INTRODUCTION TO THE COURSE
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Body Wisdom Dance Core Skills Part 2 welcomes psychotherapists, coaches, facilitators, body workers, embodiment teachers (e.g. yoga teachers). It will offer conscious dance inspirations and ideas to enhance existing therapeutic skills for both clients and group work.
The journey of self discovery whether through psychotherapy, yoga, dance or any other embodied practice can be seen as one that leads us back home to ourselves rather than how to solve the problems that we think we have. It is a journey of integration of life that embraces how we live within our body, mind and emotional world, how we recreate ourselves moment to moment, through our sensations, postures and thoughts. We can say that we are healthy when we free up fixed / rigid ways of being, thinking and doing into greater freedom, energy and aliveness.
Conscious movement is a powerful and direct way to access and explore our interior landscape. During this course we will directly activate embodied awareness through dance / movement practices alongside related Inquiries and sharing with each other. Turning towards our body to explore the ways we move and feel, extends our capacity to be with what we find, discover our bodies inherent wisdom and be open to everything. The practice is exhilarating, joyous and transformative.
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COURSE SCHEDULE
Week 1 - Coming home to the body - Aspects of Embodied Listening
Our body speaks to us all the time in the most precise and intelligent ways. Yet its language is radically different to that of our mind, expressing its wisdom through the language of posture, sensations, embodied felt sense, body tensions and symptoms, the ways we inhabit space, through body tone - aliveness, numbness, collapse or over activation. Through the dance we can explore somatic patterns that express as shapes, rhythms and the unfolding choreography of our movements.
Acceptance and welcome - Listen from the heart
Mindfulness - Embodied Listening, being with what is
Earth - Compassion + ground as resource
Embodied flow as resource
Centring as resource - how near or far we are from our centre?
Grounding as resource - recognising over-grounded / under-grounded
Embodied balance of aliveness, awake attention and relaxation
Witnessing + Heart Inquiry
Week 2 - Polarities
Everything that is alive pulsates; from the cell to the galaxy. All energy is fundamentally vibratory, and pulsates from contraction to expansion. Our body and life energy compose a structure with many pulsations and polarities. Some pulsations can be seen, like our breathing, or felt like our heart beating and others that arise out of conscious awareness.
What is Neuroception
What is the Window of Tolerance?
Getting to know the condition of our Nervous system + survival responses
How do we recognise and integrate trauma in the body?
Coherence in relationship - self-regulation, co-regulation, dis-regulation
Resources to down and up-regulate when in hyper and hypo states
Pendulation and Anchoring
Air - Breath as resource, helping frozen parts of the body come alive.
Week 4 - Contact, The Relational Field and The Web of Life
We are mutually interdependent and constantly in relatedness with the world around us. A dynamic flow of interchange arises in the ‘relational field’ between self, other and world. As humans we seek and need other beings to know the nature of our own being. We long for a nourishing quality of being-to-being interconnection such that our relationships are imbued with compassionate connection, generous and respectful intimacy and creative, vitality and intentional action.
Mindfulness in relationship as a fluid inter-related flow of awareness
Flow of inward and outward attention, Reaching In, Reaching out
Deepening Listening and Relational style - Yin / Yang, open / directive .
Somatic transference and counter transference
What is our sense of self and how do we meet another?
Exploration of Channels of Contact between therapist and client / self and other
- Sound, which includes language, styles of listening and voice tone;
- Eye Contact, both looking out and being seen
- Contact with the Ground - legs, systems of support and posture
- Contact through hands and feet
Week 5 - Boundaries and Reaching out (Proximity)
Healthy relationships require us to know a dynamic balance of groundedness and safety within ourself and at the same time hold and openness to contact, connection and openness with the other. When we are free enough from early attachment experiences we naturally know how to engage in connection and intimacy with our own body and in relationship with others, we have a healthy sense of self and we know embodied healthy boundary.
Exploration of our ability to reach out, connect and make contact
Quality of eye contact - Over-focused / under-focused, present or closing down
Exploration of Boundaries
Opening to the flow of aliveness in relationship
Ability to presence our needs in relationship
Yin / Yang, passive / Active, open / directive
Week 6 - Sense of Self, Self-Sates and Somatic constellations
Our life experience combines with our personal history to form a unique shape or self-sense. This shape colours our daily experience of our body, our perceptions, the ways we think, what we feel, and how we see the world. ‘We see the world not as it is but as we are’ - Anaïs Nin. This ‘shape’ contains a number of self-states / parts / voices, that arise from the various life challenges, traumas and survival triumphs we have navigated to survive and thrive as best as possible. As practitioners it is important to develop understanding and insight into the dynamics and structure of the psyche as a key to developing radical compassion for both our wounds, imperfections, gifts and resilience.
How and what shapes our psyche - What is Sense of Self and Ego?
6 Relational Fields’ of influence on the ‘Shape’ of our Psyche - personal history, soul / karma, ancestors, collective community, collective cultural, Life environment
Working with self states through moving, somatic constellations.
How to develop compassion, self-love and forgiveness
What is integration?