Exploring Embodied Practices

Discovering through drawing organised this one day symposium in April 2018 see http://www.drawsymposium.co.uk.  I presented a paper on embodied practices which Im happy to share  – you can email me via movementinmind.org.

Here is an excerpt:

‘Working among these complexities, balancing and rebalancing the felt and the construed, the given and the made, has been at the centre of my embodied professional practice as a psychotherapist, psychologist and Alexander teacher over many years. 

 How then in drawing might these complexities be re-visited, re-experienced, and re-interrogated?  

Clinical practice requires an immersion in a mutual performance.  Questions emerge in conversation through embodied response, chosen from a repertoire, framed by theory, by clinical experience and of course by feedback. New articulation and new direction becomes possible through reciprocal reflection.

Ways are found to suspend the usual ways of going about things, of thinking or judging,  methods are developed to get beyond preconceptions, to work with the moment – in the moment – no more and no less. 

Treading lightly, a dance can evolve through re-balancing of intention, a shifting of weight, and an opening of attention to process.  

Concerns shift and boundaries are blurred between old dichotomies; subject object, observer participant, inside outside, presence absence, process outcome.

At their best these journeys are experienced as mutual, transactional, connecting, surprising, extending. 

Such embodied practices demand a continuing reflection in and on action. Through careful attention, the practitioner develops a capacity to integrate information through their whole person and to engage a fully open, and present self.   

The day included exciting workshops – photograph of me here participating kindly shared by the organiser’s photographer Aleksandr Khotislovski.  Participating in the day generated some new work also shown here.