Chandler Stevens

1. How would you define your personal practice?

I work at the intersection of movement, conversation, and awareness to help people better connect to themselves and the world around them.

 

2. What turning points have you encountered on your movement journey?

The biggest turning points for me were my introduction to natural movement and somatic education.  Both fields of study effected a major change in how I lived my life and how I practiced.

 

3. What role has injury played in cultivating your current niche?

It informed quite a bit of my earlier explorations.  I was burned out from injuries in conventional training, and that led me to natural movement practice.  But I still had lingering issues that the “physical” practice wasn’t resolving, which led me to explore somatic work.  That proved to be major for my development as a “mover” and also a human being.

 

4. Do you consider yourself a teacher?  Why or why not?

In some ways I do, but it’s a tricky word to wrangle.  Even when I’m “teaching” the emphasis is what participants learn, rather than what I want to instill.

 

5. What has been your experience with physical education, both in the schooling system and sought out knowledge/ know-how elsewhere?

As a subject?  We have some major issues.  People have a strangely myopic view of what physical education could be, especially considering that your body is the most constant thing you need to know how to work with in life.  I never took to phys ed in school, but I also got a very late start to my movement practice.

 

6. How do you involve your mind/ emotions into your physical routines?

Almost entirely.  I think it’s sad that we still have such a rift between “mind” and “body,” as if one could exist without the other.

 

7. What are your personal aspirations regarding movement?  How do you hope to find purpose and use in the skills you have built?  

My primary goal is deepening connection to myself, my surroundings, and the people in my life.  I see a movement practice as a way to deepen and broaden our sense of self.

8. How can people find/ contact you?  Do you have a site or social media handle to share?

I write for coaches at www.TheSomaSchool.com.  I have a personal site as well (www.ChandlerStevens.com).  On Facebook I’m “Chandler Stevens,” and on Instagram I’m @chandlerthemover.

Chandler’s Recent Blog Posts

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Shifting Habits with “Decision Hygiene”

Chandler Stevens Lately I’ve been thinking more and more about habits. When most people hear the word, they conjure up ...
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A Beautiful Practice

Chandler Stevens Each psychology is a confession, and the worth of a psychology for another person lies not in the ...
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How to Do What You Say You’re Going To

Chandler Stevens This year we have another cohort beginning The Ecosomatics Practitioner Training, as well as a group continuing on ...
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Pso Cool: Psoas Release

Chandler Stevens ...
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The 80/20 Rule of Better Movement

Chandler Stevens Early in my career I was fortunate to work with somebody in her 90s whose primary goal for ...
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Life & Leverage

Chandler Stevens The body has a harmony of its own. Think for a moment that what you know and live ...
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Hard Work vs. High Performance

Chandler Stevens What’s the difference between those individuals who wear themselves down with long hours, battling against fatigue and lack ...
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Moving Beyond Symptoms

Chandler Stevens Symptoms are tricky little things. Knee pain, jaw tension, an achy back…each seems to beg our attention. They ...
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Reconceptualizing Depression

Chandler Stevens I’m attempting something rather large in this particular piece, knowing full well that I’ll fall short. What I’d ...
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The Need for Anxiety

Chandler Stevens Anxiety is: “A sickness which attacks…precisely those who are strongest in spirit and richest in gifts.” – Herman ...
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Where is Gravity Winning?

Chandler Stevens There’s a thing we say about aging, that gravity takes its toll. And it’s true. The soft tissues ...
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Your Body is Trying to Tell You Something

Chandler Stevens Part 1 A client I work with really knows her shit. After a successful film career, she introduced ...
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Psoas Patterns

Chandler Stevens The poor psoas. It’s so misunderstood. This part of the body is responsible for so much of your ...
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Becoming Yourself

Chandler Stevens Why does it take us so long to be ourselves? How can a movement practice bring us a ...
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Connecting to Ourself

Chandler Stevens Do you ever get the feeling that you’ve hit a wall?  Or that you’re spinning your wheels?  Or ...
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The Politics of Movement Ed

Chandler Stevens There’s a strange power dynamic inherent in most movement education and coaching (obviously extending out to therapies as ...
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FRC 101: An Elegant Framework for Improving Mobility

Chandler Stevens Functional Range Conditioning (FRC) is an empirically-driven thought process around mobility developed by Dr. Andreo Spina.  After attending ...
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An Integrated Approach to Neuromuscular Training

Our most advanced computers pale in comparison to the human nervous system when it comes to complexity.  And what we ...
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Three Things Psychotherapy Teaches Us About Effective Coaching

Movement is amazingly complex. What we quickly realize is that there’s more to the body than muscle and bone.  We ...
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Slow, Breakdown, Play

How do you go from “Woah, that looks cool ?” to “Oh, I think I can do that?” —————————————— I ...
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Perception, Permission, And Possibility

I was struck by a question the other day: How do we perceive what’s real?  What are the boundaries we ...
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Constraints Based Learning

View this post on Instagram I got a question by email this morning about shoulder pain…until I have time to ...
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