THINKER/MAKER/HEALER

The Power of Authentic Movement

Authentic movement is a dance movement therapy defined as a completely self-directed form in which individuals discover a movement pathway that offers a bridge between the conscious and the unconscious. This somatic practice explores the relationship between a mover and a compassionate witness, seeing and being seen. With eyes closed, the mover listens inwardly and finds a movement arising from a hidden prompting, a cellular impulse. Gradually the invisible becomes visible, the inaudible becomes audible, and explicit form is given to the content of direct experience.¹

I have been exploring authentic movement, specifically through a Breath Movement journey with Dance Healing. We move through breath work, movement meditation, individual as well as partner and group exercises, free writing and drawing, which then culminates in a final movement expression that is witnessed and reflected back. What fascinates me about this practice is the new facets of awareness and intelligence I am excavating from my body. By listening to my body and giving it a safe space to express what it wants, or more accurately, needs through bodily story-telling, I can access creative, unconscious and sacred dimensions of experience. For example, unlocking stuck energy, and accessing grief that my mind didn’t realize was still lingering in areas of my body. I love that one aspect of this practice can open us up to freedom from our own self oppressions, and move us towards one another, where our bodies are able to hold and celebrate difference.

This practice has radically expanded what is possible for me in my own journey of healing, prompting me to interview dance movement practitioners Hayley Shannon, founder of Dance Healing and West Liberty of The Body as Teacher. Their stories provide a brief glimpse that just scratches the surface of the amazing richness and depth of discovery that is possible in this work. Here are some key themes that struck me:

Key Themes

1. Authentic movement invites its movers into a process of reclaiming our bodies and attitudes.

In this practice we focus inward on our breathing, our bodies, which include our nervous systems, and check in with ourselves. As we slow down and pay attention to our bodies, we can begin to integrate mind and body. Bessel Van Der Kolk writes in his book The Body Keeps the Score, “Neuroscience research shows that the only way we can change the way we feel is by becoming aware of our inner experience and learning to befriend what is going on inside ourselves.” ²

“My goal for everything I do in terms of movement and touch and relating to each other as bodies is about developing a relationship with your individual nervous system. The work that I do with folks is all about noticing what it’s like to be in a body. My goal is to give people the keys to start understanding their own nervous system and how their nervous systems reacts to different stimuli.” –West

This work can be liberating and empowering. We can break through old patterns and attitudes that have held us back or are no longer working for us. Rae Johnson, a queer-identified scholar working at the intersection of somatic studies and social justice asserts that “what happens to us on a body level in relation to others (including the embodied dimensions of oppressive social interactions) is both meaningful and profoundly important to our self-identity.” ³ Here, Hayley shares one encounter of masculinity witnessed in a movement workshop.

“As a facilitator, I’m careful not to put stories on people, and I usually wait for them to reflect too, so here’s an example of that. Of witnessing two men in this back to back dance, and just kind of observing their journey. From the outside it can look a certain way, I don’t know what’s going on from the inside. They had this lovely contact dance and then after one of them shared, I have never touched a man in that way, like I have never experienced intimacy like that with a man. And just feeling this profound release and grief around that and just realization of how intimate touch with another man is a beautiful, possible thing. That really moved me because a lot of my inner work has to do with healing wounding around the masculine, so to see men also working on that and experiencing healing around where I imagine toxic masculinity has created a lot of rigidity and how men in our society are allowing themselves to touch and be touched and in a nonsexual way. And that they felt safe to do that moved me too.” –Hayley

2. Authentic movement connects us to our aliveness.

“Growing up, dance was the space that revealed my own inner joy and connection with my aliveness that I really didn’t feel in other spaces. It was my therapy growing up without knowing that, without calling it that. It was the place where I could connect with myself and express.” –Hayley

Using tools such as rhythm and sound, movers pay attention to internal rhythm. Being in one’s own skin. We can attune to our grief, our pain, our edges, our curiosity, our sensuality, our aliveness. This work can be erotic. Sound can begin to unlock emotion. As our bodies move and energies flow, we can wade between the conscious and unconscious. Energy, individually and collectively can shift and rebalance. Here, Hayley shares a personal experience of a fingertip dance that was like a raw opening and release.

3. There is healing power in witnessing body stories, in the connection that occurs in seeing and being seen.

People want to be connected but don’t always know how. Authentic movement sets up a frame of safety in which courageous movement can occur, providing a viable tool and pathway to connect with oneself and others on a deeply human level.

“We slow down and tune in…begin to notice sensation from within and calm the body mind to start to be able to pay attention to the subtle body… Then we go into an embodiment warmup, or I like to call it a ritual, and that’s focused more on the physical to awaken the body’s pathways and the pathways in our brain…And then we engage with the feelings that arose, especially using the power of witnessing.” –Hayley

Kinesthetic empathy is the notion that shared movement provides the neural basis for empathy and compassion between people.⁴ Here is a story of witnessing and stepping into another’s experience that West shares.

We were in a group of three and there was a young woman who shared at the beginning of class that she was feeling a lot of grief, that she works with elderly people and there had been some deaths recently with the people that she worked with. We were doing an exercise creating rhythm, having one person starting the rhythm and we were following the rhythm of that person. At a certain point we just both started to cry and to me it felt like she was releasing something that had been building up for her and sometimes when you see another person cry that allows access for you, and we were just crying together. I was surprised because I wasn’t in that same heavy place that she had been talking about but it was definitely a moment of connection, a moment of understanding between us that was totally nonverbal, there was really no verbal communication that was happening at all, it was just our bodies reacting. –West

4. Authentic movement shifts and expands the possibilities of what dance, expression and bodies can be.

Dance is more commonly seen as performance and entertainment, and dancers must train and develop their bodies in order to perform well. In contrast, authentic movement focuses on bodily exploration of one’s unconscious, with a goal of restoring a sense of authority to one’s own bodily-knowing.⁵ Both Hayley and West grew up dancing at a young age, moved through and continue to evolve their own frameworks of dance.

“I think that’s when that shift happened of what I understood dance could be…as far as the context of dance where I grew up it was entertainment, for pleasing an audience and doing something that looks great.” –Hayley

“There’s something about the non-verbal nature of communicating through movement and dance that I think creates a lot of access for folks who have a hard time processing verbally.” –West

Expanding our understanding of what dance can be shatters limiting beliefs of who can dance and what it can look like. Speaking with Hayley and West, it was hard not to sense their fierce hope for all to benefit from the powerful practice of authentic movement, for everyone to know they can access this healing work. Here, West considers at a macroscopic scale how justice might live in a body that moves.

Learn more about Hayley Shannon at Dance Healing.

Learn more about West Liberty at The Body as Teacher.

“It’s really fascinating the macro-micro scale of this work and how what I’m experiencing in my own body is a mirror for my relationships, is a mirror for the collective, is a mirror for societies, and just zooming out on that social justice lens, how I am breathing is related to social justice and our planet.” –Hayley Shannon

References

1. Authentic Movement Institute. What is authentic movement?
2. Bessel Van Der Kolk, MD. (2014). The body keeps the score. Penguin Books. (p. 208)
3. Rae Johnson. (2009). Oppression embodied: Exploring the intersections of somatic psychology, trauma, and oppression. United States Association of Body Psychotherapy Journal, 8(1), 19–31.
4. Natalia Duong. Dance As Therapy: Natalia Duong at TEDxStanford.
5. Tina Stromsted. What is authentic movement?