Anat Baniel: Transforming The Lives Of Children With Special Needs

	"We came to Anat when Isabel was 15 months old. She had just been diagnosed with Cerebral Palsy, spastic displegia. We were scared and confused about Isabel's future. After one session with Anat, Isabel was moving in ways she wasn't previously capable of."     —Trish Karlinski and Barbara Austin

By Anat Baniel

A child is born. It is a miracle. For the first few weeks, the little one sleeps a lot, nurses, occasionally cries, and needs to be held and rocked. Her arms and legs move, and her body twitches—all involuntary movements. Soon her family notices she is doing things she was unable to do before. By the time two years have passed, this little person can walk, talk, even argue, and will continue to grow at an incredible rate.

As parents and caretakers, we provide for the child's needs and yet, we have limited understanding of how these remarkable changes and developments come about, and little say as to when these developmental changes occur.

When this magnificent, spontaneous process of development does not take its normal course, like with Cerebral palsy (CP), brain and nerve injury, autism, birth defects, genetic disorders and sensory integration disorders, the parents and therapists are left with the question and challenge of how to best help their child.

Most therapeutic modalities tackle the child's limitations head-on and try to get the child to do what they should be doing according to their age and developmental stage. When an eighteen-month-old child with CP can't sit up, she is repeatedly placed in a sitting position with the hope that somehow she'll figure it out. A ten-year-old boy who can't read gets hours of extra tutoring and the arm of a girl with brachial plexus injury is moved around in an effort to increase its range of motion.

With the Anat Baniel Method (ABM), a very different approach is taken. Rather than focus on the limitations and try to directly fix the presenting problem on the level of muscle, bone, joints, and soft tissue, the focus is shifted to where the most powerful solutions actually lie—with the brain. Built upon the work of Moshe Feldenkrais, ABM works by communicating with the brain of the special needs child and facilitating the formation of new neural connections and patterns, irrespective of the cause of the child's limitations. We know from brain research and from anecdotal accounts how amazing, magnificent, and often surprising the brain is. We also know that the potential of the brain is much greater than any of us has manifested. With the ABM, we know that to be true also for the brain of the special needs child. As part of the work, nine requirements—the Nine Essentials—for the brain to form new and effective patterns of movement, thought, and feeling have been identified and implemented.

Variation: Variation creates opportunities for a child to perceive differences, providing new information the brain needs to differentiate and create more successful patterns than it presently knows. Variation turns the brain on.To provide variation, intentionally change what you are doing with the child, making sure you avoid repeating the same action over and over again. For example, when you want the child to learn how to reach out and lift his arm, instead of trying to stretch it, you might help him first bend the arm a bit more and let go. As you're doing that, turn the child's head one way and then the other. Then help him bend and extend one of his legs at the same time that he extends and bends the arm while lying down on his back, on his side and while held in his mother's arms. Then come back to bending and straightening the child's arm and see if it is any easier. Be innovative. Introduce something completely new, or introduce many slight shifts and differences in whatever you are doing.

The more new variations the child experiences, the better and faster his brain can differentiate and form new solutions. The child learns how to learn. Without variation, we starve the brain of the new information it craves; no matter how hard the practitioner and child try, the outcomes will be very limited until you provide these variations.

Michael was thirteen months old when I first saw him. He was born with what his doctor called "dislocatable hip joints," meaning his hip sockets were not fully formed. Worried that the baby might dislocate his hips while moving, the doctor thought it best to restrict movement. Thus, at the age of three weeks, Michael was put in a full body cast, where he remained for nine months.

The cast not only stopped Michael from moving his hip joints—which didn't help correct them, it also stopped the movements a baby would normally experience of his spine, ribs, sternum, clavicles, abdomen, breathing, pelvis, and legs. In this way, Michael was denied most of the usual explorations of early infancy—variations of movement, sensations, and interactions with the world around him.

When the cast came off, Michael was unable to move. He was otherwise healthy, but his brain did not form the underlying patterns necessary for him to be able to have him roll over, crawl, come up to a sitting position, or stand up. He was irritable and deemed to be an "unhappy baby." Michael was unresponsive to his traditional physical therapist's efforts to get him to do what babies his age can normally do. Michael remained clueless as to how to move.

Knowing Michael's history, I began to very gently and slowly move him in an abundance of variations that his brain could easily grasp. I moved his pelvis forward and backward, right and left. I moved his lower back so that it arched and rounded, and gently turned his spine from side to side. I moved his pelvis in concert with his legs, arms, and head, always in a variety of configurations. I also did these movements with Michael in different positions: on his back, his right side, his left side, and his belly. The movements fed new information to his brain—information he literally didn't have to work with until then.

At first it felt like his brain and body had no idea how to do even these small movements, even with the guidance of my hands. But within minutes it was as if his brain literally woke up and started working with this new information. He quickly became more flexible and comfortable with these new movements and soon his lower back began arching powerfully.

The variations in our lesson gave Michael's brain the information it needed to begin a potent process of differentiation. Twenty minutes into the initial session, Michael began crawling on all fours for the first time in his life. To say the least, both the boy's mother and myself were astonished. After a few more lessons with me and lots of spontaneous movements and experiments on his own, Michael fully caught up to his age group.

Whatever modality you work in, there is always room for variation. If you have been trained to follow very specific routines, it might feel a bit scary at first, or even "wrong" to improvise and introduce variations. But as I always assure my practitioners, pay close attention to the child and the outcomes and be guided by your own observations of the child. By doing that, you will see the child improve right before your eyes.