Somatic Movement Dance Therapy

Amanda Williamson

• 12 mei 2023
• 9781789386905

Samenvatting:

Focussing on Somatic Movement Dance Therapy and the importance of self-regulation and co-regulation, chapters deal with self-regulating different tissues through movement, breath, sound and the imagination. Brings together detailed theoretical and experiential anatomy and its application in SMET practice. 227 b/w figs.

In this detailed anatomical text, Amanda Williamson shares her therapeutic practice, rooted in self-regulation, co-regulation, cardio-ception, breath awareness, soft-tissue-rolling in gravity, fascial release, and the importance of parasympathetic ease-and-release.

The book attends to key body systems in detail, and how sense-perception of living tissues increases fluid flow and supports fascial health. It is grounded in detailed experiential encounters with afferent sensing, consciously sensed motor expression, interoception, proprioception, the vagus nerve, the cranial bones and nerves, scapulae, sacrum, fascia, and the nervous system. Clients and students share qualitative reflections after sense-perceiving the state of their living tissues and easing tight tonus through self-regulatory movement.

Somatic Movement Dance Therapy pays detailed attention to applied experiential anatomy and physiology, improvisation underpinned by somatic awareness, the art of directing one’s awareness and attending gently to living breathing tissues, resting egoic mind and settling in the heart. The integral importance and compassion of the co-regulatory embodied witness is shared in this book. Amanda shares processes throughout that ease stress, depression and anxiety.

Collective foreword from Sarah Whatley, Daniel Deslauriers, Celeste Snowber and Karin Rugman.

Amanda Williamson is director of the Centre for Somatic Movement and Dance Therapy and the Association of Somatic Movement Therapies, UK and the Republic of Ireland. She is the founding editor of the journal Dance, Movement & Spiritualities.

This book focuses on Somatic Movement Dance Therapy and the importance of self-regulation and co-regulation. The chapters attend to self-regulating different tissues through movement, breath, sound and the imagination.

Throughout the book the author shares processes and practices that support participants to balance their living tissues, moving from sympathetic arousal into parasympathetic ease and release. The study of the autonomic nervous system and how to innervate the parasympathetic through breath awareness, heart-sensing and intero-ception is the central through-line in the book.

Uniquely, Williamson attends to the anatomical and physiological complexity underlying the apparent simplicity of somatic movement dance practice. How to sense-perceive and move with attuned awareness of specific body tissues, such the skeletal-muscular and craniosacral system invites the reader into a deep anatomical and physiological excavation of self-regulation. The interconnectivity of fascia, and the importance of cardio-ception, breath awareness and gravity lie at the heart of this book. Sensory-perceptual awareness of the heart is foregrounded as the most important ingredient in the efficacy of practice, as well as gravi-ception, soft-tissue-rolling and fascial unwinding.

Includes a collective foreword from Sarah Whatley, Daniel Deslauriers, Celeste Snowber and Karin Rugman

This is a must-read practice-as-research book, for under- and postgraduate students, researchers and educators and especially important for practitioners who feel the weight and condescension of the mechanistic paradigm.