Ecstatic Dance As Therapy...

Cultivating the Body as a Friend

By Pauline Wakeham

Somatic therapy incorporates the body as a resource for growth and healing. Ecstatic dance is a joyful celebration of the moment. Both are partners in my own journey into fuller embodiment and greater sense of aliveness, presence, and compassion. It is my life's purpose to be both a catalyst and support to others who seek reconciliation with their bodies and who wish to reside peacefully in themselves.

For many of us our relationship to our bodies is anything but friendly. How we got to see our own bodies as enemies is not difficult to see. Our fear of aging, and ultimately of death, reveal themselves through our body. So much money is spent in marketing products that are supposed to banish this fear as we try to battle these demons. Magazines reinforce a way of looking at ourselves from the outside in, with often judgmental eyes. Illnesses and abuse, addictions and accidents cause many of us to only notice our physical self when it is hurt or threatened. The rest of the time we may go on as if we haven't a body at all. Of course there are times of pleasure when we want our bodies back. For those of us that left our bodies, shut down in order to lessen the pain that full embodiment might entail, wanting to fully experience pleasure can be a catalyst to our return. Sexuality can become more alive and intimate, a delicate and profound exchange between partners, a form of worship and renewal, the heart-filled acknowledgment of our vulnerability and our capacity for pleasure.

Much is now known about the way the body responds to trauma. Fight and flight and freeze, are self defensive coping strategies that the nervous system brings on line to protect us from threats. The problem is that we don't live in the wild any more and no longer does the tiger chase us and we later get to recover. In many ways though, we often live with a constant tiger at our heels. Overwhelmed the body often does not reach a sense of safety and recovery. In somatic therapy we assist the recovery process enabling clients to complete incomplete self defensive movements, and to self soothe, utilizing the body as friend and not as foe. This involves finding a language of feeling through the body and for example, slowing down enough to begin to unthaw the frozen parts and bring our bodies back to life.

It may not be surprising then that dance and movement are natural partners of somatic therapy. Here we get to support the body in movement, dancing not for some critical audience to judge our symmetry and sense of rhythm. Instead the music and the other people in the room are there to support, catalyze and celebrate our being ourselves. Gabrielle Roth's 5 Rhythm practice supports us wherever we are on the map of our recovery to fuller aliveness. In classes we experience the dance with ourselves, with one other and the dance with the large group. It is through the experience of acceptance and belonging that healing is nurtured and explored and our birth rite of embodied aliveness expressed.