Authentic Movement supports your ability to express & integrate the information your body has for you.

Authentic Movement is a practice of moving from the wisdom of your unique, intelligent body. It facilitates a migration into the nexus of body-mind-spirit and accesses the subconscious. The body, with cells who still remember what it was like to be a jellyfish, is a gateway to unconscious material, the stuff that is guiding our life choices (whether we like it or not!) In the practice of Authentic Movement, the body expresses its stories — its impulses, sensations, memories, emotions and images — through movement. You learn to allow, listen to, follow and integrate all of the information your body has for you. The body does not lie. It is a truth teller and Authentic Movement helps us listen.

In Authentic movement, a mover moves with eyes closed while being witnessed by another person. There is a dialogue process that follows moving + witnessing that is an important part of this process. Authentic Movement develops your capacity to be present with what is arising in the body and it cultivates your ability to track the details of your felt experience. The act of being witnessed is paramount and alchemical. Being witnessed externally supports your inner witness. Being seen cultivates your capacity to see and be with yourself, compassionately.

This form was created by Mary Starks Whitehouse (1911-1979), in the 1950s. Mary Starks Whitehouse was a Modern dancer turned Jungian Psychoanalyst who investigated the body as the vehicle for acting out and bringing to light subconscious material. She is the mother of modern day dance therapy. Mary Starks Whitehouse is quoted to have said “Movement, to be experienced, has to be ‘found’ in the body, not put on like a dress or coat. There is that in us which has moved from the very beginning: it is that which can liberate us.” Her students, Joan Chodorow (1937- ) and Janet Adler (1941-2023) have developed and taught the work of Authentic Movement.