Movement Is Fundamental to Life
Somatic Dance & Movement Therapy
is tender, supple, daring, and exhilarating
Dance is an ancient healing art, a community practice, form of celebration, method of communication, rite of passage process, and a pathway of unfolding embodied wisdom.
All life moves: in unexpected shifts, habitual rhythms, and innovative, improvisational patterns.
Movement is fundamental to life. When we feel stuck it is of great value to explore that experience in motion and generative stillness — to explore gesture, movement phrases, repetitions and transformations. In somatic movement and dance we can find liberation and comfort that is whole-bodied.
Anxiety and freezing? Micromovements can help us modulate, soften what feels bound, and feel more relaxed, present, and more confident. Research has found movement helps soften anxiety.
Feel depressed, shut down, numb, or collapsed? Research has found that movement helps ease depression, helps us feel more lively, find our sense of joy and embodied pleasure, feel more playful. When we find buoyant relations with gravity we find more ease and also feel connected to the sturdiness of Earth again - able to play the range of yield and push.
And when we feel scattered and frazzled, movement can be a way to come home to a center, feeling present here and now, coherence in the moment and integration, coalescing into the center of the rhythm that runs through the moment.
Cling, Fawn, Freeze, Flight, Fight, Collapse, Death- Feigning, Shut down…
…These descriptors of traumatic responses are movement patterns,
•patterns that evoke breath and heart rate changes
•musculature changes,
•and denote particular relations with gravity and the support of Earth.
Movement is one of the deepest arts for self expression and is also a place many of us feel afraid to inhabit in front of others, a place where we restrict our freedom, perhaps out of fear of humiliation or rejection.
This threshold means movement is a potent site for reclaiming aspects of our life-force that have become shrunken, tightened, exiled, and disavowed. This is a generative threshold for aliveness.
Cave art across the world shows people dancing, in images as old as 70,000 years (Greater Good). Cave images reflect dancers alone, together, and as a community, through time.
In the cave art, folks made images of aspects of their lives that were important to them. Our ancestors’ cave art lets us know that dance has been important to humans through time.
Researchers have found that dance is a part of every culture that is known.
Dance Movement is part of our shared human ancestral cultural wisdom, and all of us carry that capacity within us.
release, yield, push, lengthen, reach, grasp, pull
turn, twirl, swing, swish, sashay
leap, roll, bend, unfurl, exhale, inhale, pulse, pendulate, vibrate
sustain, flow, staccato, chaos, lyrical, stillness
peripheral, core, energize, shape, flow, orbit, pause, echo....
release, yield, push, lengthen, reach, grasp, pull turn, twirl, swing, swish, sashay leap, roll, bend, unfurl, exhale, inhale, pulse, pendulate, vibrate sustain, flow, staccato, chaos, lyrical, stillness peripheral, core, energize, shape, flow, orbit, pause, echo....
Movement & Dance
•movement includes pedestrian forms, like waving, walking, reaching, pushing, sitting, turning, smiling, frowning, breathing, nodding…
•movement also includes creative and expanded forms, like a gesture, a movement phrase, and can bridge into dance
•“Dance, [can be] defined as a form of non-verbal communication that combines the visual, kinesthetic (the sensation of body motion) and aesthetic aspects of human movement [sometimes] with the auditory dimension of musical sounds (Kaeppler 1992)
“Dance-movement” is a way to reference the range from pedestrian, micro and macro, into dance forms both improvisational and composed
“Movement partners the dynamics of the earth. Momentum, centrifugal force, and gravity inform the way we swing an arm, turn our head, or leap across a stream. In many ways, the moving body is our connection to the family of things. Rather than creating movement, we participate in the inherent movement of the planet….
•Neurologist Oliver Sacks…considers kinesthesia (sense of movement), our sixth sense, essential to an understanding of self and the world.….” — Andrea Olsen
Rivers and ripples of rhythm
why movement, embodiment, and dance?
Human bodies shape space, the inner space (skinesphere) and the kinesphere. We move and gesture and relate to gravity and Earth, Sky and breath, bone and fire. We are heart beating and blood pulsing through like a river current. We are movement and gesture. We express through facial expressions - a micromovement dance. We express through hand gesture, and in the process discover what we think and feel. We can modulate our nervous system states of consciousness through movement, breath, shaping of space, body alignment, and ripples of movement phrases - exploring our range from bound to released, from braced to supple, from animated to tight to responsive….
Our experience is an embodied experience, of movement and stillness - much as the wind, the rivers, the rain, the ocean wave, the seed unfurling a new shoot….
do clients have to be experienced in dance or movement in order to participate in dance and movement therapy?
No. All bodies have a home in motion. We are all hearts that beat. We are all breath that flows. Movement is fundamental to all of us. And this homeland is always available, in every moment, for all of us.
Katrina’s dance-movement therapy background:
I have been immersed in dance since age 4 - ballet, jazz, tap, and musical theater performance were deep currents throughout my youth. When I got lost in trauma for a number of years, I found my way home through the doorways of yoga and art, then modern dance, into Authentic Movement & Experiential Anatomy and from there to Argentine Tango and the 5 Rhythms. I studied yoga with Sandra Sammartino and became a registered yoga teacher (1999-2001). I spent 2 years in a 5 Rhythms dance process group with Andrea Juhan, exploring Libido: Creativity and Sexuality through dance.
Then, in 2006, I found Soul Motion Improvisational Conscious Dance and knew I had found a deep and mystical home. This practice is a deeply poetic, playful, contemplative improvisational form of Conscious Dance. I was part of the pilot program to become a Soul Motion Teacher (2007-2009), and spent 11 years apprenticing deeply with my teacher - Vincent Martínez-Grieco - 2007-2018 - assisting regularly in workshops at Madrona Mind Body, Kripalu, and Esalen Institutes and in Germany, while also teaching my own classes. During this time, Aletia Anna Alvarez and I co-created the Soul Motion Embodied Leadership Program, within the Soul Motion Teacher Training Program running in Germany and the USA.
I also trained in Movement Based Expressive Arts during this time, at the Tamalpa Institute with Daria and Anna Halprin, and in Dance Movement Therapy Alternate Route Graduate Training with the Center for Movement Education and Research in California.
Experiential Anatomy and Authentic Movement have also been a deep current in my training, primarily with Andrea Olsen and Caryn McHose (2017-2024). I also spent some time training in developmental movements from Body Mind Centering, Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen’s work, with a variety of teachers including the Moving On Center.
I weave dance and movement therapy with Somatic Psychotherapy. From 1999 until the present I have trained in Somatic Psychotherapy, first in Hakomi (1999— 2003) and then in Sensorimotor Psychotherapy (2003-present). I am a Certified Advanced Practitioner of Sensorimotor Psychotherapy, an Approved Sensorimotor Psychotherapist, and a Trainer in Sensorimotor Psychotherapy.
I offer somatic dance movement that carries these lineages forward in innovative, playful ways.
“I know the voice of depression
Still calls to you.
I know those habits that can ruin your life
Still send their invitations.
But you are with the Friend now
And look so much stronger.
You can stay that way
And even bloom!
…Learn to recognize the counterfeit coins
That may buy you just a moment of pleasure,
But then drag you for days…
O keep squeezing drops of the Sun
From your prayers and work and music
And from your companions’ beautiful laughter
And from the most insignificant movements
Of your own holy body.
Now, sweet one,
Be wise.
Cast all your votes for Dancing!
~ Hafiz ~