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Our story begins June 9, 1939, the day Michael Cristiam Nebadon was born in Buenos Aires Argentina. His father’s mother was indigenous and his mother was of French ancestry, his birth name was Oscar Antonio Aguado.  From an early age this young child was seeing a whole universe in the wild yellow irises that grew beneath his window and questioning this world he was awakening to. He remembers going to the grocery store with his mother noticing the clerk weighing the beans. As both sides of the scale became even, he wondered, “where did the weight go?”

At the age of  six he became crippled with polio and the doctors said he would not walk again.  The patient love of his mother and aunts helped him through this affliction and at the age of 16 Cristiam took his first dance class. He brought an unusual thoughtfulness and awareness into his practice and displayed such ability that in his early 20’s he was chosen to join the first dance troupe to tour Argentina performing American musicals. From there Cristiam found himself in New York City where he danced in Broadway shows for some years using the stage name given him of Oscar Anthony.

Cristiam’s desire to understand the nature of movement never abated and one day in 1973 while choreographing a musical in Jerusalem, Israel he wandered into a temple and in deep contemplation entered an altered, ecstatic state. More information about this experience here

From that moment things began to change for him.  Returning to New York he spent many hours in Central Park practicing movement.  Bringing to the surface of physical reality a growing understanding based on the information he had received in Jerusalem.  The structured dance patterns he knew so well began to dissolve into a flow of multi-dimensional awareness.

He recalls seeing in a store window a picture of the Judaic Kabbalah, the ancient ten-dimensional Tree of Life symbol.  He recognized in this design the multi-dimensional nature of the human form.  Below is one of his first graphics showing how he saw the human form fitting with this design.

As he continued to refine this new experience of movement other insights  came to him.  The static thought  of  “good posture” and the practiced “positions” he had learned so carefully in dance begin to dissolve into a three-dimensional field.

 

 

Cristiam further saw that within our human experience the search we have had to find “balance” has been illusive. And that if we think of balance as, for example, an achievement of good posture we will never find it. As shown in another early graphic below, true human physical balance depends on equal three-dimensional centering of the whole body. The figures to the left and right of center are having individual experiences relative to the center. These individual interpretations inevitably  produce stress in one form or another.

The question regarding the scales and weight that Cristiam had contemplated as a child was answered.   The example of the human being utilizing equally the three-dimensions of space available to us as depicted in the center figure of this graphic shows  that the equal balance of weight (just as with the scales) gives an experience of weightlessness,

 

As Cristiam continued on his path of discovery it wasn’t long before he had left the Broadway musical behind and was teaching his own movement classes. It was at this time he became a United States citizen and being told he could then change his name to anything he wanted  he became Michael Cristiam Nebadon.  He left New York for the West Coast–first to San Francisco and then on to Los Angeles where he continued to teach, calling his practice simply “Balance”. In Los Angeles he  had a group of devoted students and continued to teach and explore.

In 1989 personal events in Cristiam’s life brought him to Santa Barbara where he has lived ever since. I met him shortly after he moved here. It was one of those meetings that was waiting for the right moment to appear and when it did we started with the work we were destined to do together..  For more information about that time  here

Before I met him,  Cristiam had devoted much time creating images of angels taken from iconic Renaissance paintings. I joined him to continue working with these images and other geometric designs and we eventually produced a series of greeting cards.  See the angels here:  Angels

Looking back on it, I can see that working together with the angels and other geometric designs in this way gave us the depth and inspiration and just plain drawing skills we needed to enter into the work of bringing forward the Movements of what was soon to be called  “Unity In Motion”.

Although living in Santa Barbara Cristiam was still commuting back and forth from Los Angeles with his work.  And for a short while he was  teaching one class of Movement here in town which I attended. After our work on the cards reached completion around 1993.  I remember one fateful day feeling discomfort in my lower back and asking him if he could guide me through  those Movements he taught in his classes. With this one request our work together opened into a whole new world.

I have tried to remember exactly how this unfolded. Cristiam  was guiding me through some movement and then a sequence started to appear.  These were all Movements that he had developed through the years but never had they been in sequential form the way they were now appearing.  We began writing down the sequence and creating names where none had yet existed and began to realize that the individual movements were actually in a rhythm of mostly 4/4 time a few in 3/4 time – and that one followed along to the next in a seamless reality.  We worked for some weeks – possibly even months – getting this information written down. We found that The Form of Unity in Motion – as it came to be called – consisted of Five Sections.  I remember one time when were were entering into yet another section – the 4th – being a little dismayed and asking “when already?!”  Cristiam reassured me – “only one more section after this”.

And eventually the five sections appeared. perfect and complete.  Since that time almost 35 years ago,  we have added a few things to the First Section but the 2, 3, 4 and 5th Sections remain almost entirely as they came through at that time.

This was the early ’90’s and Cristiam had started giving a few local talks here in Santa Barbara when a woman visiting from Pittsburgh, Nancy McGowan happened to attend one and was so taken with his work she arranged for him to come to Pittsburgh for a weekend workshop. Before long Cristiam was making frequent trips to Pittsburgh and as he and I proceeded with our work on the Movements here in Santa Barbara, Nancy  was urging us to hurry up with descriptions of what we were doing as she wanted to teach them.  A similar thing happened at the same time with a Northern California group.  Without these two groups urging us on, and Nancy in particular, I wonder if we would have had the stamina to keep going with it.  I have come firmly to believe that this is  how the Universe works when it wants something done – helping us out – directing us – in a super friendly, subtle way.

 

 

Nancy McGowan is in many ways the
heart, the Essence, of Unity in Motion.
From the beginning of our work together she has remained
undaunted and unfailingly committed to bringing forward and sharing
the message of love and perfection that Unity in Motion offers.

 

All through the 1990’s Cristiam and I created videos and written descriptions and in addition to workshops in Inverness CA and Pittsburgh we held summer workshops here in Santa Barbara.  While Nancy continued grounding the work and expanding her group in Pittsburgh we were looking for someone to appear who could create drawings for us so we could put together a workbook of all the Movements.  It turned out that the person we were waiting for was actually us.  I took  pictures of Cristiam describing each of the what we call the “Connections”. After developing the pictures I made enlarged photocopies of them and then we traced them, after which time Cristiam worked on each one individually making sure they matched, anatomically and energetically as closely as possible to the intention of the Connection.  I then reduced the drawing and pasted each one onto a mock-up page which I then photocopied. This is how our Workbook was created – before the technical advantages we have today.  This was truly “home made productions.” This book, The Geometry of Balance,  as well as others we have published through the years is available to download here

Most of the core group of Unity In Motion students who came together in those early days is still with us.  This group 💜  is an intrinsic part of Unity In Motion and through the almost 35 years we have been together each one has been an essential part of what Unity In Motion has developed into.

Although we had taken many individual videos which we shared with students, we didn’t have one that showed it all.  A friend suggested we could create a website and put the Movements up on line. So around 2011 that’s what we decided to do.  You can view videos of the Movements here.

Our site stayed the same without much change for some years. It served as a place where the Movements could be safely stored and easily assessed by students

When COVID came along and we couldn’t carry on in-person classes and workshops, a student suggested Zoom meetings..

These Zoom meetings were to evolve in a very surprising way. They became the vehicle for the whole Ten-Dimensional Design of Unity to appear.  Access the Zoom Meetings  here

And I am realizing something now for the first time as I am writing this. I am seeing that the information contained in the Zooms came in a very similar way to how it came when Cristiam and I were putting together the Movements of Unity In Motion.  This time, using the Zooms as a format, the new information started unfolding one Dimension at a time until all Ten Dimensions were covered.  And then there was an end to it.

Again, as with the Movements, a perfect and complete design.

We now have two Unity In Motion Movement teachers offering classes both through Zoom and in person.  Ellen Rennell lives in Los Angeles and has known Cristiam since she discovered his classes shortly after graduating from college some 40 years ago.  Mary Pat was one of the core group from Pittsburgh. Nancy McGowan, a founding member along with Cristiam and me, while no longer teaching privately,  is an active communicator and can be reached by mail or phone.  For more information about our teachers or to contact us directly with questions or comments click here

Cristiam is currently giving by-weekly talks over Zoom that can be accessed online. .

 

 Our two main  Unity In Motion teachers, Ellen Rennell and Mary Pat Mengato
have known each other through Unity In Motion since the ’90’s
Ellen lives on the West Coast and Mary Pat on the East Coast.
Here they are together in an early picture.

 

The number of our core group has remained small but we recognize that it was a perfect plan. We have had much work to do to ground this vision and it has taken time.  However, now, in 2025, it seems as though the whole vision of what is called Unity In Motion, as presented on this site, has come forward and in that sense feels complete.  Complete, but not static.  

Every thought contained in the information presented can be looked at and contemplated, and every frame of the Path of Balance that the Movements unfold can be refined, to extraordinary degrees.  After all, we have been told that the universe is expanding so nothing is ever static. Everything is constantly unfolding in waves of Love.

I am still in awe of this perfect vision of unity that has come forward for us.  I am beginning to understand it as one whole beautiful expression of unity which can be seen as the completion of the Judeo-Christian tradition.  

Cristiam discovered that the ancient Tree of Life symbol  from The Kabbala, can be seen as  a matrix of the human body  and that the ten dimensions  the ancient Hebrew mystics knew and wrote about can be seen to represent the completed ten attributes of the human form and consciousness.  More 

Thus, this vision completes the waiting for the Messiah, with the understand that each one of us is none other than the Messiah we have been waiting for.

 

Carol Sipper
Thanksgiving 2025