‘It is the whole body which tells us about the nature of life on earth. I need to listen to my body if I want to learn about this life in me and my experiencing of it’ (Jill Hayes)
My work draws on my training, research and experience as a somatic movement practitioner as well as my background in contemporary dance and improvisational practices.
My interest and focus lies in the creative, imaginal and intuitive aspects of working from body.
The work cultivates presence and supports bodily awareness through qualities of curiosity, listening, feeling, sensing and intuition.
My approach tends towards attuning, allowing and supporting experience to emerge, as opposed to manipulating, answering and fixing. It holds that the body keeps the score, honouring and enabling our innate movement towards wellness.
Attunement to the body’s impulses and responses in this way, creates a form of sensing which gives space to the emergence of image (imagination/metaphor). This creative sensing facilitates depth (what lies in the unconscious). In working with body in this way; we can start to understand how our unconscious life plays out in our conscious life. This level of work is soul work. In alignment with depth psychologists, I hold the soul as vital to life and the care and nourishment of it as our first responsibility to ourselves.
‘The symbols of the self arise in the depths of the body’
(Jung, C.G. as quoted by Chodorow, J. (1999). Dance/Movement and Body
Experience in Analysis).