Dance movement therapy: how to know and change yourself through movement

2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44

Your plasticity and manner of movement directly affect your self-esteem and emotional responses. You can learn and change your personality with the help of natural dance.

You can't help but be able to dance. This is the same as not being able to run or jump. Yes, you may not be able to dance rumba or salsa, but you can dance. You don't have to learn this. This is a natural activity of our body.

People danced around the fire long before the first dance styles were invented. One-year-old kids dance to the music - squat, spin around themselves, wave their arms. They have not learned to dance anywhere, they already know how. Same as you.

Why is it important to dance

Dance is able to influence not only the body. He can change your thoughts, attitudes towards yourself and others.

Have you ever noticed that all emotions are immediately reflected on the body, and the position of the body affects how you feel? Here's a great story by social psychologist Amy Cuddy about it.

Our body language determines how we think about ourselves. It depends not only on others, but also on ourselves. The body changes consciousness.

Amy Cuddy

Moreover, body behavior is directly related to thinking, feelings and sensations. Moshe Feldenkrais's book Awareness Through Movement: Twelve Practical Lessons mentions the inextricable connection between muscle contractions and feelings.

Moshe Feldenkrais is an engineer, psychologist, founder of the system of human development through movement.

Behavior is the mobilization of muscles, sensations, feelings, and thinking. Theoretically, each of the components can be used as the main one. But muscles play such an important role that if you exclude their patterns in the motor cortex, the rest of the components of this action disintegrate.

Feldenkrais notes that the motor cortex, which is responsible for muscle contraction in the body, is in close proximity to the structures that govern thinking and feeling. Due to this location, as well as the diffusion and spread of the process in the brain, changes in the motor part cause changes in thinking and feelings.

In addition, the body is able to remember the positions in which it spends most of its time. If you often experience negative emotions, they freeze in the body and turn into movement patterns. If you are constantly experiencing fear, insecurity, embarrassment, you shrink, pull your head into your shoulders, slouch. The muscles responsible for these positions get used to being constantly tense. To relax them, you have to make a conscious effort.

It turns out a vicious circle - emotions form muscle clamps, constant tension feeds emotions, and you can no longer get rid of this situation so easily.

The good news is that this way you can not only get a negative habit, but also fix it.

A fundamental change in the basis of the unit integration pattern will break the bond of the whole. In such conditions, it is easier to change thinking and feelings: the habit has lost its main support, change has become possible.

Moshe Feldenkrais

The body cannot lie

We pay so much attention to verbal communication, while 60 to 80% of the information is transmitted non-verbally. This means that all muscle clamps directly affect how other people perceive us. You can lie with words, but the body does not lie, and others read it.

It is much worse when you start lying to yourself without realizing it. Social attitudes that hinder you and the fear learned in deep childhood - all this forms a picture of yourself, creates psychological blocks and limits your potential.

To understand what prevents you from living, and to get rid of it, dance will come in handy - a real authentic movement, without memorized schemes and patterns.

Natural dance to know yourself

Body movements reveal who you are and what you think of yourself, and natural dance tells your story.

Why not just go dancing? Any dance is great if it brings you pleasure. Moreover, through changing muscle patterns, you can change your character. You can choose any dance direction.

But all dance styles have one significant drawback compared to authentic movement - they don't tell you anything about you.

We can observe how natural practice gradually gives way to acquired methods. Society generally denies the individual the right to use the natural method, forcing him to master the accepted method of action, and only then allows him to work.

Moshe Feldenkrais

The natural method reveals your personality and allows you to get to the bottom of your problems. This is the moment when movement turns into psychotherapy and a way of knowing yourself.

How to know and change yourself through movement

There is a special area of psychotherapy - dance movement therapy (TDT). And authentic (natural) movement is part of it.

If your city has courses in TDT or Authentic Movement, do it with professionals. If this is not possible, and you want to try it, we will show you how to get started.

Dance analysis

In authentic dance, it is important to monitor your emotional state, how the movements are reflected in feelings. This is a kind of meditation that requires complete concentration.

You can start with some kind of experience or focus on your feelings for a person, attitude to work, hobby, whatever. Thought will generate movement.

You can disassemble the session into several steps:

• Concentration on inner sensations.
• Choice of vivid experience and movement.
• If a particular movement arises, you concentrate on it, repeat it, intensifying the emotion that it evokes.

Let's look at an example. You begin to move with the thought of a relationship with a person, you notice a sharp chopping motion with your hands from top to bottom. You repeat this movement, watching what emotions it evokes - rejection, rejection, anger.

You are pulling latent emotions out of your subconscious. In addition, by experiencing emotions in dance, you release repressed experiences that can affect your life - create fears, keep you from moving forward.

If you are not yet ready for a session with another person, you can record your dance on camera and then analyze it.

Pair therapy

Even more interesting and effective is a lesson in pairs, where one person dances, and the other observes. This is the basic structure of an authentic movement, consisting of the mover and the witness.

The witness performs several functions:

• Provides security. During the dance, everything is allowed - you can look around, in the mirror, only up or down, move with your eyes closed. You can move by jumping, crawling on the floor, and sharply moving in different directions. It is clear that in such conditions you can bump into something, fall or crash into nearby objects. Therefore, one of the functions of a witness is to keep you safe.
• Gives feedback. While driving, you can plunge into the unconscious, your emotions and sensations and not track any connections or side emotions. The witness should be sensitive and not lose focus on your movement, so that after the session he can describe what happened, what feelings arose in response to your dance.

At the same time, the witness should not make specific judgments about your movement or about any parts of the dance. After the session, you can discuss the dance.

Let's say you say what you felt or imagined at the moment when you slowly crawled across the floor, and you ask a witness what associations or feelings this movement aroused in him. Together, you can create a more accurate picture of what is happening. Someone else's vision can give you interesting thoughts.

Just do not force a person who is not ready for this to be a witness. You may encounter criticism, misunderstanding, lack of empathy and concentration.

Who is the authentic movement for?

This practice is not for everyone. On the one hand, this is not a dance in the general sense of the word, but rather a psychotherapy in motion. On the other hand, this is dance in its original form - the expression of emotions through plasticity, revealing oneself in motion.

An authentic movement will do:

• Those who have poor control over their bodies.
• People who want to learn more about themselves, remove psychological blocks, experience emotions driven deep into themselves.
• Dancers who want to express their emotions in dance, and not live someone else's, discover new ways of plastic expression.

To dance, you do not need the ability to sit on a split, an ideal sense of rhythm, an athletic physique, knowledge and skills. All it takes is your body, emotions and music. Play music, drum sounds, metronome, or listen to silence. Make a few movements and let emotions and sensations guide your body. Dance.