The Medicine of Movement
Through the medicine of movement, we can remember our true essence. This part of our being is the deep core of who we are beneath our roles, labels, and definitions. With intentional movement, we revisit all the aspects of ourselves that are hidden, ignored, or put aside to pursue the life of performance. Our structured life is a life we have believed- or have been taught to believe- was the only way to live a fulfilled, successful life. For many of us this may be enough. But in my experiences with working with many women, I have come to believe that we are deeply inhibited, held back from the true experiences of self that are wanting to emerge from our core essence. I believe we need a lack of structure to allow the language of the body, and thus the language of the soul, to come to the forefront of our consciousness to further unlock our potentials in life. The language of the deep subconscious is the symbolic, archetypal language, which goes beyond linear patterns of movement and choreography. We need total freedom, a complete lack of structure to allow the body mind to express itself as one unit.
Through intentional movement, we can get a glimpse of this innate desire for freedom, for uninhibited self-expression. During this movement medicine, we then start to experience the freedom more often, blossoming from one initial experience to more frequently, and then more of a recurrent pattern from time to time scheduled in the safe shelter of dance class. If your true being is one of joy and freedom expressed, how can you live this way permanently?
Somatic therapies such as freeform dance, or ecstatic dance, are responsible for neurogenesis, the creation of new brain grooves in the brain. This neuroplasticity is the ability to live a new, bigger life experience by literally connecting new movement in the body with the formation of new brain cells. When you move differently, you can re-wire your brain, which allows you to perceive differently, and expand your conscious ability. This is the essence of mind, body, and spirit movement. Somatic psychology states that the body and mind are inextricably linked, even going as intricate to state that the body is a bridge to access the deeper portals of the subconscious mind. Indeed, the body reflects the qualities of mind, and the mind reflects the qualities of the body; they are inseparable mirrors. This is the medicine of movement. Dance is a total mind body psychological experience, as it arouses our emotions and demands that we pay attention to our thoughts and feelings.
A form of active meditation, this dance style blends psychology with the joy of free form movement. This is the epitome of somatic psychology. When we allow the body to move in new spontaneous ways, we unlock the patterns of performance and open the doors to new states of being as we create new brain grooves. These new states of being are sourced from our dancing into subconscious portions of the brain, and becoming aware of the emotions and thought patterns lurking in the limbic brain, the performance brain. The newfound awareness of these emotions helps us to observe the symbolic, archetypal language of this deep brain portion. We feel this language emotionally, and experientially process these archetypal energies as the emotionally-based movements that we dance out on the floor.
A very important part of our development journey is the ability to explore the unconscious motivations which are the roots of many of our behaviors. This can be explored with incredible results through the tool of free form dancing to access the subconscious mind. By analyzing our subconscious mind through the use of somatic psychology whilst engaging in intentional movement, we can tap into the root system of our core being. This can be aided with the use of Carl Jung’s system of archetypes. Without being cognitively aware of it, we express some of the more dominant archetypes through movement all the time! We will work with these archetypes in each class, sometimes more subtly and other times more obviously, depending upon the nature of the students.
A practice such as this becomes a tool for navigating our life, and can help release the psychological blocks previously unknown to the individual. The uncovering of these blocks is the key to leading an exponentially miraculous life of no limit potential. Creating these new neural pathways in our brain creates new pathways in our life experience. This is how the movement is medicine. With all of these cognitive enhancements and discoveries, one achieves a newfound point of reference: experiencing more mental clarity, better focus, the sensation of a freed spirit with stronger discernment and confidence. To know is to flow.
