At 62, Kathy Weber looks 10 years younger than her age. And, she’s been taking classes at The Movement Center for 10 years.
Coincidence? Maybe The Movement Center didn’t stop time, but Weber’s doing something right.
“It’s taking care of my body so that I can continue to move into my 80s, my 90s,” said Weber, of Lower Paxton Township.
The Movement Center is that place you’ve driven by a million times—a brick Queen Anne on 2nd Street in Harrisburg, just north of the Governor’s Mansion. Beth Butler founded it in 1985 as a dance studio, but the facility has changed with the times.
Dance remains on the menu, but the addition of various yoga modalities reflects Butler’s perspective on wellness and “sustainability” of the body through movement and proper bone alignment. The Movement Center lures customers to Harrisburg as the region’s sole practitioner of Yamuna body rolling, foot fitness and yoga, which use balls and disks to promote alignment and ease of movement.
Customers range in age, but many have “aged with me” and are now in their 70s and 80s, said Butler.
“People do find us because we offer things they can’t always find at other places, so they make the effort to come here,” says Butler. “There are wonderful programs all over the place, except they don’t always offer this specialized focus.”
At The Movement Center’s winter open house, I joined six or so brave souls who ventured out on a cold, rainy morning to sample body rolling. I sat in a chair with two squishy balls under my sit bones. At Beth’s instructions, we shifted the balls father down our thighs, a couple inches at a time, letting the pressure create space between jammed-up bones. We rolled our bare feet and gripped our toes on spiked disks, because if “you work your feet, everything else above it is going to start to align,” Butler said.
We opened our hips by lying on our backs, putting soles of feet together, and moving the balls under our lower backs and femurs.
“This is really not about rolling around and working soft tissue,” Butler said. “This is about impacting that bone. You have to think differently about this. It’s not like soft-tissue work at all, but you will release some muscles, I guarantee.”
Weber, an old hand at Butler’s body rolling classes, said, “You know what I like? Beth gets to a spot and stays there a while. She has you breathe into it, and it really hits the bone.”
Someone asked, “Do you get into the neck at all with these?”
“Oh, yeah,” Butler said.
The whole room said, “Ooooh.”
“It’s a whole-body therapy,” Butler said. “This is not isolated. When you have back problems, you don’t always work your back. You have knee problems, you might work your shoulders.”
Shana Andreychek, of Lower Paxton Township, attended the open house to test The Movement Center’s range of courses. At 35, she endures chronic pain from a degenerative condition. Quick to laugh and willing to try as much as her body can take, she said she hoped to find the right mix of movement and personal sessions to ease her pain.
“I try to find different modalities that work,” said Andreychek. “It’s difficult, but I noticed that, here, each instructor has vastly different modalities, which doesn’t usually happen. Usually, you go to a yoga place, and they have the basic philosophy of yoga and the basic type that they do, but this is unbelievably diverse.”
Instructors have free rein to follow their passions and pursue their specialties. New instructor Rachel Benbow realized her first time at The Movement Center that she studied ballet there as a child. Now, she teaches tribal fusion dance—like “earthy, very avant-garde” belly dancing—and offers reiki massage and sacrocranial therapy.
“I’m very excited to have the opportunity to teach dance here,” she said. “They offer such a wide variety of things, geared toward your health.”
Butler said she strives to create a welcoming space.
“My husband calls it a mission, as opposed to a business,” she said. “It’s never been too much of a business model. This would be what not to do, but that doesn’t mean we haven’t had a great impact with people we’ve seen. From our beginning to this, with all the different types of modalities, has been great.”
The Movement Center is at 2134 N. 2nd St., Harrisburg. For more information, call 717-238-0357 or visit www.themovementcenter.net.
