Somatic Movement Practices to Express Yourself, Create Healthy Boundaries & Birth Change
When you feel stirred, get activated, are moved, sense a new feeling, experience an “aha!,” sense a swell of energy, you have potential to shift these intense experiences into healing and growth.
But many times, these surges of feeling—anger, embarrassment, shame, grief, anxiety—don't have a place to go except to swirl in the cocktail of chemicals flooding your body that is your nervous system's survival response state Fight/Flight.
In overwhelming, life threatening situations, thank goodness (!) for your body's survival mechanisms that cause you to blur out, dissociate, shut down or fuel you with energy to use adrenaline to fight or flee. However, many daily situations, that aren't actually life threatening, can activate these trauma responses because an underlying thread of threat needs attention, curiosity, support and repair.
When you feel that familiar swell of activation, there are somatic practices that help you to move the feelings, the emotion, the energy that can feel intolerable. These specific gesture practices are developmentally-informed and are initially invited to be explored with relational support, with a helper, so your feelings, your experience, can be transformed into action.
We develop and learn how to gesture, how to discover our energetic skin, how to express, how to signal a need for change, in our earliest relational experiences. Time and time again, throughout several developmental stages, we make gestures that are actions designed to get a reaction. If those actions are repeatedly dismissed, inhibited, shut down or reprimanded, they fade away until they are provoked and usually present with trauma response.
Therefore, when these emerging actions, these somatic movements can be directed into Gestures for self expression or boundary making or creative expression, the familiar surge of overwhelming feelings can be transformed from trauma response into trauma healing.
To attempt to change now, to attempt to move forward now, to express now, to create now, to be seen now, sometimes needs a redo with a helper. When you explore “Gesture” practices with a trained helper, the feeling of “is this okay now?” becomes possible. 🐾
Gestures become the embodied action that gets the desired reaction.
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Monday Movement Group: Mindful Movement as Mothering Medicine
With Caroline Gebhardt, LPC, RYT, Registered Somatic Movement Therapist & Educator
1:00-2:00pm Kirkwood/ATL
Ongoing, closed group
3-month commitment
Interview required
$200 month
All bodies, 18+ welcome
*No experience necessary 🩷
Register: Caroline@MBodiedTherapy.com
https://www.mbodiedtherapy.com/events/m-bodied-monday-movement-group
Along with developmentally-significant yoga shapes & sequences, members get to explore somatic movement practices including:
Navel Radiation: Move from your core with fluidity
Contralateral Movement: Explore blockages & invite more energy to flow
Gesture: Discover your energetic skin for presence as well as boundaries with others
Handling: Expand your movement vocabulary for a more satisfying and eventual self-supported experience
Caroline Gebhardt, LPC, RYT, is also a Registered Somatic Movement Therapist/Educator with ISMETA. She developed M-Bodied: Mindful Movement as Mothering Medicine as an offering of movement and shapes based on developmental and relational patterns for deep nourishment from the inside-out.
M-Bodied is grounded in the principles & practices of the somatic trauma healing method Chi for Two®, which groups and sequences early relational embodiment practices as symbolic redos for nervous system functioning and healthy relationships.