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, aka, 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. This helps you live from, make choices from and comprehend your life from a more WHOLE, Authentic You.

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. The mover speaks her experience, what they can remember, what they felt and thought. Then, the witness has the opportunity to speak about their experience of witnessing - what they saw, felt and imagined. This dialogue process integrates the felt experience (more limbic and lizard brain) with analytic thought (more pre-frontal cortex), again, in the service of living from all of the information our body-minds have for us.

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) developed Mary’s work and coined this form Authentic Movement.

I like to work in containers because they provide the Yang (Structure) for the Yin (Soft and Squishy) to emerge (as taught to me by one of my teachers, Jeannie Zandi). Containers are like a greenhouse for the young sprouts to emerge and flourish. They offer stability and protection to the vulnerable process of digging down and growing up. If you can attend the whole series it is strongly recommended! The group has its own particular healing power ;;; we evolved to flourish in community. And to make this more accessible to people who can’t commit to all 6 weeks for financial or family reasons, you are welcome to drop in to class. To drop in, however, you must have attended an Authentic Movement Series with me.