Coming Soon: The Tuning Board as an Instability Resistance Training Device in Physical Therapy

What is the Tuning Board?


The Tuning Board is a professional quality balancing device ….

· Suitable for professional use;

·  Safer and more stable than any balance board on the market;

·  Gentle, constant, stable motion allows for movement in any plane;

·  Sturdy construction, high-quality long-lasting materials;

·  The engraved design on its surface evokes the 8 cardinal directions;

·  Feeds a fluid sensory experience into the user’s standing body;

·  Centering and grounding are interwoven with movement;

·  The experience is that of a continual gentle dance with gravity.

Because the Tuning Board will never be perfectly still, the individual is challenged to find, and quietly attune to, a relative stability, while surrendering rigidity, fragmentation, and holding patterns to motion.
— Darrell Sanchez, Ph.D.

In all of its possible uses, the Tuning Board….

  • Helps to free obstructions and open the body to the flow of life and energy;

  • Facilitates movement into the deepest areas of our human experience;

  • Brings us into the present moment;

  • Promotes a conscious felt experience of the unity and integration of mind and body;

  • Enhances the intimate relationship of structure, function and experience;

  • Articulates and accelerates re-patterning;

  • Is a doorway into creative process for both practitioner and subject;

  • Is a feedback tool that reveals patterns that would otherwise go unnoticed and unchallenged.

How the Tuning Board got its Name:

Darrell asked me to try to give a name to my experience. What immediately came to me was a sense of ‘attunement’. This is important in the sense that attunement with nature, healthy orienting and defensive responses … can be thrown out of balance when one is traumatized. Attunement is critical for assuring appropriate and timely responses to both opportunity and danger. At the most basic level, it means survival. Darrell’s deceptively simple device was designed as another means of assisting trauma survivors to find their way home to a felt sense of self through their perceptual responses native to a human organism. And so, from this experience of “attunement,” Darrell’s board became ‘The Tuning Board.’
— Anngwyn St. Just, Ph.D., traumatologist, from her book "Relative Balance in an Unstable World: a Search for New Models for Trauma Education and Recovery"

Read also "Dancing with Gravity: Using the Tuning Board to Promote vertical embodiment Resources and Vertical Integration"

…an article by Darrell Sanchez, Ph.D. and Vivian Gettliffe published in the 2016 IASI Yearbook of Structural Integration

more about darrell sanchez, Ph.D. :

Certified Advanced Rolfer™, Licensed Professional Counselor, and Movement/Therapy/Dance Instructor

Serving Boulder & Denver, Colorado since 1986