Auroville · in person · babies, children and adults
A physiotherapist by training, who went looking for something that worked better and found it in touch, attention, and a great deal of patience.
The short version
Swati is a physiotherapist by training. She spent a decade in conventional paediatric practice before going looking for something that worked better, and found it in the Feldenkrais lineage — Anat Baniel’s work with children, and Michelle Turner’s Movement Lesson, which she trained in directly. The work that came out of it she calls Sensing Movement.
She works through gentle touch. She is not manipulating tissue and she is not correcting posture. She is listening — checking whether movement can actually travel from the ankle to the knee to the hip, finding where that conversation stops, and asking what the interruption is protecting.
Conventional therapy teaches the components of a skill: how to crawl, how to hold up a head, how to hold a pencil. Swati works one level below that. She gives the nervous system a richer map of how one part of the body can talk to another. Given the map, the body reorganises itself.
Twenty-five years in practice. The last twelve in this work.
How she works
A fracture at five. A difficult birth. A fright. The body contracts and finds a way around it — and then nobody tells the nervous system that the moment has passed. The workaround becomes the way you move. The same mechanism runs emotionally: a way of coping that was once necessary quietly becomes the default.
Swati’s question is never how do I release this. It is what is this holding trying to say? Something held on for a reason, usually a good one. It tends to let go once it has been genuinely heard.
Allowing cannot be conditional on an outcome. If you permit the pain in order to be rid of it, the body knows the difference. In her words: the body does not want to operate in the realm of lies.
Deep presence opens up the possibility of acceptance, and it is the safety a person perceives that makes acceptance an option at all. What follows is a connection they can land into — one that was never really lost, only hidden underneath the disconnection.
Not the child’s resistance. Not the adult’s. Hers. When something is not shifting she assumes she has not yet given the system what it needs, and changes what she is offering.
Who comes
After a difficult birth, or where milestones are not arriving: no rolling, no tracking, stiffness, feeding and gut trouble alongside it.
Cerebral palsy, developmental delay, birth-related trauma. Often from the first weeks of life.
Coordination, flexibility, crossing the midline, handwriting — or effort that seems out of proportion to the task.
Long-held pain, stiffness, patterns of holding that have not answered to anything else.
A small internal practice they can do without a therapist in the room — sensing from the inside, and finding more range there.
A hands-on training in Sensing Movement, in small numbers: working through touch, and through attention. Swati invites therapists and teachers to explore it alongside her rather than be taught a method. confirm format: dates, length, how to apply
Still not an offering. Swati stopped needing her reading glasses after a few sessions of this work. Her eyes have not been measured since, and on its own that proves nothing. A small pilot is now being arranged with an eye clinic to look at it properly: an assessment before, a short daily practice, the same assessment after — and an honest record, including when nothing changes. clinic named once confirmed; start date If you have recently started needing reading glasses and that interests you, say so.
What happens
You stay clothed. You lie down, usually. Swati places her hands on different parts of the body — a foot, a hip, a shoulder, the head — and it will often look as though very little is going on. There is no cracking, no stretching, no pushing against anything.
With a child, the parent stays in the room.
With babies, movement sometimes becomes strange before it becomes easier: arching, odd twisting, sounds. Swati stays steady through it rather than settling it, because the movement is usually the release.
Adults sometimes cry. Adults quite often fall asleep.
Afterwards most people are tired in a good way and want to rest. Changes tend to show up over the following days rather than on the table, and they are smaller and more ordinary than you expect: a lighter leg, a head that turns further, a child who does something new without being asked.
A session runs length. Medical reports are useful, but general information is fine to start with.
What has happened
Five accounts
These are individual accounts, not promises. Every body is different and Swati does not work to a protocol. Nothing here is a claim about what will happen for you or your child.
A man with a leg that registered as nothing at all. Underneath it, a part of him insisting that rest was not permitted — that nothing would ever be enough, that he had to keep going. Once he stopped bargaining and genuinely allowed that part to rest, the leg came alive and light within the session, and the movement went through from hip to knee to ankle. He fell asleep on the table while they were still talking.
Two months old. Rigid, holding her head up with enormous effort, no rolling, no tracking, difficult feeding, gut trouble. During the birth she had been stuck in the canal. As Swati worked, the baby’s face changed — and what was needed was not correction but safety: that is over, you are here now. Afterwards the head wobbled again, which sounds like a loss and was in fact the sequence restarting. Proper head control came at three months.
Diagnosed with global developmental delay, seen since his first week of life, not expected to develop much. He is at pre-school now. One afternoon, another child who had been bothering him for a while — and for the first time in his life he hit back, with the arm affected by his birth trauma. His teacher said it was the best she had seen him with other children. His grandmother was delighted. So was Swati.
A woman whose hand habitually held itself in a protective position. Some weeks after the work, what she reported was not about her arm. She had been able to set a boundary with her parents for the first time.
Swati’s own. She woke one night and spent a while drawing numbers and shapes internally, from one part of her body after another, including from behind her eyes. The next day she read her phone without glasses. She has not gone back to them. Nobody has measured her eyes since — that is what the pilot is for.
Before you come
How she got here
Swati studied physiotherapy, moved into paediatrics almost by accident, and trained in the standard approaches — neurodevelopmental technique, sensory integration. She practised in Mumbai, then in Bangalore, working with children daily.
Then she left Bangalore. Three years later she went back to see the children she had worked with. All of them had reached some form of walking when she left — a walker, assisted, something. All of them had gone back to exactly where they were when she found them.
There has to be something better.
What she went looking for turned out not to be another technique. Movement Lesson first, then the Feldenkrais approach — and both kept pointing past the movement itself, towards attention, and towards the person’s own experience of what they were doing. Her work shifted accordingly. It became less about teaching a particular movement and more about noticing what happens when someone becomes attentive to movement itself.
What she had to unlearn was the habit of starting from the outcome — deciding in advance where a body ought to arrive and organising everything towards it. Beginning instead with what is actually present turns out to be the harder discipline, and the more useful one. Parents, she notes, unlearn it faster than therapists do.
Most of what she offers now she explored first in her own body. She still learns from the room — from children, from adults, from the therapists she teaches, and from the questions that arrive in the middle of the work.
The work has kept changing since, and she is clear that it will keep changing. It has absorbed her physiotherapy training, the Feldenkrais lineage, and a long personal reckoning of her own. She will not describe it as a fixed method, because in the room it is not one.
The name she has given it, Sensing Movement, is a name for what she keeps finding rather than for anything finished: that movement can be sensed from within, in steadily more detail. Not only the movement you can see, but the movement of weight, of breath, of attention travelling through the body.
A letter
I recorded something. It is not polished — it is raw, fumbly, not well-formed, and it has no agenda. It is alive in me, and that is the space it comes from, rather than anything meant to reach outside.
It is an invitation to be where you are. Not to get somewhere: to be exactly wherever you already are, and to sense that from the inside rather than think your way towards it.
Nothing is expected. Everything is allowed to be exactly the way it is, including resistance to all of it. If it does not land for you, let it be that — stop at any point, or ignore it entirely. That is welcome too.
Stay with what is true for you.
Swati
Get in touch
Tell her who the session is for, what your concerns are, and what has been going on. Medical reports are useful but general information is fine to start with. She answers her own email.