Authentic Movement: A Weaving of Body, Heart, and Soul

You may be seeking something, you may not be.  And then there it is—what you’ve been needing, what you’ve been waiting for.  It weaves the various threads of your life together and you know you’re home.

That’s how I felt in 1986 when I first encountered Authentic Movement, a subtle yet powerful process developed in the 1950’s by dance therapist and Jungian analyst Mary Starks Whitehouse.  The primary developer of the practice, Janet Adler, had just moved to my little town in Northern California.  That day she extended the seemingly simple invitation to close my eyes and allow movement to emerge while she was present as a supportive, nonjudgmental witness.  No music, no steps, no right, no wrong, just trusting my body to move how it needed to move.  It was the beginning of a transformational journey.

 

Authentic Movement as Physical Process

I remember stepping onto the movement floor, standing, shifting my weight rhythmically, feeling a little anxious, wondering what it meant to follow sensations, breathing in and out, rolling my neck, stretching my arms.  I didn’t know what I was doing, but I recognized my familiar ally of movement.  I have so fortunate to have this body connection, which has been an organizing force in my life from my wild tomboy days to my adolescent years as a nationally-ranked tennis player to my young adult years as an improvisational movement performer.  Yes, my body, my vitality, my creative spirit began to celebrate inwardly at the discovery of this new practice.

Just watch a baby move.  It’s the most natural thing in the world.  Stretching, rolling, turning, squirming, totally spontaneous, pure.  From an early age, however, the conditioning begins: prohibitions, restrictions, be still, don’t touch, get down from there.  This input gets coded into our internal makeup as blockages and inhibitions.  Layer upon layer, year after year.  Add to these inner tensions all of life’s inevitable slings and arrows—abuse, neglect, losses, disappointments—and the resulting “cellular memory” leads to a life style of lowered vitality and decreased pleasure in life.  Authentic Movement offers a vehicle to practice allowing our life force, our authentic self, to be expressed through natural intrinsic movement, breath, and sound.

 

Authentic Movement as Personal Healing Process

Of course, on that day in 1986, it did not take me long to enter deeper realms of experience, almost like diving down into the ocean to a sunken ship and finding old skeletons and lost treasures.  Following my body’s lead, I soon found myself down on the floor, knees up to chest, fetal, rolling, rocking, soothing some faintly-felt old sense of pain, of loss. The great thing was that my mind did not have to understand or make a story.  The instructions had been clear: surrender to your body’s sensations and impulses.  If a story or memory comes from the movement, fine, but no need to look for one.  Trust your body.  Over the years, that simple instruction, to trust my body, has given me an entryway into unconscious material stored in my cells so that it could be exposed to the light of day, processed on a bone-deep level, and healed.  The depth and profundity of my own psychological healing through this process still astonishes me:  issues of undermothering, sexual abuse, anger, grief, fears.  Yes, my psyche joined in the celebration at discovering Authentic Movement.

Many of us learn to “leave our bodies” as a way to avoid discomfort, sadness, pain, the usual suspects.  We anesthetize ourselves.  We analyze, we become prematurely spiritual in an attempt to bypass the “darker” corners of our psyche.  We distract ourselves through drink, drugs, TV, food, sex, work;  the list is endless.  We form body armor.  By freezing or numbing our bodies, we don’t have to feel what hurts.  But in the process we also keep ourselves from feeling what gives pleasure and joy.  Cut off one and we cut off the other as well.  Authentic Movement offers a safe and supportive structure to encounter our body and all that may be dwelling there.  We learn to listen to and trust this unfolding process.

 

Authentic Movement as Spiritual Process

As I lay on that floor in 1986, trusted my body and allowed it to express itself without self-criticism, expectation, or story, a sense grew in me of some deeper current moving in and through me, a river of life force, a stream of vitality, Spirit.  It’s not an easy thing to let go of our mind’s control over our movements.  If we know or decide how we are going to move, we are not truly listening to the cellular promptings in this moment.  

It can be downright scary to trust the body’s wisdom to take us into the unknown. 

Through Authentic Movement, our consciousness, our inner witness, is developed.  We swim in a river of moments, focusing our attention on the felt-sense of this particular moment and allowing it expression through movement (or stillness, since we may always choose not to move).  For me it is a perfect blend of my primary two spiritual paths:  Vipassana meditation, with its emphasis on mindfulness, still and focused attention in this moment, accepting what arises without judgment or analysis; and the Sufi path, a path of surrender, heartfulness, merging with the Other, disappearing into the ocean.  Authentic Movement helps me practice being fully awake and present in each moment while moving in the world and relating to others. 

Who is drawn to Authentic Movement?  Some are called by the opportunity to befriend the body, to learn its language, to awaken vitality, to release long-held tension, to become more fully alive, to regain pleasure in simple moving.  Some are called by the depth and profundity of psychological healing that occurs as a natural phenomenon when Authentic Movement is used as a regular practice.  Others are called by the richness of this form as a spiritual practice, a place to experience being present moment-by-moment even as our bodies move through space.  It provides a structure to develop our inner witness, as we observe our unfolding body process without judging, manipulating, or controlling.

For me, Authentic Movement is like a loom, the framework for the various threads of my life to be woven together into an authentic reflection of my core being.  It satisfies my physical, emotional, creative, relational, and spiritual needs, and serves as a pathway, a vehicle, and a sanctuary.  The many streams of my inner life can dance in and out of each other and eventually come together as one mighty river on the way to the ocean, to Wholeness, to Presence.