Hi! I’m Monika. I’m a movement educator and craniosacral therapist in Melbourne. My mission is to empower curious humans to get to the root of pain and movement problems, and build a movement practice that is meaningful, enjoyable, sustainable, and healthy.
Her knowledge of the human body is matched by her genuine curiosity and passion, and she's been extremely generous with sharing her insights. It's also been inspiring to see her approach her own difficulties with curiosity and patience. She's an awesome human being and fun to work with - even through a time when I've often been struggling. I highly recommend working with Monika Volkmar!
Looking for help in-person in Melbourne or Toronto? Book a bodywork and movement session.
Want to learn about movement with me online? Enroll in my online course Liberated Body, my self-study movement course based on the AiM method.
Want to work 1:1 online? Get personalized help with a gait analysis package and Zoom movement sessions.
LIBERATED BODY Online Course For DIY Learners
Liberated Body teaches you a system to free your body from the shackles of inefficient, compensatory movement habits by reminding it how it was orginally designed to move.
Get access now and learn how your body is built to move for efficient, flowing gait, based on the teachings of Gary Ward and Anatomy in Motion.
Are you a movement nerd, like me? Check out my latest blog posts:
- A Movement-Based Approach to Treating Bunions
- How to Mobilize a Stiff 1st Metatarsal Joint
- An Exercise to Liberate Your Stiff Shoulders by Exploring How They Rotate in the Gait Cycle
- How to Decompress Your Neck and Jaw
- How I Healed My Chronic Pain with Anatomy in Motion- Interview with Anat Cohen
My story
My first passion was dance. Growing up in Brandon, Manitoba, I had dreams of becoming a professional dancer. However, after being rejected from major professional ballet schools for being “too old”, and “not having the body”, I decided to pursue a career in contemporary dance, and, at age 19 went off to study dance performance at Ryerson University in Toronto.
Long story short, I put my body through a tremendous amount of abuse, with little regard for self-care. In my final semester my previous years of neglect for my mental and physical health finally caught up to me, and I sustained a string of injuries that forced me to step away from dance as a career path.
At this point, with no future in dance and no other skills, I decided to take matters into my own hands and so began my DIY journey to get pain free by entering the world of fitness, bodywork, and healing.
In 2012 I created The Dance Training Project as a summer strength training program providing cross-training and injury prevention for dance students (this was not a lucrative business, as you might imagine…).
Enter Anatomy in Motion
In 2015 I discovered Anatomy in Motion™, and my life (and practice) has never been the same. With AiM I finally felt I’d found a system of working with the body that had the answers I was looking for to set my own body free from pain. I finally began to unwind the years of wonky movement patterns and postural distortions I’d accumulated.
The mechanics and philosophy I learned from Anatomy in Motion inform and permeate all the movement sessions and workshops I conduct. I am also the instructor for AiM in Canada. Go HERE to see a list of in-person AiM seminars and sign up for a course near you.
What is Anatomy in Motion?
AiM is a way of assessing and working with the human body based on how our 360 joints and 206 bones move through the gait cycle, created and taught by Gary Ward, author of What the Foot.
At each moment in time in the gait cycle (walking cycle), each of those bones and joints are doing something very specific, and by using Gary’s Flow Motion Model of gait as an assessment tool, we can see what exactly is happening with the body that could be keeping people in pain or limiting their performance.
We are interested in looking at the entire body, and the interdependent relationships between all joints, from your talus to your occiput, not just at the areas that are symptomatic. It is not odd in a session to focus on how the feet are moving when the area of complaint is the neck. After all, about 25% of the bones in our bodies are found in the feet! Not a body part to ignore.
My wish for you…
The stuff I share on my blog, videos, and online offerings, is the stuff I move about, think about, and learn about in my own life everyday. I love learning about movement, and I love to share what I’m learning 🙂
My wish is that something interesting and useful may overflow from my experience to yours, and be as enriching for you as it is for me.
I wish for you to move with more ease and less pain.
I wish for you to gain the components you need to build a meaningful, enjoyable, sustainable, and healthy movement practice.
I wish for you to have a more trusting relationship with your body.
I wish for you to understand the connections within your own movement system and be able to understand “why is this happening?”, “why does my body feel this way?”
I wish for you to learn to listen to your body’s inner wisdom and tap into it daily.
I wish for you to inhabit your body with ease, to let go of the struggle, let go of the need to be always fixing or correcting something that feels “wrong”.
I don’t know if I can grant these wishes, but I can show you the process by which I made these wishes come true for myself.
Get in touch if you want to learn more about using movement to set your body free 🙂
