Reaching

Expanding into ourselves

Reaching triggers our proprioceptive sense, a sense that uses a language our minds only poorly understand, pain. The language of pain can be delicious, stretching to your limit and even beyond is both painful and good.

If Play is dancing around risk, then stretching is teaching the language of pain to sing.

What reaching does...

Other categories within Swings & Sensory Integration

Vibro Accoustic Sand & Water Deep Pressure Sensory Integration Swings Outdoor Special Swings Spin Rock Bounce Balance

Inhabiting

actively occupying the regions of the body that proprioception serves but everyday movement neglects. The work that occupational therapy calls upper body mobility.

Occupying

engaging the full range of the body's available territory, including the periphery that habitual movement leaves dormant. Useful for those of us who avoid movement or find it hard to initiate.

Filling

extending muscular and proprioceptive activity into the body's complete spatial envelope. Reaching toys give a reason to stretch, lean, and extend.

Coming home

restoring awareness to areas of the body that have become functionally silent through disuse. The motor planning that brain and body do together, practised in play.

Claiming

taking conscious possession of the body's reach, including ranges that have been ceded to habit or constraint. Cause-and-effect feedback — sound, light, motion — reinforces the claim.

Embodying

integrating cognitive presence with the body's full physical extent. The aim of reaching work in physiotherapy, occupational therapy, and at home.