The following is a brief outline of key concepts and practices that form the foundations of FE. Each topic has many layers of meaning and application, which can only be appreciated through personal experience and study. It forms the backbone of the postgraduate course in FE.

1. Pulsation – The Body’s “Metronome”
   This is the organizing principle of the formative process. In some healing traditions it is called ‘The Deep Pulse’, the ‘Long Tide’, or the ‘Pilot Wave’.
2. The Embryological Foundations of Formativeness - Morphogenesis
   Looking at constitutional types. This is an anatomically based character typology built from the three embryological germ layers
   
   • The Endomorphic type:
   • empathic, caretaker, visceral, and related to the metabolic system
   • The Mesomorphic type:
   • action-oriented, hero, warrior, and related to the musculoskeletal system
   • The Ectomorphic type:
   • observer, inhibitor, magician, and related to the nervous and integumentary systems
3. Boundaries and Form-Building
   
   • Establishing a clear sense of an inside and outside, a centre and a periphery.
   • Processes involving organizing, disorganizing and re-organizing structure and form.
4. 
  Growth and Development
   
   • Managing the transitions of life stages and from one shape to another.
   • Exploring our many ‘adults’ – young, alpha, mature and older.



B. ACTION – THE FUNDAMENTAL IMPERATIVE OF THE ORGANISM

1. Feeling, sensation, emotion and thought as feedback systems in service of action and behaviour.
2. The nervous system and Formative Embodiment; memory and learning.
   

1. The Polyvagal Theory of Stephen Porges
2. Tensional patterns in the body – the organism’s attempts to create a form to meet its challenges and opportunities. Organizing behaviour for new and different situations
3. Organismic Self-Regulation
   
   • How the organism speaks to itself
   • Self-differentiation.

D. THE POWER OF NARRATIVE AND STORY TELLING – BUILDING COHERENCE

1. Story-telling as a fundamental human activity; the socialization of experience
2. Attunement and resonance – wide spectrum listening
3. Methods of supporting the discovery, unfolding and emergence of deep stories
4. Organizing physiological, cellular and psychological events into coherent pictures
5. Understanding stories as the soma’s way of organizing a language to talk to itself – the mechanics of physiological self-talk.

E. FORMATIVE METHODOLOGY FOR SELF MANAGEMENT, THERAPY AND COACHING

1. Stanley Keleman’s ‘Five Steps’ and the ‘Bodying Practice
   
   • Voluntary Muscular Cortical Effort (VMCE) as the royal road to the unconscious; subcortical man/woman talks to cortical man/woman
   • Macro and micro-muscular activity – the dynamic of embodying and re-embodying
   • Working with gestures; a key to the formative process.
2. Connections and resonances with other somato-energetic therapeutic and educational methods
3. Formative process as a quantum process
4. The great somatic adventure – soma and soul.