Situation
“Linetta” said that she felt that Authentic Movement would let her investigate some of the issues with which she was struggling. In particular she identified:
- Taking care of others to the exclusion of herself, “A dream I have is to know how to take care of myself in authentic ways, compelling unto themselves rather than the effort being fraught with struggle.”
- Wanting to explore how she expressed anger
- Wanting to integrate what felt like opposing parts of herself
- Wanting to find her voice in the midst of chaos
Approach
Using individual Authentic Movement/Coaching sessions, we:
- First established overall goals for the sessions.
- Structured kinesthetic, musical, and artistic experiences to help achieve her goals.
- Customized each meeting based on current issues Linetta brought in that day, yet still in the context of her overall goals.
- Debriefed each session’s experience using our customary coaching methodology: deep listening, compassionate response and probing questions.
- Assisted Linetta in identifying movement cues: gestures or movements that would remind her of a particular decision she made, an attitude she said she wanted to take, or an important insight from the session.
Results
Linetta reported feeling better after every session: calmer, freer, more integrated and more in tune with herself, therefore more spontaneous in the moment. She felt that the freedom of choice to follow a movement impulse is a model for empowering oneself to be more spontaneous and intuitive outside the movement studio.
Linetta reports feeling empowered to express herself more easily. She describes breaking some important patterns through the movement sessions we structured. She has become aware that she builds an invisible wall and can now make a different choice: a permeable “wall to walk through instead of unknowingly being hindered by an invisible wall.”
