Mark Taylor

Mark Chandlee Taylor is a somatic movement educator and the director of the Center for BodyMindMovement, which he founded in 2006 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The Center is an Approved Training of the International Somatic Movement Education and Therapy Association (ISMETA) and offers 500-hour certification trainings in somatic movement education. The training has since grown to sites in Mexico, Brazil, Chile and Colombia, each led by its own directors.

His work rests on embodied anatomy and developmental movement. Somatic movement, as the Center describes it, focuses on internal subjective experience, attuning to sensation and satisfaction rather than the outward appearance of a movement. Classes may draw on developmental movement, a particular body system, regional anatomy, cellular awareness, or an application such as dance or yoga. The trainings serve teachers and practitioners of dance, yoga and martial arts, people in caring professions such as physical and occupational therapy and bodywork, and psychotherapists, artists and educators. Taylor has also co-directed Coherence in Motion, a training for trauma therapists, and has worked on developing a Whole Person Somatic Movement and Therapy program.

Before this work, Taylor was a choreographer. He founded Mark Taylor & Friends in New York, directed Dance Alloy in Pittsburgh, and served on the dance faculties of Princeton University and the University of Limerick in Ireland. He is a Somatic Experiencing Practitioner. He trained in Craniosacral Therapy with the Upledger Institute and as a yoga teacher with the Himalayan Institute.

According to his Insight Timer teacher page, Taylor has been inspired by being the parent of a son with developmental disabilities and supported by forty years of meditation practice. He keeps a private movement therapy practice in Pittsburgh and serves on the board of ISMETA.