Note: Currently I am not offering the dance due to working on other projects.
MovingSoul in brief: Dance & immerse yourself in a diverse mix of ambient, funk, acid jazz, psy-trance, folktronic, classical, hip hop, latin, afrobeat, pop, rock, world music. A two hour dance journey into the territory of your life, woven together by beats that make you move and ballads that make you feel. Joy, celebration, sensuality, play, rebellion, anger, sadness, fear, power, longing & loss. Let your body speak!
Come to the dance and lose yourself to find yourself in an eclectic mix of global and contemporary rhythms!
This is an article and an invitation to MovingSoul, a creative dance/movement practice for emotional, physical and spiritual well being. It describes 8 lenses that can deepen your dance experience and support you in exploring your edges in dance.
Note: See the Dance tab for a full description of the MovingSoul practice
Introduction:
MovingSoul is a free form dance using a broad mixture of global, funk, contemporary and earthy beats mixed with more reflective, pensive offerings.
MovingSoul is a practice you can come to just to have a great free form dance. It doesn’t have to go any deeper than that. This in itself is a deeply releasing experience and a great workout!
This article outlines some deeper processes at work in the dance, particularly focusing on where you might stretch into your edges. It aims to provide frameworks for exploring your internal world through movement.
In the following writings I describe the multiple maps that are at play in the MovingSoul practice. Each lens, on its own, is self contained and can be used as a background to inform moments in the dance. At the same time all of these models or ideas are linked, so you can move between them to form a fluid multi-dimensional picture.
This involves 8 lenses as follows:
- Psychoanalytic / psycho-dynamic theory
- Jungian theory and the archetypes
- Mythology
- Deep Ecology
- Dance as a mindfulness meditation
- Laban Movement Analysis (LMA)
- A “self- supervision” practice for therapists, carers or anyone in an intimate relationship
- the model of “no model”
I have gone into these topics in the above order, so that you can scroll down if you are interested in particular ones.
MovingSoul and psychodynamic theory
Psychodynamics are about the unconscious processes of how we relate in the world in order to be viable and safe. In Freudian terms it can be described as the ego ( our conscious identity) mediating between the id (our un-socialised impulses) and our superego ( our internalised parent and arbiter of what is acceptable). To get at it more specifically, in our early childhood and growing up years there may be feelings and “ways of being” that were not acceptable to our family group (most particularly our parent figures). On a body level, perhaps it was not OK to be boisterous and loud, or soft and gentle (for a boy), or strong and direct (for a girl). On an emotional level, perhaps expressions of sadness, anger or anxiety were not allowed. If you grew up with a chronically depressed mother it could be disloyal to express too much joy. If you are from a flamboyant family there may be no permission to be small, quiet and still.
So, in order to belong and be viable within our family group we all have to split off, repress, suppress, deny or project parts of ourselves. In attachment terms we risk rejection or abandonment if we cross certain boundaries (which are often unspoken and all the more powerful because of this). This doesn’t mean that we’d be thrown out on the street, but rather that love and positive attention might be withdrawn from us, or perhaps we’d be smothered with too much attention in an unhelpful way. These anxieties tap into our most powerful needs and fears and lead to a contraction of our full self and our full capacities.
From this point of view MovingSoul can be seen as a practice of retrieval of our lost or split off parts, as well as a celebration of this moment in our life. The music and our bodies invite us into the different corners of our experience to connect to things we may have been “bottling up”. Exhilaration, play, sadness, passion, power, fear, anger, joy, longing, nostalgia, stillness. In our dance we are invited to explore our edges and reclaim ourselves with curiosity rather than judgement.
The amazing thing is that you don’t have to think about it or understand it or try to figure it out. It’s a personal journey you share at your discretion. It’s all there in your body, just waiting to be explored. The conscious connections often come later when you are walking home or having lunch the next day!
MovingSoul, Jungian theory & the archetypes.
One of the great contributions of Carl Jung was to attribute profound symbolic meaning to our dreams (sleeping and waking) and connect them to our archetypal nature. An archetype can be thought of as a deep template of purpose within us, a predisposition towards an activity or way of being that is deeper than our family or cultural socialisation. If we don’t bring conscious attention to these archetypal callings then they can play havoc with our well-being throughout our life. An archetype informs us in regard to the question “What am I here to do in this life at this time?”. An example of an archetype being strangled by family pressures is in the movie ” Dead Poets Society”. In this story the son is a poet/actor/ artist. However he is pressured by his father that he must do something more “meaningful”. The tension of loyalties leads to the son’s suicide.
A great practical introduction to archetypes, using Greek mythology as a portal, are a series of books by Canadian psychiatrist and Jungian Analyst, Jean Shinoda Bolen, including “Gods in Everyman” and “Goddesses in Every Woman”.
Archetypal callings and impulses are not about logic, practicality, making money, status or prestige although they may lead to some of these later things. One of the signs of honouring an archetype is that you will feel good on a deep level when you do the activity expressing that archetype and you will be in flow. It may also have an urgency to it, “I have to paint”, “I love doing maths/ building things/being a mum/being involved in politics/ to study…”. That is, you do it for the love of it, for its own sake rather than because you “should”. This is contrary to the protestant ethic that meaningful work or activity must somehow be a drudgery and an act of duty. Your real duty, if you wish to give your true gifts, is to follow your archetypal urges. This means a life that will involve sacrifice, but will be deeply fulfilling, meaningful, passionate and, dare I say, fun!
Archetypes can fly in the face of ones upbringing and create great tension. Others may not understand what you are called to do or give value to it. An example of an archetypal pattern for me is expressed in creative/ ecstatic dance movement. I was raised in a conservative family of football and cricket for men. There is no history or encouragement for dance (especially “creative” dance for men!) in my family or in the wider culture I grew up in. Yet when I discovered the dance there was an immediate feeling of recognition and ease which felt kind of bizarre. Having journeyed with this now for 30 years I am still reconciling the split between my upbringing and the profound sense of coming home I feel when I dance. Its been great for me to notice the ongoing emergence of urban tribal styles of dancing and feel less weird about it.
From a Jungian perspective, MovingSoul and other styles of creative/ecstatic dance take us out of prescriptive forms of movement into the territory within ourselves that is deeper than our familial or cultural socialisation. This is the world of impulse and archetype. The forms, feelings and energies that emerge in the dance are raw, alive and untainted by language or cultural constraints. This is tapping into the little boy or girl in you who could play, express and experiment unselfconsciously, before you were trained that you had to be a certain “way” to be acceptable. This is the open place where archetypal knowings are most able to reach through to our consciousness. It is also why we must be careful of the creeping urge to believe that there is some “right way” to move or dance.
The dance cracks us open into the world of archetypal possibilities. It shakes up our definition of ourselves and reintroduces mystery and wonder to our lives. By doing practices like this regularly, we become more available to recognising what brings us to life and to discern our next authentic steps.
MovingSoul & Mythology (the “Heroes Journey” as a practice)
We tend to associate the word mythology with the past and “primitive culture”. Myths are something “not real” that primitive peoples believed such as “The sky God is angry and we must appease him with a sacrifice”. In our arrogance we are (mostly) not aware that we are just as caught up in our own myths in the same way as our ancestors. Like them we see these beliefs as truths. Examples are our beliefs in “economic progress” divorced from any sense of limited resources or ecological impact, or a belief that science, technology and logic will save us and resolve all our problems. Being in the unconscious grip of these myths, we hand our authority over to external powers (e.g. the Gods of the economy, science and industry) and give away our own voice and trust in our own knowings. It is imperative that we regain trust in our own knowing and our own voice. We need practices that take us inward to find our own authentic answers, using all our faculties. This does include reductive logic and reason but it also includes sensing, feeling and intuition, in balance.
MovingSoul and other creative/ ecstatic dance practices can be understood as a mythological journey. In hero myths from different cultures there is a particular sequence of events. The hero is someone untested and unassuming who doesn’t understand or know his deeper nature and has given away his power or has never known his power. He (or she) is called into a quest in which he must go through an arduous journey, confront and slay demons/dragons and topple a king who has become too powerful and despotic. From there he must find a “holy grail” that must be brought back to the community for the benefit of all
In the dance, the generic dragon we must all routinely slay is our internal critic. Our chief weapons are curiosity, compassion and an open heart. Each of us also has our own personal demons to confront that are gatekeepers to becoming more whole as we stretch beyond our familiar patterns/movements.This is a private journey that no-one else need know about but is very real for the one experiencing it. For one person it may relate to allowing oneself to express powerful movements. For another, gentle, soft movement. For another to allow more sensuality through in their movement, more chaos and less structure, more structure and less chaos. On an emotional level it may be the challenge to allow ourselves to feel our anger/ resolve/ joy/ sensuality/ anxiety/ sadness/longing/numbness/power/silliness/exuberance.
The king we are all toppling is the one to which our culture has become unconsciously attached. This is the God of reductive thinking and economic progress that dominates Western Culture and tends to break everything into separate pieces. We lose track of the whole and the connection between everything. It is not that reductive thinking is bad. It is a wonderful faculty. However it is a faculty, not a God. It needs to be put into its place in co-operation with intuition, feeling and sensing in order to create a balanced way of perceiving ourselves and the world.
As we put reason and logic aside and enter our bodies in the dance, we connect to an embodied knowledge where feelings, impulses, intuitions, images and sensations can come to us. The holy grail we bring back to our community is a more integrated self, where these other faculties are more available to us.
I can think of no better example of these faculties being out of balance than in our current ecological crisis. Intuitively we can see the disaster looming. But because of our disconnection and devaluing of our intuitive knowing (and our disconnection with feeling) we cannot connect decisively enough with the anxiety we need to radically change course and say “No! Enough is enough!” Our intuition is overshadowed by the God of reductive thinking which tells us we can “think” our way out of any situation. This perpetuates “business as usual”.
This leads us to the next lens on the dance, Deep Ecology.
MovingSoul and Deep Ecology
Deep Ecology was developed by Arne Naess, a Norwegian philosopher and expanded by Joanna Macy, amongst others. In part it seeks to expand our current sense of identity to include the natural world. A key premises of Deep Ecology (that Joanna Macy speaks of) is the notion that we split off the sadness, anxiety and anger we feel about what is happening to our natural world and become numb and shut down. Yet these deep, raw feelings are the very fuel we need to make the necessary transformation and to reconnect to our deeper identity as creatures of the earth.
It could be said that these deep feelings are connected to an archetypal core of all humanity that is urgently in need of reconnection. Practices such as MovingSoul aim to support us in connecting to these deep feelings.
A wonderful aspect of free, unstructured, movement and dance is that it tends to by-pass our rational defences and lead us straight to our heart. In the dance we may often connect to strong feelings that are linked to meanings beyond our small everyday lives… they are about our pain for the creatures of the earth, our worry for the biosphere, our anger at the rapacious nature of Western culture. These precious feelings are not to be medicalised or diagnosed, they are to be connected with, celebrated and utilised in changing how we are in the world and in forming a more expansive identity.
MovingSoul as a form of mindfulness meditation: facing life as it is in this moment
Eckhart Tolle said “Life is the dancer, you are the dance”.
Another lens that relates to the task of recovering our humanity, evolving our consciousness and transforming our environmental impacts, is that of the dance as a mindfulness meditation. Mindfulness meditation practices help us to shift our consciousness to our “internal observer” where we can witness our internal experiences, breathe by breathe, with acceptance, curiosity and compassion. We flow from breathe to breathe without holding on, without clinging to our story and making it solid. Although not generally seen in this light in traditional meditation circles, this can be considered a very accurate picture of MovingSoul. The main difference is that we are expressing these internal contents in each moment so that they are more fully embodied to be witnessed, acknowledged and released. We allow our body to move and express what is in our internal world as each breathe and movement unfolds into the next. We bring to the surface our internal response which is formed up on a body level and expressed in movement and gesture, beyond and deeper than language. By making these internal responses visible to ourselves and others, they are bought into the light of day, into awareness on an immediate, body level. The practice builds our acceptance of what we are experiencing in any given moment and builds our tolerance and acceptance of uncomfortable feelings (e.g.: sadness, anger, longing, loss) whilst celebrating the miracle of being alive in this moment.
By connecting with ourselves we stop running away from our life as it is now. In this way, the dance is about saying “Yes!!” to all of our human experience. As we expand into ourselves and connect with ourselves and others, we realise that what we are really deeply searching for is authentic connection. In this more centred and more aware place, we are hopefully less inclined to rush around making an unnecessary mess of the biosphere. We become less vulnerable to the marketeers who wish to convince us that we are somehow incomplete as we are.
MovingSoul and Laban Movement Analysis (LMA)
I am not a certified LMA teacher but have studied LMA in the Graduate Diploma in Movement and Dance that I completed at Melbourne University. I am aware that LMA has many more levels of complexity than I will discuss here. So apologies to those who feel I am skipping the depth LMA can offer. The main aspects I want to discuss that relate to MovingSoul and other creative dance practices, are the structured explorations LMA can offer and the permission it creates to explore movement qualities (& therefore emotional states and lost aspects of identity).
In one sense LMA is purely about movement and qualities of movement. As such it is very clean and unencumbered by emotion even though different combinations of “efforts”, in LMA terminology, express emotion. The building blocks of LMA lead to different “drive” states that are more complex. However to me the beauty of LMA in relation to MovingSoul is in the simplicity of the building blocks of movement. These are “effort” qualities that can be explored by any dancer/mover. To name them, the movement building blocks relate to: space (direct & indirect); time (sudden & sustained); weight (strong & light). Alongside this there is also the quality of flow (bound & free). Translating these effort qualities into simple movement words gives the list: float, glide, punch, press, flick, dab, slash and wring. If you have never heard of LMA, perhaps even with this small amount of information you may be able to guess the avenues for exploration and how they can help us explore new or repressed aspects of our experience and our identity.
To illustrate this by being a bit stereotypical, imagine a man who has been conditioned that his movements need to generally be strong, direct and bound. To explore any of the opposite polarities (light, indirect and free) will be taking him into new territory and supporting him to retrieve capabilities within himself that have been repressed or labelled negatively. These capacities have very real applications in everyday life in terms of adaptability. For example, the movement quality of lightness relates to being able to yield rather than bulldoze, something a man needs to learn if he is to relate to women! Indirect movements can be related to sexuality and sensuality (think of the salsa!).
Some other examples (oversimplified to illustrate):
If you were shut down for being too boisterous as a child (sudden, strong, free) you can benefit from exploring these qualities in your dance and thereby reclaiming them, reaching through that taboo from childhood.
If you were forbidden from expressing anger or being assertive as a child (strong, direct) you can benefit from exploring these movements in the dance.
If you were in a family where you had to be loud (strong, direct) to be viable, you can benefit from also exploring the qualities of light and indirect movement in your dance.
If you were always expected to be doing something functional (direct, bound) in order to receive love and be viable, you can benefit from exploring indirect free movement and stillness.
If you were in a depressed family environment where expressions of exuberance (sudden, free) were disloyal, then exploring these movement qualities can help you reclaim these parts of yourself.
The list goes on.
Another aspect of LMA that creates permission is the kinesphere. This can be defined as “the area your body is moving in and how you are paying attention to it”. This reminds us and gives us permission that it is OK to roll or crawl on the floor, to jump and reach high above us, to leap backwards, to suddenly or slowly expand and contract into the space around us.
Its not that these explorations “need” to be undertaken or “have to” be undertaken. Or that they need to be defined rigorously. These things are totally at your discretion. Its more that they are potentials in the dance that you are free to explore. And LMA gives us a language for exploration and pointers of where we are comfortable and where we might stretch ourselves if we choose.
MovingSoul as a vehicle of “self supervision” for therapists, carers and anyone in an intimate relationship
This “lens” relates to the neurological pathway of mirror neurons, as a pathways of empathy. Mirror neurons are a relatively recent neurological discovery that suggest we have wired into us the capacity to feel into the emotional world of others.Through this hardwired pathway we can unconsciously pick up other people’s pain and carry it around in our body, as if it were our own. When we sit and physically mirror and emotionally attune to the feelings of another, their emotional world tends to be configured in our brain. That is, the parts of the brain active in them tend to start firing in us, like a mirror. This is a new and somewhat speculative area but it does offer an explanation for projective identification and some counter transference responses in therapy, as well as everyday relationship experiences. This process is largely unconscious and occurs beyond our awareness.
How does this relate to practices such as MovingSoul ? A question you can carry into the dance, in the back of your mind, is “Who’s dance is this at this moment?” That may initially sound very strange and a bit unnerving. However if we accept the idea that we unconsciously soak up other peoples emotional worlds you can see how these feelings are now held in our bodies and will be expressed in our dance. As a therapist I have experienced many times where I have suddenly realised in the dance “Oh. A lot of this sadness I am feeling and moving is ‘Marys’/ ‘Johns’ “. This doesn’t just apply to therapy but any intimate relationship. The frozen trauma of your mother you just spoke to on the phone. The suppressed anger of your partner who you just spent time with.
Practices like MovingSoul can help you express and shed these energies and regain your sense of balance while increasing your awareness of things you may be carrying and to whom they belong. As this shedding happens you can reclaim that fresh clear internal space that is less defended, more innocent and energised. You can also reconnect to your own resources (joy, strength, passion) and needs (I need to rest/ I need to work with that person differently/ I need to have a chat with my partner).
MovingSoul and the lens of “no model”
If you have read this far, all these words may have left you cold? The way that may feel most “right” for you is to just come and dance, with no conceptual model in mind. Maybe this could be called the Zen model? Let the dance be your koan, your mystery and drop any analysis at all (or analyse it until your brain gives up and your body takes over). This is a valid and powerful view that brings us full circle back to the notion to dance just because it feels right.
I hope these writings have been useful in providing anchoring points for your dance experience. I hope I have written well enough that you can see some of the connecting layers between dance/movement, emotional integration, expanded identity and the wellbeing of ourselves, others and the natural world.
I hope to see you on the dance floor.
Warm wishes,
Tim
References:
Cozolino,L. The Neuroscience of Psychotherapy: Building and Rebuilding the Human Brain. W.W.Norton and Company. New York. 2002
Chodorow, J. Dance Therapy and Depth Psychology. Routledge. London, 1991.
Hollis,J. Tracking the Gods: The Place of Myth In Modern Life. Inner City Books. Toronto, Cananda. 1995.
Johnson, R.A. Inner Work. Harper & Row. San Francisco. 1986
Kabat-Zinn, J. Full Catastrophe Living. Piatkus Books Ltd. London.2004
Laban,R. Laban’s Principles of Dance & Movement Notation. 2nd ed. MacDonald Evans, London. 1975.
Macy,J.R & Brown.M.Y. Coming Back to Life: Practices to Reconnect our Lives, Our World. New Society Publishers B.C. Canada, 1998.
Tolle, E. The Power of Now. Hodder Headline Australia Pty Ltd. Sydney. 2000.
Whitmont, E.C. The Symbolic Quest: Basic Concepts of Analytical Psychology. Princeton University Press. New Jersey. 1969.
