BodySoul Work

11/12/2025

When the drummers were women… Invocation Women's Frame Drum Collective leads a frame drum procession to honor the elements of earth, water, fire, and air in a local Festival.

09/30/2025

Simply lovely…what it's like to be a moving human across the lifespan as one of Pina Bausch's dancers. 

Dancing through time - Sadler's Wells Digital Stage

09/29/2025

Dance/movement therapy gets a mention in this National Geographic article on dance being more effective than antidepressants for depression.

Research shows that moving to music with others reduces symptoms of depression more than walking, yoga, or even standard treatments.

06/29/2025

"Life on the screen facilitates withdrawal, or denial defenses..."

We need frustration, we need experiences of difficulty in the body, in the mind, in the emotions in order to reach psychological and developmental milestones and maturity.

https://www.instagram.com/reel/DFde1GAiyod/?igsh=MTF2ZXZiODNlbmJnOA==

06/07/2025

"The addiction to innocence, to not knowing life's darkness--and not wanting to know either--constitutes America's endemic national disease." --James Hillman

Hosted by depth counselor, writer and cultural activist Brian James: http://brianjames.caCheck out my new book Traumadelic: Re-Visioning Psychedelic Therapy ...

05/29/2025

Global water dances are happening now. Let the beauty you love be what you do.

05/25/2025

This is the non-pathologizing approach that I hold toward myself and others when I work with people in therapy. Thank you Sharon Salzberg. 

Some say that if only we had a positive attitude, if only we approached our circumstances in an upbeat way, we would feel no emotional pain.

I challenge this. It’s inevitable that by simply living a life, being a human being, we will encounter times of adversity. It’s not because of our attitude that a pandemic or 9/11 or a financial crisis or a marriage or a long friendship ending are oppressive or heartbreaking. Some things just hurt. I have found this basic truth liberating.

In the teachings and practices I studied, there was no attempt to belittle my pain or rationalize it, and no one was reassuring me that things would surely get better soon or reminding me to only look at the bright side—all things we are conditioned to say and believe in the face of suffering. For the first time, I felt permission and freedom to feel whatever I was going to feel. I wasn’t doing it wrong, and neither are you.

Of course, we don’t want to let our suffering, and the suffering intrinsic to being a human being, define and overtake us either. Therein lies our work. So how do we do it?

For a start, it helps to recognize that for many of us, a dominant cultural attitude toward pain is that it’s something to be avoided, denied, “treated.” As a result, it can be particularly tough for people—including me—to acknowledge painful emotions. Simply recognizing and accepting suffering is a huge first step.

Second, remember that this truth, that some things just hurt, is universal. That means that no matter what, we are not alone.

When I’m in some kind of pain, I’ve found that one of the worst components of what I experience is feeling that I’m all alone with my pain, my nose pressed up against the window, looking into the space where everyone else has gathered, to enjoy themselves together or comfort one another. It’s the worst and most habitual “add-on” to suffering that I experience.

But it is not actually true that we’re excluded, uniquely cast out because of the pain. Everyone hurts at times. Try reaching out to someone, or allowing someone to reach out to you. Take one small step to allow whatever helping hands are coming toward you to find you.

05/04/2025

The Discipline of Authentic Movement is an ideal practice for people with narcissistic injuries--and we all have them to varying degrees. The discipline is more than simply closing one's eyes and moving one's body any way one wants to. The discipline is developmental and relational with a specific form of practice, speaking, and listening. The practice always in the beginning involves at least two people: a mover and an experienced, prepared witness.

The moving part of the practice offers an opportunity to find oneself in the body again. Some questions that the moving practice helps to answer are:

Where am I?
Who am I?
What do I want?
What do I like?
How am I just now . . . and now?
What are my postures and gestures?
Can I be myself in my body in your presence?
What is it like to be in my body?
What is it like to trust my body?

There is a chance to find the Self, to go into and through personality into direct experience through one's body, because of one's body.

The witnessing part of the practice gives a form to the mover and witness for:

How to speak.
How to treat others.
How to treat oneself.
How to sit in the not knowing and wait to know.
How to endure not knowing.
How to be with silence.
How to listen and see.
How to recognize and own projections.

And more . . .

Images are still frames of Janet Adler as the witness with her Authentic Movement group, from the film "Still Looking" by Expressive Media.

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04/18/2025

Discipline of Authentic Movement

"Drink from the well
of your self
and
begin again."
- Charles Bukowski, Mind and Heart

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I am welcoming students on Whidbey Island and n Seattle who wish to study the Discipline of Authentic Movement. Individual sessions are a first step toward group work.

The Discipline of Authentic Movement is an embodied awareness practice that develops--in those who commit to it over time--a felt-sense of a compassionate inner witness, facilitated by practicing two rituals: 1) moving & witnessing and 2) speaking & listening.

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The Ground Form

The discipline (or practice) takes place in a clear, empty studio without music in the presence of an experienced witness.

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The mover closes their eyes and "drops in," listening internally for any inner impulses to move.
When impulses arise, the mover follows the postures and gestures of the body into movement, stillness, sound, and silence.
The mover's impulses toward movement may develop from bodily sensations, dream images, emotions, and other sources.
The mover is present to what arises and decides whether or not to follow it.
Choice of yes and no is always important.
The mover learns to track themselves as they enter the domain of the body, the unconscious, the transpersonal, and direct experience.

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As the mover moves, a compassionate witness sits nearby with eyes open, holding space for the mover.
The witness is not analyzing or judging the mover, but tracking them while simultaneously tracking themselves and being present to what arises in their own bodysoul as they witness.

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After moving, mover and witness speak and listen together, as words form a path between what happened in the movement and what wants to be known through speaking.
There is a specific, taught pattern of speaking that helps to anchor words in the bodysoul of mover and witness.

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Groups of people may practice the discipline together in dyads, triads, and more once the inner witness of the mover is strong enough.
After a time, the mover learns to become a witness, at first silent and then speaking.

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The roots of this discipline are in dance, mysticism, depth psychology, and indigenous healing practices.
It was first articulated by dancer and student of Jungian psychology Mary Whitehouse in the mid-Twentieth Century.
In the decades following it developed along many streams.
One of those streams was through my primary teacher, Janet Adler, with whom I studied from 1995 to 2015.
In 2015 I received her blessing to teach the Discipline of Authentic Movement.
Other teachers have been Jungian analysts Joan Chodorow and Tina Stromsted, Neala Haze, Tamara Berdofe.
I also studied for three years in Berkeley, CA at the Authentic Movement Institute in the late 1990s.

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I have been teaching for many years and also use Authentic Movement in my psychotherapy practice.

Please DM for more information if you are interested.

04/06/2025

The Discipline of Authentic Movement grew from the marriage of Dance, Healing, Ritual, Mysticism, & Depth Psychology. Janet Adler was a primary teacher and carrier of this lineage, which is lovingly passed down from teacher, to student…who then becomes a teacher and passes it down to a student...and so on.

To be a mover moving in the presence of a compassionate, experienced, committed witness is a precious gift. From 1995 to 2015 I was a mover with Janet as my primary committed witness. I learned to close my eyes, drop in, and listen to embodied impulses, then follow them into movement, stillness, sound, and silence.

Some of Janet's wise words to me: "you never have to explain or defend where you are right now."

And other wise words: "I placed the phenomenon of suffering at the center of my offering," which taught me how to listen and follow the direct experience of my own suffering bodysoul.

Because we all do suffer, and we are all in need of ways to be with our suffering so that it can transform within us, such work is imperative in these times. I received this gift from Janet, and now I offer it to you.

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