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Many of us move through our teaching lives switching rooms in the same house. We shift between roles. We improvise. We carry a private mix of doubt, intuition, brilliance, and care. In this episode, Shawn sits down with longtime colleague and former student Dr. Amanda Heim, saxophone professor at Gettysburg College, to revisit how somatic work shaped her teaching and the artistic lives of her students for more than a decade.

Their conversation moves through memory, identity, agency, and the quiet transformations that happen in applied lessons. Together they explore:

• how teaching feels like walking through different rooms of a house
• why shifting between modalities (theory, choir, applied lessons, recruiting) creates cognitive load
• how somatic language demystifies the body and normalizes the musician’s lived experience
• the story behind Amanda’s 13-year injury-free studio
• why improvisation is actually advanced preparation, not lack of preparation
• the role of self-belonging in artistic confidence
• the hidden cost of never saying “good job” to ourselves
• imposter feelings as a somatic pattern, not a personal flaw
• how students learn agency, identity, and autonomy through embodied pedagogy
• what happens when we finally celebrate our own work

This episode offers a rare look inside two careers shaped by Alexander Technique, Body Mapping, and nervous-system-informed teaching. It also opens a door into the deeper conversation emerging across the field: what changes when belonging starts inside the body rather than outside it?

Becoming mBODYed is a production of and copyrighted by mBODYed, LLC, 2024. www.mbodyed.com
Follow me at https://www.instagram.com/mbodyed/ and https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61566020594221
The intro and exit music is Dark Matter by Carlos Velez, recorded by Tosca Duo on their CD Dimensions.
A link to Carlos’s music is available at
https://composercarlosvelez.wixsite.com/carlosvelezmusic/about-me.