BodySoul Work

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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02/09/2025

A timely talk from a precious elder of depth psychology.

CIIS Professor Emeritus and cultural historian Richard Tarnas for an illuminating discussion on the human psyche, spirituality, and the nature of the human j...

02/01/2025

Pioneer of dance/movement therapy, Irmgard Bartenieff (1900-1981) was a German dancer, physical therapist, writer, teacher, interpreter and extender of Rudolph Laban's movement work, movement analyst, cross cultural scholar, dance historian, and dance/movement therapist. She was born in Berlin and together with her husband George had a thriving dance company there until fascism and the N***s threatened their existence. They left Germany for New York City at the end of the 1930s.

The body of work that bears her name--Bartenieff Fundamentals (BF)--was developed across her lifetime, drawing from many influences. A mainstay of her emphasis on this work was "the importance of internal body connectivity in making movement come alive both within the individual and out in the world." ( p.1)

"Bartenieff Fundamentals is an approach to basic body training that deals with patterning connections in the body according to principles of efficient movement functioning within a context which encourages personal expression and full psychological involvement.… It is the experience ofinner connectivity, rather than information about it, that is a part of the goal of Fundamentals." ( pp.31/32)

I use BF in my work to help clients bridge the sometimes heady work of Jungian psychotherapy with the lived experience of the body, working with symbols and symptoms that arise in the body.

Let's remember and name the mothers of embodied therapy!!

Images from a Google search.

12/28/2024

For those of you who noticed my absence of about six months on this platform, I needed a good long break from being flooded by the performative aspects of IG. I come to you today sharing about a wonderful new book from Jungian Analyst Barbara Holifield: Being with the Body in Depth Psychology: Development, Trauma, and Transformation in the Unspoken Realm, 2024, published by Routledge, with many fine endorsements.

Barbara is a long time practitioner and teacher of Authentic Movement, as well as other somatic modalities.

"This book explores the intricacies of working with the body as experienced in the course of depth psychotherapy. Jung speaks of psychology as being nothing if not experience (1966/1943). Many seeking psychotherapy, like myself, long for soul, perhaps even require a link to soul, or what they sense as sacred, to be explicitly part of a psychotherapeutic process. Jung and post-Jungians work to do this. However, many are not drawn to Jung or depth psychology because it seems too conceptual. Focusing on embodiment and leaning into the felt sense of the reality of the psyche, the foundation of which is being with the feeling of feelings, grounds the work in what is essential in our time–the healing of personal and transgenerational trauma that otherwise threatens to undermine our ability to function as a people enduringly connected to the earth community. The focus of this book is not to replace what has come before but to highlight the bodily basis of psyche's unfolding process. . . .cultivation of the felt awareness of embodiment is its central theme." (p. 5)

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09/15/2024

Duty to warn...

End of Rationality: The politics of mental pathologyDr. Bandy X LeeForensic psychiatristIn conversation with:Jonathan LemireJournalist, MSNBC “Way Too Early”...

06/02/2024

From the dawn of human history, the frame drum has been part of daily life as well as part of the symbolic mysteries, holding birth, death, resurrection, initiation, planting and harvesting, celebrations, prophesies, worship, community.

The frame drum was the technology of the sacred and was played primarily by women, priestesses of goddesses and goddesses themselves. It is an archetypal instrument, with power to change human consciousness, create a sense of well-being, bond groups of people together, create community, .

I've been playing the frame drum since 2001, and immersing myself in this practice even more lately, teaching groups of women how to play and about this amazing instrument.

The book, the music, and the images are sourced from my frame drum teacher, Layne Redmond. Her book "When the Drummers were Women" is highly recommended.
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05/28/2024

This is a treasure trove! My frame drum teacher, Layne Redmond, made this video in the 1990s. (I have it on VHS tape but had despaired of ever seeing it again because of not having a video player. But!-- someone uploaded it to YouTube in a very high-quality form.) 💖🙏🏼

This is about the mind-body connection, archetypal symbolism, rhythmic synchronization, and how these can be empowered in women through frame drumming. Layne is a riveting lecturer, and there are many incredible images here.

Enjoy!

In Rhythmic Wisdom, Layne Redmond, world acclaimed drummer, teacher, and historian, shares her virtuosic drumming and extensive knowledge of the Frame Drum.T...