This s**t works!

 

Hello everyone! It’s been a long time since I posted, almost three months. After three months of regular fortnightly posts, three months of nothing. It was not because I had not written anything. The current post was ready end of August itself. It was just that after the very personal posts on my mother and sister, I was too emotionally spent to post anything. Or maybe it was because those two posts were for two occasions and now I had no occasion to write for. Or maybe just pure inertia.

This post actually was supposed to come immediately after my fourth blogpost, “Man Proposes and God Disposes!” It is a continuation…

On successful completion of the Children’s Mastery training of the Anat Baniel Method NeuroMovement (ABMNM), I started my practice in April 2019 at the Academy of Learning and Development, our school for children with special needs. There were a lot of questions in my mind. Hardly anybody knew about ABMNM in India. It was going to be an uphill task, first creating awareness about ABMNM and then getting people to trust me enough to try it out. It is difficult to explain to somebody in half an hour or one hour as to how ABMNM works. Add to that the fact that to an onlooker at times it might seem that nothing was being done in a lesson. And then there was the nagging self-doubt, will I be able to deliver, will I get results? Am I good enough?

I was extremely lucky to have three clients who were as different as they could be, in the first month of my practice.

Fortuitously for me, I got thrown in at the deep end right at the beginning of my practice. My first client, a five-year-old boy from Bandra, was extremely difficult to work with, for a variety of reasons. The first time he came, was with his parents and grandparents. I can still remember sitting in that small room, with the five of them, trying to explain what ABMNM was to all four of them. I could feel the hostility in the room. It was tangible. The grandparents, especially the grandfather who was a very strong personality and had a great deal of influence, was dead set against even trying out ABMNM. The mother, poor thing, had no voice. It was only the father who was convinced about ABMNM and wanted to try it out. He was planning to go to the US and stay for a month to take lessons from one of the practitioners there. It was she who had told them that instead of traveling all the way to the US, there is a practitioner available now locally, so why don’t you go to her.

The little boy was extremely smart and intelligent. He was diagnosed with cerebral palsy. His mobility was compromised, but other than that he was like a typical child. He was very talkative and used to go to a regular school. He could not understand why he was different from the other children. The kids in school would just ignore him and run away. Kids can be very cruel at times. He would feel left out in school, as a result he started hitting and shouting at the other children. And this behaviour continued outside the school also. He was like a dictator in the house. His mother was terrified of him. There were a lot of behaviour issues.

It was nearly impossible to get him to cooperate during the lessons. I had to try all sorts of tricks while giving him lessons. He would come with his mother for the lessons. One Saturday, he came with his father. And that is when I learnt of the tensions going on at home. Nobody spoke with the father as he was insisting on carrying on with the lessons. But the father did observe changes in the child even in that short span of time. So that was really heartening news for me. But then one day, the mother came looking really harrowed. Her son had been acting very difficult at home, and the behaviour continued during the lesson. He would ask for water to drink and then hold it in his mouth and spit it all out. The mother was on the verge of tears. That is when I suggested to the mother that we wait outside the room till he quietened down. That, I guess was a mistake on my part. It was too early for me to expect the mother or the child to trust me. Also, maybe I shifted from the Connecting to the Fixing mode, where I was trying to fix his behaviour. The mother was extremely stressed out.

Whatever the reason, the boy stopped coming for lessons. At first, I blamed myself as I considered that as my failure. It upset me a great deal as I was personally invested in the child. With more experience and training I realised that he was a big learning opportunity for me and that it was on the parents if they decided not to come and not on me. They decided what they thought was best for their child. That did not mean that I had failed or was not good enough.

Namra, a five and a half months old boy from Bhuj, on the other hand, was highly compromised. He had hardly any movement. His parents, a cute young couple were very enterprising and brave. They did a lot of research on the net. That’s how they found out about ABMNM and me. They had gone to Kerala to consult some doctor and from there they came to Mumbai, without any prior bookings. They were not sure that I would be able to work with Namra for he cried incessantly, especially when anyone touched him. His parents and grandmother who had accompanied them were amazed when he quietened down under my touch and allowed me to give him a lesson. That was the first sign I got that Yes, I can be an effective ABMNM practitioner. They stayed in Mumbai for two weeks. Everyday they would come to the school, well before their scheduled appointment time.

One day, they were late for their appointment, so much so that I started to get worried, wondering what could have happened, fearing for Namra’s health. And then they turned up, very apologetic, but full of smiles. For the first time Namra had woken up smiling and they got to play with their baby boy. So, they lost track of time. Also, for the first time in five months they washed his hair because he allowed them to. This was the best testimonial I could get.

My third client, Ansha, was a twenty-year-old girl who had just appeared for her third year Arts final examination. She had been diagnosed with cerebral palsy and had difficulty walking. The first time she came to meet me with her parents, she could not walk without support. She had been doing physiotherapy for most of her life, rigorous one hour of painful exercises. But she had stopped during the last year as she wanted to focus on her final examination. As a result, her walking became even more painful and laborious. Fortunately for me, Ansha was a talkative young girl. Right from day one, she started giving me feedback. Her response after the first lesson was that “Wow! For a change here is someone telling me not to do anything, but just lie on the table. It felt like heaven.” And then every day, she would come with some feedback for me, like, “My leg feels lighter”, “My thigh does not feel so heavy”, “For the first time, I can feel the soles of my feet”, “For the first time, I could feel the back rest of the auto”, “My pain is gone” and so on and so forth. And then, one day to our delight, she got out of the auto and walked independently, without any support. Other than these physical sensations and changes, there were other outcomes like her reading speed improved, her grasping capability and ability to focus improved, most important her confidence in herself improved greatly.

So also, along with Ansha, my confidence in myself as an ABMNM practitioner grew, and continues to do so with practice and experience and of course, continuous education.

Arti Deo

Anat Baniel Method NeuroMovement (ABMNM) Practitioner

Founder & Director, Academy for Learning and Development, school for children with special needs.

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