The central question of this inquiry is: Does the movement experience facilitate personal meaning and wholeness? Existential-phenomenological insights are drawn from writers such as Merleau-Ponty, Bakan, and Kleinman. A major premise underlying this study is that personal wholeness is contingent on coming to terms with two symbiotic, yet paradoxical human impulses; the need for autonomy (agency) and the need for connection with others (communion). Our holistic quest is to come to terms with these two dimensions in ourselves, and show how movement facilitates their reconciliation. The major concern of this study is the increasing alienation experienced by students who feel unembodied, unfree, and unconnected in physical education. Alienation or depersonalization occurs when the inner subjective feelings and the outer observable dimensions of movement are split from each other. Our continued reliance on Newtonian and Cartesian dualistic thought as the theoretical base for physical education supports and compounds the alienation dilemma
