Mindful Movement Talking Story

Big Island, 2018

Mindful Movement Talking Story is a workshop dedicated to exploring the confluence of movement, words, and embodied witnessing: listening to the stories that the body carries, to the movement of the body that longs to be expressed, and to the impulses of the body that most deeply represent what is meant by the idea of the ‘self’ as an awareness created through relationship. Each of our six days of this retreat is divided up into a morning of movement exploration of autonomy and communion, afternoon explorations of group dynamics in the thrilling nature of coastal Hawaii, evening council focusing on group-supported explorations of the individual psyche, the effect of loving group attention on the natural impulses toward communion and healing.

In morning sessions participants are guided through explorations of free-form improvisational movement inspired by music, silence, and deep compassionate witnessing. In the traditions of Medicine Dance (www.medicinedance.com)  participants are encouraged to find and follow their body’s own deepest impulses rather than follow imperatives of choreography or other people’s expectations, even when in partnership. This attention to somatic signals allows participants to gain a deeper experience of the shifting awareness and differentiation among sensations, feelings, emotions, and cognitions, inspiring what Somatic Psychology describes as bottom-up processing.

By practicing moving the body in community and relationship while always in the context of autonomy, participants of this workshop hone the skills essential for psychological and spiritual growth and healing: empathic attunement, embodied witnessing, differentiating and integrating sensation/emotion/cognition/self and other; supporting profound healing through a liberation of the body’s eloquent but wordless impulses.

Afternoons we move as a group into the natural coastal environments nearby, investigating the intersections of the natural world with the psyche, especially using the nearby lava-heated warm ponds to practice partner and group experiments in assisted floating and meditation.

The evening sessions integrate the morning’s somatic awareness practice with the stories we carry consciously and unconsciously. In the group tradition of the Threefold Way (www.threefoldway.com), we explore eliciting, holding, and embodying the narratives that implicitly mold and define our sense of our ‘self’ and each other. Compassionate witnessing and holding allow us to release the unconscious psychic and somatic adaptations that we once had to make to survive our developmental challenges. Together we explore different modes of holding a container for other people’s stories through group limbic attunement, role-playing, group movement, music making, and aspects of therapeutic touch.

We offer CE credits for psychotherapists, psychologists, psychoanalysts, nurses, social workers, and dentists. For more information please see this link:

 https://www.academeca.com/CEUReg/SeminarInfo.aspx?seminarId=1816

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