The body is the concrete part of us through which we relate to the world It records all the memories we have experienced since our birth...
The body is the concrete part of us through which we relate to the world
It records all the memories we have experienced since our birth. In addition to what we inherited from our ancestors, we have a wide range of movement repertoire, from crawling to running, from holding a pencil to playing the piano, from hoeing to stirring tea.
However, while a newborn baby discovers the world with his first body and physical sensations, he builds the basic relationship with his mother that will last throughout his life, through interbody communication. The sensations, perceptions, conscious and unconscious reactions felt by the body are expressed and recorded through our body. Even when performing our verbal expressions, which is one of our strengths, the intonation of our voice, the expression of our face, our posture at that moment vary depending on the content and emotion of our speech, the dynamics of the relationship between us and the person we are talking to, the conditions of the environment and many other things. The body, in cooperation with our mind - as in all living things - is an intermediary that responds to external stimuli and reflects our internal reactions. Since our birth, we develop some behavior-action patterns depending on our character, experiences, the culture, values and environmental conditions in which we grow up, and then they become our habits. In the face of similar events and situations, similar movement patterns that we have become accustomed to come into play. Just as each of us has our own unique stance, a way of walking, or even a way of sitting...
In the limitations, pressures and strains in the real world or in the inevitability of traumatic experiences in general; It is inevitable that we experience disconnections in our connections with the life energy within us, resentments in the relationship between mind and body, and disruptions in the harmony between the parts/elements that make us who we are. The thoughts in our mind, our current emotional state, and our general mood are expressed by our body. In this case, sometimes it is possible to think of diseases as an expression of the body. Almost all of us have experienced that psychosomatic reactions and even diseases occur when exposed to chronic and periodic stress. Headaches, migraine, lower back pain, gastritis, shingles, bowel irregularities, etc. We can list the reactions.
According to this perspective, we can define the state of health as being deeply aware of our own inner life energy and the harmonization and expression of this energy within the mind-body relationship.
“The body never lies.”
The body speaks and expresses. What we need to learn and what is possible to learn is; To be able to listen to it is to develop the ability to hear it. In this way, we can access the 'healing power' that our body has. Sometimes we can interpret illnesses as the body's way of expressing itself against stressful life events, traumatic experiences, thoughts that occupy our minds, emotional reactions that we do not give but accumulate, and many other things that our body records throughout our lives.
Today, we are aware of many supportive methods in order to cope with diseases or maintain health, such as doing exercise/sports that appeal to the body, or yoga that appeals to both the body and our spirituality. We are just getting acquainted with dance/movement therapy, which can raise awareness about the body, mind and the relationship between them and provide therapeutic gains.
Although dance/movement therapy is as old as rituals performed for healing purposes, it began to gain its scientific basis and take its place technically in the world of psychotherapy approximately 50 years ago. In addition to providing significant gains in many different populations such as Alzheimer's, Autism, and schizophrenia, it is applied as a therapy method in many cancer clinics in America and England. Last year, we started the first applications of medical dance/movement therapy in our center in Turkey and are still continuing. The healing of diseases in the body, which interacts with the mind, comes from an action directed at both the mind and the body. Yoga, bio-energy, tai-chi and acupuncture also work with the life energy, power and flow in the body. Unlike these methods, dance/movement therapy is a type of psychotherapy that is applied based on theories within the therapeutic relationship and framework.
I would like to include the post of a participant who participated in a medical dance/movement therapy study, with his permission. “ This is the only place I feel free. It's the only happy day of the week. I get by for 3-4 days with the energy I get from here. I felt lost after the illness; I was here. I wish we could do it a few times a week ..." (Ö.T.)
Movement is evidence of our aliveness . Our movement begins from the moment we fall into the womb. While many movements continue inside our bodies, such as the circulation of our blood and our heart beating, we live in a movement outside, such as the rotation of the earth and the movement of planets in orbit. In this age of technology where intelligence comes to the fore, or on the other hand, while we experience events or their effects that are rapidly occurring in many parts of the world, I hope that we can maintain our state of health by strengthening our physical existence and awareness.
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