BrainMoves in Action: Facilitating a Children's Cooking Class
By: Elizabeth Hummel Published on: 06/10/2025Hi friends, you all know me, but you don’t really know me. My name is Elizabeth, and I help Diane Malik and BrainMoves with their marketing and support their website. I am also a trained and certified personal trainer, movement therapist, and yoga instructor. My job is to train and facilitate in a variety of settings, from performance to life skills like cooking, to movement therapy using BrainMoves, somatic therapies, and yoga. I love helping people with diverse brains and different abilities live their fullest and happiest lives, whether they’re pursuing the basic act of moving from place to place or a new hobby like cooking or performance driving. People say that this makes me seem all over the place, but the common thread is that if a human being is well-regulated and enjoying their school, work, and playtime, they’re living their best life and helping their friends and families live better lives through co-regulation. Hi friends, you all know me, but you don’t really know me. My name is Elizabeth, and I help Diane Malik and BrainMoves with their marketing and support their website. I am also a trained and certified personal trainer, movement therapist, and yoga instructor. Over the next few months, I will be writing a periodic column to share how I use BrainMoves in my work with different populations. Hopefully, this will help you see how you could apply the ideas of somatic supports and scaffolding with the simple actions of BrainMoves.
BrainMoves, Movement, and Learning for the New School Year
By: Diane Malik Published on: 30/08/2025The new school year is starting. Shoelaces half-tied, their backpacks jostling, everywhere across the United States, parents will send their children to the bus or drop them off for class in various states of energy, movement, and enthusiasm. School days create lasting memories for families. For parents, it means preparing children for a new year, while children make their own memories by exploring and learning through movement. Activities such as picking up toys, building with blocks, and solving puzzles demonstrate that hands-on movement is crucial for memory. Movement helps children remember and learn more effectively.
“BAD” Parenting and “MISTAKES.” How BrainMoves can help YOU Parent Positively and be Kinder to Yourself + Three Parenting Tips
By: Diane Malik Published on: 07/08/2025Being a mother or father to a preschooler can feel like an impossible job. If it is your first child or your third, sometimes you may feel like you are one day before a complicated review and you forgot to hand in a work project or that you have been given a new role but have no onboarding for how it should happen. Of course, mistakes will happen. Your child is unique; you are unique. Every situation is unique. There is no guidebook. There’s also no black and white. Remember that part of childhood development is transitioning from black-and-white thinking into a more nuanced way of reviewing our world. When we’re stressed, we, as adults, can sometimes revert back to that childhood black-and-white thinking. What does this mean for parenting? You may feel a situation is disastrous: Maybe you’ve said the wrong thing and the child cried, you lost your temper, or maybe you forgot something important like a parent-teacher meeting or a doctor’s appointment. Perhaps you simply overcommitted yourself and you don’t feel “present.” In that moment it may feel like the exact opposite of what should have happened HAS happened and you feel guilty. Your brain could process this as “Oh, that was a mistake. That was BAD.”
Ask Diane, My Boisterous Child
By: Diane Malik Published on: 23/07/2025I am reaching out because I am concerned about my preschooler, Luke, who is displaying some challenging behaviors that are becoming increasingly difficult for us to manage. Luke is often restless and hyperactive, frequently running around and bumping into other children and even walls. It seems like he doesn’t fully understand how to play nicely with others, which often leads to tears or even accidentally injuring other children during playtime. He isn’t even unkind; he seems to just be loud, boisterous, and rough and tumble all day until he falls asleep like a log, exhausted at night.
