As the world enters its third year of contending with a pandemic, dance/movement therapists are growing and evolving our clinical skills to meet the immediate needs of our clients, students, and patients. We’ve had to ask ourselves some challenging questions such as:
- How are dance/movement therapists uniquely addressing the needs of our clients, in person and via teletherapy?
- What innovations and best practices are dance/movement therapists discovering as we encounter complex grief, burnout, anxiety, depression and medical issues in our clients and in ourselves?
- How do we best support one another as we navigate this new normal?
The Spring Summit includes enriching workshops, a fabulous International Dance Day Dance Party, and opportunities to mix, learn from, and share with Dance/Movement therapists from many parts of the world!
Keynote : “DreamDancing: Exploring the Opposites” with Tina Stromsted, Ph.D
Saturday, April 30th, 9:00 AM-10:00AM PST, 12:00 – 1:00 PM EST
“One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.” ~ C.G. Jung.
In challenging, polarizing times like these we are called to draw from creative, healing energies from deeper parts of the Self.
Dreams, imagination, and embodied knowing offer profound resources ~ personally, culturally, and from the timeless collective unconscious that connects us to one another, to all of life, and to the creative intelligence that informs us all.
Transformation is an embodied, cellular process involving reclaiming rejected parts of the self necessary for wholeness. Re-integrating shadow material projected onto others is essential to the work: What could emerge if we reclaim this “other?”
Authentic Movement, or embodied active imagination, is a simple yet powerful meditative and
therapeutic approach that bridges body and psyche through expressive movement, inviting descent
into the body and psyche within a safe environment. Shadow elements often emerge spontaneously
through unconscious movement responses, gestures, voice tone, verbal expressions, breathing
patterns and mood. These can, over time and with rapport, be reflected by the therapist and
experienced more consciously by the client. And explored in ourselves, as practitioners and world citizens.
This energy can have a profoundly transformative effect when experienced, differentiated, and
integrated. The shadow may also represent positive elements within ourselves – “everything that is
yet unborn or not yet conscious within us” (Jean Bolen). We cannot yet “own” these but instead project or
attribute them to someone whom we feel is able to do something that we “could never do.”
Exploring the body-level responses to the shadow provides a bridge to the unconscious, frees life
energy essential for growth, and connects a person to a deeper sense of knowing, creativity, and
wholeness.
Please bring a dream figure – or your sense of a person in your life, past or present – who inspires you!
Through presentation, natural movement, and sharing we will rediscover the light in the darkness.
Please join us to explore and be moved by these potentiating inner energies.
All those interested in Embodied healing are welcome!
For more information & registration (discounted through 3/21), click here.
*Painting by Peter Malone