What do you mean by "spontaneous movement meditation"?
There are basically two parts to this practice: spontaneous movement and meditation.
Spontaneous movement
The formal definition of spontaneous is: “acting in accordance with or resulting from a natural feeling, impulse, or tendency without any constraint, effort, or premeditation”.
ShapeShifting is all about spontaneous movement. It is about movement that comes out of your body naturally without any constraint or effort. There is a kind of flow that springs from your body. This is much like jazz musicians who improvise (who simultaneously compose and perform on the spur of the moment without any preparation) music. It is also like freestyle rappers who improvise their words on the spot. They often describe this experience as being ”in the zone” or being in the “flow”. And this zone is often triggered by responding to other musicians melodies, sounds, or words.
What has just been described above also matches Abraham Maslow’s peak/flow experience. He is the founder of the self actualization movement in psychology. He and his followers discovered that people who have achieved this self actualized life have a unique set of experiences when they are in this flow state. Their experiences include such elements as: control in flow, effortlessness, altered perception of time, melting together of action and consciousness, and the autotelic quality of flow-experience.
This same kind of flow can spring freely from your body in response to a multitude of stimuli. This something else can be music, sounds, words, other bodies, or silence. There is an exchange of energy taking place between your body and those external energy sources. All of these energy sources merge and create a new energy flow. This combined energy flow unlocks your body’s story through movement and it shapes its own energy flow into a movement sentence. This all happens spontaneously without effort. This movement is not a product of your conscious mind. It happens in a part of your brain dedicated to creative expression.
There is a place in your brain that is really good at doing this. This part of your brain is called the medial prefrontal cortex and it is the center for self expression which sets you free to risk mistakes and not worry about what comes next. It also opens up expressive communication which has to do with language. Both rapping and making music are forms of language. Your body has its own movement language.
I call this place or state of mind your preconscious mind. Your preconscious mind is where your body lives and breaths. It is not your conscious mind. Your conscious mind wants to constrain your body to fit its wishes. Your preconscious mind allows your body to tell its story free of those constraints. Furthermore, your body has its own kind of intelligence that remembers what your conscious mind cannot handle.
Meditation
Movement meditation has the same goal as traditional meditation which is to get beyond the clutter of your conscious mind and allow your true self to come through. When your body expresses itself through movement, it is performing the meditative process of awareness, of being completely present in the moment, but it differs from traditional meditation in a number of ways.
Unlike traditional meditation movement meditation involves movement. Most meditative forms involve stillness and a quiet place. Movement is central to the kind of meditation that ShapeShifters practice. And intentional sound or silence and external stimuli are essential to its environment. This kind of meditation can happen any place on earth. In fact, the practitioner is encouraged to do this meditation in places no one would ever expect it to take place. The point is to allow your body to tell its story within ever new and unfamiliar environments on a regular basis.
Unlike traditional meditation which seeks detachment from trauma ShapeShifting allows you to embrace your autobiographical memory. The goal of most meditative forms is to detach yourself from your thoughts, feelings, and memories that have clouded your judgment. The purpose of movement meditation is rather to relive it all through the bodily reactions that were originally present. Its point is to re-immerse yourself into those thoughts, feelings, and events so that you can express them and embrace them as part of the story of who you are. Your story gains more depth and breadth because your body remembers what your conscious mind cannot and will not remember. When we allow our bodies to relive these things, we go through them, we embrace them, we become present with them, we become aware, and we are healed.
Unlike traditional meditation the altered state that you reach in movement meditation is your preconscious mind. Traditional meditation seeks to remove us from the physical world. This is another level of detachment. Movement meditation, conversely, seeks to immerse us more deeply into our physical selves. The goal is to be totally present in the story that our body is telling through movement as it responds to the energy flow both within our bodies and the environment around it. The place where this happens is in our preconscious mind. This altered state of mind is where we connect most completely with our bodies. We leave our conscious mind behind so that we can be completely present with our bodies.