WHY WORK WITH THE BODY-MIND?

Understanding how the past has shaped you can be very liberating. When you engage with your unconscious
early conditioning - especially at an embodied level - powerful change becomes possible and you start to have more choice about how you are living your life. Dance of Awareness   is an embodied movement practice that invites you to consciously connect with your body and explore developmental themes from early childhood. The Dance of Awareness cycle takes you through a dynamic movement journey which consists of six sequential phases: Sensing; Grounding; Expressing; Releasing; Connecting and Completing. Informed by psychodynamic theory and developmental psychology, the cycle follows childhood stages of development from pre-birth to around five years.
 

By listening to the imprints and stories from these formative years still held in the body-mind, you will be
invited to explore: How did I become the way I am? Through movement and dance, somatic awareness and
embodied exercises, we will look at how early experiences of key developmental issues such as safety, trust,
support, validation, autonomy and contact shaped your ‘becoming’ and show up in your embodied and
relational patterns as an adult. Within the safety of a supportive group environment and the permission of the dance floor, you will have the opportunity to practice letting go of self-limiting patterns from the past and move beyond the early conditioning that no longer serves you. You can experiment with new, more authentic and creative ways of relating to yourself and others and enquire: Who do I want to become now?

 

What Is Dance of Awareness?
Dance of Awareness   (DoA) is a new approach to working with movement, dance and awareness. It has five
main streams of influence: Post-Reichian body psychotherapy; Five Rhythms dance; Authentic Movement;
Dance Movement Psychotherapy; and the experiential exploration of Awareness itself. It was developed by
body psychotherapists, Tim Brown and Clare Osbond, who run the Brighton School of Embodied Therapy. Set to music, the Dance of Awareness cycle - sensing, grounding, expressing, releasing, connecting and

completing - follows an energetic wave, charging and discharging over the course of a session. Throughout
the process there is strong emphasis on body awareness which provides the ground for our experience. The

cycle is designed to evoke childhood stages of development and gives the mover the opportunity to re-
experience their formative years of early development, explore old imprints, and discover new patterns of

moving and relating.

 

An Overview of What the Day Involves:
We will start with warming up the body to music and arriving in the space. There will be an opening circle and
brief introduction to Dance of Awareness.  Over the course of the day, we will dance our way through the 6
phases of the Dance of Awareness cycle (Sensing, Grounding, Expressing, Releasing, Connecting and
Completing). There will be guidance from myself, some structured exercises and plenty of time for free
movement and dancing to find your own flow. We will have a lunch break of 1 hour at around 1p.m. and a tea
break in the afternoon. For most of the day we will let our bodies do the talking but there will be some
opportunities for verbal sharing in the whole circle at the beginning and the end of the day, as well as time for
reflection and integration in pairs and small groups after exercises. The group will have a maximum of 14
participants to allow for in depth exploration and a safe, well-held, therapeutic environment.

 

About Lucy
I am a relational body psychotherapist and have been working with individuals and groups for over 25years. I have an MA in Humanistic and Integrative Psychotherapy and have done extensive furthertraining in Somatic Trauma Therapy and Embodied Relational Therapy which emerged from Reichianbody work and body-centred psychotherapy. I am a full member of the European Association of BodyPsychotherapy (EABP). When I discovered Dance of Awareness,  I immediately knew I’d found ahome for myself: it brings together two things I feel passionately about, conscious dance and bodypsychotherapy, and in 2017 I qualified as a licensed facilitator. Most recently, I became a certifiedbreathwork practitioner and run regular groups in Conscious Connected Breathwork in Findhorn.