Workshops: About Therapy

If you just set people in motion, they'll heal themselves.

Gabrielle Roth

Movement never lies. It is a barometer telling the state of the soul‘s weather to all that can read it.

Martha Graham

WHAT IS DANCE OF AWARENESS?

Dance of Awareness is a new approach to working with dance, embodied movement and awareness. It was developed by body psychotherapists Tim Bond and Clare Osbond who established the Devon (previously Brighton) School for Embodied Therapy in 2012. It is an embodied movement practice which integrates several influences: Post-Reichian body psychotherapy, 5 Rhythms, Authentic Movement and Mindfulness.

Set to music, the Dance of Awareness cycle follows an energetic wave, charging and discharging, through six sequential phases: Sensing; Grounding; Expressing; Releasing; Connecting and Completing. Informed by psychodynamic theory and developmental psychology, the cycle is designed to evoke childhood stages of development from pre-birth to around 5 years. Each phase provides an opportunity to work with key developmental themes and issues, such as safety, trust, support, validation, autonomy and contact, as well as the segments of the body associated with that developmental phase where ‘armouring’ or embodied defences can be held.

The formative time of pre-birth to around 5 years of age is when the growing sense of self becomes embodied through interaction with its environment and sets the patterns for adulthood. As much of our early history is pre-verbal and unconscious, movement and somatic exploration can provide a more direct access to our early embodied and relational patterns. By letting these patterns emerge and literally move through us, what was out of
awareness and automatic can start to be consciously felt and engaged with.

This opens up the opportunity to reclaim lost parts of our younger selves and reconnect with a sense of aliveness and spontaneity inherent in our true nature. It also allows us to move beyond our childhood conditioning and let go of learned behaviours that no longer serve us. We can expand our sense of self and unfold into new, more congruent ways of being and relating.

Dance of Awareness is also powerful as a group process. As the cycle progresses, it directs us from inner awareness to an increasingly relational focus creating a strong sense of connectedness and community on the dance floor. This can soften social boundaries and free us up from our habitual inhibitions, inviting spontaneous and playful interaction and a depth of contact with others that is often not available to many of us in our everyday lives.

It also has the potential to open us to something ‘other’ or greater than the personal or interpersonal. As we move and breathe together, we may tap into a wider consciousness and sense of interconnectedness with the beings and world around us that touches on the sacred or transpersonal.

In this way, Dance of Awareness is a holistic practice that works with the body-mind connection to promote well being and transformation on all levels: physical, psychological and spiritual.

Dance of Awareness is for you if you want to:

feel more connected to yourself and your body
express how you feel and relate to others more authentically
gain insight into how your childhood experiences may have affected you
let go of self-limiting beliefs and the patterns that are holding you back
increase your self awareness and self-acceptance
tap into the inherent aliveness and wisdom of the moving body
explore non-verbal channels of healing and personal development

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