Our bodies are deeply intelligent and relational, but this reality can be overshadowed by a social privileging of more individualistic, cognitive, and verbal understandings of distress and wellbeing. Yet whether we consider direct interpersonal relationships, or our place in relation to a more/other-than-human ecosystem, we are always moving in relation to/with our wider context of significance. DMP brings attention to our embodied experiences as an ever-evolving dance between biological, psychological and wider sociocultural and transpersonal fields of meaning.

Dance Movement Psychotherapy (DMP) responds to the fact that movement is integral to life. Developmentally, our sense of safety, satisfaction of needs, and relation to others and the world around us, begins with our physical and emotional holding in infancy. From the beginnings of life, this primary experience of ourselves and the world is lived through reciprocal movement. Even when at rest, the vital rhythms of our bodily systems keep us alive.

What does DMP look like in practice?

In a DMP session we might explore how you experience your body, by bringing attention to movement preferences, posture, areas of restriction or ease, and where we feel different emotions in the body. Embodied interventions are explored to creatively engage with aspects of experience that might feel stuck, or difficult to express with words alone. This could include use of music and movement props, use of images and art materials, vocal expression, and mindfulness exercises.

What can DMP help with?

Areas of exploration might include (but are by no means restricted to): your relationship with self and others, your relationship with your body, how/where emotions are felt and expressed, your experience of creativity and authentic expression, your experiences of challenge and suffering. By emphasising movement and non-verbal experience, DMP can allow space to explore the interplay between thoughts, feelings, physical experiences, and the wider systems (e.g. social, cultural, environmental) that we are part of.

Often traumatic experiences can result in an experience of the body as unsafe, where physical responses can feel like a loss of control, and feel threatening in themselves. DMP can support safe exploration of embodied aspects of experience in a carefully held therapeutic relationship. This might involve gradually building capacity to be with the discomfort of the body’s signals, or developing self-compassion by exploring how survival mechanisms have been at play in one’s story, and honouring the parts that have survived. When the body can be reclaimed as a powerful resource rather than a threat, this can have a profound impact on self-trust and confidence.

DMP can be an invaluable way to develop trust in the body and its communications. From a transpersonal (soulful) perspective, our physical or emotional distress can bring awareness to neglected parts of our soul’s story. By listening to these ‘messengers of soul’ we open up the possibility of deeper understanding, towards a greater sense of wholeness.