.”
Andrew Warshaw
Associate Professor of Music and Dance
Music Director, Dance Department
Marymount Manhattan College
New York City
“I have used Body-Mind Centering® in my piano playing and teaching for the past 30 years. Body awareness is a crucial element in my art; it is the tool through which I can realize my musical intentions. Without it, I would be prone to injury; with it, I have access to a treasure-trove of artistic possibilities. I like to work with the body systems as a stimulus for generating new interpretations, and I have especially enjoyed Bonnie Cohen’s work connecting the scapula to the fingers. Amazingly, that work correlates beautifully with Chopin’s ideas about piano playing. Being grounded in my body allows me to be expressive in my soul.”
Monica Jakuc Leverett
Elsie Irwin Sweeney Professor Emerita of Music
Smith College
Northampton, MA