In order for an organization or individual to be accepted into membership, the application must be approved in accordance with the ISMETA Board of Director’s process. Taken into account in making this decision will be the extent to which the applicant meets the eligibility requirements established by ISEMTA, and whether it is the consensus of the ISMETA Board of Directors that approving the application will further the mission of ISMETA.
An organization is eligible to apply for membership with ISMETA if it fulfills all of the following requirements:
As an organization that is educating individuals as professional somatic movement educators or therapists, the identifying curriculum addresses coursework, practice, and theoretical discussion on active examples of ways to create insightful body awareness through movement. This awareness is fostered so as to enhance the capacity for living with a sense of integration which stems from:
Enhanced and/or effective expressivity through movement;
A lexicon for communicating about movement which can describe the sensation of creating, observing or experiencing movement;
A theoretical model for movement that releases patterns of restriction and encourages the potential for greater ease and capacity of total body integration;
Exercises that promote (positive/effective/corrective) re-patterning based upon the learned functional model.
The format of instruction includes these aspects of study:
500 hours of appropriate training that develops and examines the above mentioned attributes;
An approach to working with fully clothed clients;
Learned exercises that can be used, re-created and documented, and offer identifiable results;
Movement exercises that involve the whole being — accessing awareness of emotion, thought and sensation, encouraging insight into self and nature, and providing a platform for personal growth.
The organization teaches within its program an educational approach in which teachers and students are co-active in the process of learning, discovering, and healing through somatic movement.
The organization teaches its educators and/or therapists skills and tools for exchanging information to support their clients’ own self-healing process in the promotion of well-being.
Each organization has an ethically appropriate and organization-wide agreed upon approach to a structured and intentional use of touch for the purpose of communication and guidance with clients.
The organization incorporates in its program a comprehensive inter-relationship between the understanding of the functional, biological, and affective/emotional aspects of movement experience.
The organization teaches its practitioners ways to identify new capacities for movement potential in their clients and ways to offer movement resolutions to functional problems when the need arises.
The organization teaches practitioners ways to identify and work with a client’s movement inhibition and resistance.
The organization teaches practitioners ways to enhance internal sensation and kinesthetic movement awareness.
The organization’s philosophy of movement holds primary that it is a body-mind approach, providing a fluid interconnection between movement, sensation, and thought.
A primary message of the organization’s methodology is that, what defines somatic movement is a person making or recognizing meaning and connecting meaning with their movement experience.
The organization has a methodology that it requires its educators and therapists to follow when they use the title given to them by the organization.
As it is assumed that each organization will specialize and develop unique approaches to the somatic movement field, particular foci may arise that define the program by highlighting emotional __expression and balance, spiritual components or various ways in which human beings can enhance their capacity to feel more alive and engaged with living. ISMETA considers these features of each individual program to be identifying considerations and not areas of necessary inclusion.
The somatic movement method of the organization teaches its practitioners a variety of protocols for specific body conditions.
The somatic movement process of the organization consciously works with a notion of energy as the initial source of aliveness.
The number of years the organization has been in existence.
