Dance Movement Therapy
Dance Movement Therapy
Through dance movement action the client can feel both relaxed and stimulated, thus preparing her for emotional expression. Since dance and emotional expression share the same neuro-muscular pathways, the dance movement therapist utilizes this linkage by selecting appropriate movement images. The root word of emotion, emovre, means “to Move”.
Awareness
The more awareness we have of our body, the more we improve our ability to take care of our total well being.
Listening
Health is as much a function of internal listening as it is external intervention.
Relationship
The body does not lie.
A one on one program combines movement, listening and awareness to bring you into a pro-active healing relationship with an emotional, spiritual or physical concern.
The diagnostic tools of Dance Movement Therapy* are used in movement exploration. The goal is to develop your personalized movement practice as it relates to the concern you have presented. Your own healing movements then can be done in an ongoing practice as a means to affect change and as one would do any spiritual or physical discipline.
Individual sessions may be scheduled on a 4 week, 8 week, 12 week or on gong basis
The Healing DMT Practice may focus on:
- Stress management
- addressing specific emotional issues
- accessing one’s sensuality and increasing intimacy
- discovering one’s personal symbols for physical and emotional healing
- working with depression or anxiety
- gain clarity about life questions
- increase self esteem, confidence and improve body image
- Identify ways in which your physical being supports or impedes you
Elements of Dance Movement Therapy Defined
Kinesthetic Image-
Refers to the images clients generate from their bodily feelings or sensations and from their spontaneous body movements or concurrently with their body movements.
Clients learn to transform their bodily-felt experience to images and thoughts. The verbal feedback they obtain when sharing their experiences with others in turn, helps to generate new bodily-felt relationships.
Somatic Awareness-
Somatic refers to the material, bodily, physical, self. Somatic Awareness then means bringing awareness to that which is happening physically.
“Reclaim life affirming power” refers to feeling connected to the body, emotions and spirit. To become totally involved with living. There is a measureless sense of joy and enchantment with existence that can envelop the dancing human being.
Groups begins by establishing group cohesion. Groups begin in a circle. A warm-up may include articulation of body parts (like swings and rotations), rhythmic explorations and games. Sessions build on each other using the tools of DMT which include:
– Body awareness techniques: education in the rudiments of movement, repetitive movements, relaxation and breathing techniques, exploring tension fluctuations and extremes, use of props (scarves or hoops), postural exploration and the use of music as a facilitator of movement and as a background support.
–Music and rhythm: help organize clients thoughts and feeling into expressive action; supports and encourages self expression; reflects clients’ moods and needs; motivates and activates; creates emotional responses.
Expressive dance movement activities include:
Psychomotor free-association through: improvisation; active imagination; fantasy exploration; and spontaneous dance interpretation; role playing; the exploration of contrasting movement themes ( spontaneous and choreographed) and choreographed explorations of emotions.
-Exploration of movement dynamics variations in space, weight, and time (i.e. sustained movements vs. fragmented movements, direct movement vs. indirect movements, light movements vs. heavy movements-
DMT group techniques include: changing group constellations such as dyads, triads, small clusters, large groups, individual action within the group, and circles Rhythmic group relationship and promoting supportive empathetic group interaction ( verbally and nonverbally).
Verbalization is used for interpretation and integration, talking about thoughts and feeling, facilitation of insight, and reflection and narration of the movement process.
The Cancer Journey
When healing and dealing with cancer who is leading? The cancer, doctors, family members, fear, or you? Offering creative and proactive structures, Using the tools of dance movement therapy (DMT) the focus here is designed specifically to deal with issues around the cancer experience- from first diagnosis, to middle of treatment to existing issues which are present years after treatment. Honoring the complexity of feelings and treatment options this highly popular experiential program offers a way to experience the cancer journey through a hopeful and creative lens.
Movement, Imagery and Health
In my clinical practice in individual and group expressive arts therapy, I see clients with a variety of emotional and medical illnesses. These people are holding significant questions, searching not always for answers, but for the common threads that can guide them through the often rough terrain of imagery, movement and health. They ask: How is creative expression related to healing? How is what is shown in movement different from what is shown verbally? How is physical healing related to heart/soul/ spirit healing? What is the relationship between physical healing and psychic well-being? What role is played by the authentic Self? What is the language of health? How is it spoken?
When medically ill clients enter the realm of health and wellness, often they are faced with a need for which they may or may not be well prepared: to listen deeply to their own truths. Facing a medical crisis after “assuming health,” which is what most of us do until we are seriously ill, changes many things. Decisions around information, attitudes, reaction and choice go through major change.
Movement and art making can provide a vehicle for listening – listening to and from oneself, listening between selves, listening to the uniqueness of these exchanges. Listening is a crucial ingredient for healing, for, as the psychiatrist and artist Charles Johnston (1984) writes “health is as much a function of internal listening as it is external intervention.”
My experience shows that listening is a much harder experience than most people acknowledge. The need is to listen deeply to one’s own truths. It’s not that we don’t tell the truth, it’s more that we don’t know what it is. Our truths speak adamantly when we are shocked by the reality of disease. They speak in image and sensate language: mythic poetic phrases, visual, auditory, or kinesthetic images, body sensations, fantasies, memories, deep silences, relentless darkness, numb emptiness.
These languages can be experienced as fears and frighten us or as saviors and help aim the direction and meaning of our healing process. The task of movement therapy, for both client and therapist, is to act as a creative detective in this land of imagery, movement and health.
Health requires us to become holistic in our thinking so we can be creative and present as we gain greater understanding of the experience of healing. The illness experience can offer images of balance and renewal to the well-being of the whole person; psyche and spirit play creative roles in this interaction as they are resources for healing, giving meaning and value crucial to health and wellness. Remen (1988) defines health as “the movement towards wholeness. Imagery is the movement toward wholeness made visible.”
By engagement in creative, aesthetic experience, we offer ourselves an opportunity to integrate mind and body; sensation, emotion, image and thought. This type of experience returns the individual to a more sentient state, a newly enriched physical and emotional way of being in the present moment.