Professional Impact – Moira Dempsey
Moira became aware of the power of reflexes through her work in educational kinesiology and as a licensed Brain Gym instructor since 1997. The discipline looks at the influence of physical movement on cognitive processes, with a goal of elevating learning outcomes. She built upon her wholistic toolkit as a Touch for Health instructor as well, focusing on energy and postural rebalancing through muscle testing.
While working in an English language private school, she found elements of kinesiology to have a profound impact on children who struggled with focus in the classroom. Moira recalls a young boy who had been disruptive, sent to her for additional support. She started to draw connections between his state of ‘overwhelm’ and an immature Moro reflex. The kinesiology-based movement was impactful, and in hindsight, she recalls the moment as critical in her understanding the ‘why’ behind reflex work.
In 2003, Moira met a Swedish psychiatrist, Dr Harald Blomberg at a camp for children with special needs. She was interested in the work he was doing, as the children at the camp always seemed so happy after sessions with him and his colleague. He had first learned these seemingly simple, rhythmic based movement from Kirsten Linde, who had begun to put together her program in 1970s. Moira asked Harald to come to Singapore, where she was living at the time, to teach this method. After this she began to work with Harald to refine andexpand the information, which grew into Rhythmic Movement Training.
“You can add rhythmic movement to what you do as a therapist. It doesn’t detract from what it is that you already know, it adds to it,” says Moira. “On the surface RMTi looks simple but it is really not. It’s how I’ve put the program together that makes it achievable.”
After returning to her hometown of Melbourne Australia in 2007, Moira formalized RMTi into an organization with a training and certification program. She continued to travel to conferences for educational kinesiology, meeting the request to teach in several cities in the U.S. as interest in rhythmic movement spread. Today, there are certified RMTi instructors in every continent but Antarctica.
Moira continues to work as a teacher and as a mentor to certified RMTi instructors globally. Her latest course, Mastering RMTi, is an intentional revisiting of the ‘why’ that first drew her to educational kinesiology and reflexes.
In this course, taught at Thrive this weekend, Moira makes an important point to emphasize the sum of the factors that contribute to a condition, not just genetics. She urges her students, each of whom she sees as her clients, to think more deeply about these factors.
“The biggest influence is on the epigenic level. Total Load Theory says the system only has so much that it can deal with before it experiences disfunction,” Moira says. “In this course, I wanted to introduce people to the idea that multiple factors contribute to behavioral challenges. Some people are built with a lot of resources to meet that load, be it environmental, diet, etc. Epigenetics and in some ways our reflexes speak to nature’s predisposition. When we’re doing the movements, we’re supporting how we perceive, understand and interact with the world.”
