Abstract
The aim of this article is to underline the importance of metaphors, imagination, and symbolism, and our connection to the natural environment through dance movement psychotherapy. In today’s society, the humancentric attachment with others and with nature highlights the nature-body-mind split and how far apart we have grown from our surrounding environment. Through spontaneity, playfulness, desire and exploring the joy of existence, we can weave anew the web of life; a life directly connected with the earth, our bodies, our inner experience and spirituality. Rituals, symbolism, and a more sensory way of experiencing the world could become the anchor of our journey towards otherness and developing our ecological self.
The image of the web of life and the contribution of creativity gives us a model and metaphor for understanding the universe and its interconnected relationships. This metaphor gives a universal understanding of the body, mind, and soul relationship which underpins the understanding of the universe and the energy which resides in all matter. The use of this metaphor allows for ‘meaning making’ which can provide a catalyst for change in a direction in life and a change in the perception of reality.
The layers of meaning expressed in our lives and the way we perceive reality is often dismissed in our own thinking because of the demands of everyday life. Our perception of the universe and the significance of the natural world can be an unimaginative one which is utilitarian and serves our economic purpose or status. The values which humans hold are expressed through the ways we articulate our sense of narrative and is often expressed through metaphor and the context in which we find ourselves.
The meanings and relationships to the natural world, which humans articulate, come from their belief system and world view. This understanding can be expressed through the metaphors t each person understands instinctively, without the need for conscious reasoning but through their life experience:
The concepts that govern our thoughts are not just matters of the intellect. They also govern our everyday functioning, down to the most mundane details. Our concepts structure what we perceive, how we get around in the world, and how we relate to other people. Our conceptual system thus plays a central role in defining our everyday realities. If we are right in suggesting that our conceptual system is largely metaphorical, then the way we think, what we experience, and what we do every day is very much a matter of metaphor. (Lakoff & Johnson, Citation1980, p. 3)
The model for understanding the role of dance movement psychotherapy and its contribution to ecological awareness, and an understanding of this web of relationships expressed through creativity is one of an emphasis on the importance of relationships, including that with the natural world. The model which is most appropriate is the transpersonal model which includes the spiritual and the inclusion of soul into the perception of the body mind relationship. Jill Hayes in her book Soul and Spirit in Dance Movement Psychotherapy ‘noticed that soul and spirit are neglected in Dance Movement Psychotherapy, ‘Sensation and emotion are shut away in a box, repressed by the ego; but sooner or later they begin to leak out, poisoning and oppressing the body ’ (Hayes, Citation2013, p. 78). She goes on to say that ‘Listening to the organic body is not an act of narcissism, it is an act of love of the sacred’ and that matter is felt to have a living intelligence and a development of awareness of organic connectivity via the living body ‘
Maybe how humans form an understanding of the universe is to connect with the heritage of an interconnected web of organic life which includes a vitality and creativity which includes and is aware of sensation and an organic vitality that we find in the living body and its relationship to the world, including the natural world and the sense of the sacred. It is important to lose the humancentric understanding and see an ecosystem of a life force that we, as humans, are part of an interconnected web of a ‘living force’, which emanates from our sensing and experiencing of a relationship, no matter how disconnected we might feel. As part of dance movement psychotherapy practice, we need to start from the body itself and the way we perceive it, and not deaden our experience but intervene and participate in its recovery. By being a part of the sensing world, we recover the lost and energised part of ourselves and our relationship to the Universe. We humans have become strangers to the natural environment more than ever before. ‘Human-caused damage to Earth’s ecosystems led to a significant rise in the frequency and intensity of climate and weather extremes on land and water, such as heavy rainfalls, droughts, and fires’ (Lakitsch, Citation2023, p. 1).
The term ‘Anthropocene’ was introduced by (Crutzen, Citation2002), as a way of acknowledging a new geological era in the history of the planet. (Barla & von Verschuer, Citation2022, p. 137) state that ‘the eponymous Anthropos, that is, humans as a collective, is said to have become a geophysical force on a planetary scale, crossing multiple boundaries and in doing so affecting the functioning of the Earth system as a whole’.
Even though, the human species can be creative and innovative, we are also capable of being destructive not only to others but to our natural environment (Beauvais, Citation2012). Thus, the question is: when did humans become so alienated with nature and our destructive elements so evident? Humans tend to think of themselves as the focus of the universe. and Family, school and society are the source of development and maturation. What if the understanding of the universe is humancentric and the way we form the system of relationships is founded on false assumptions? Maybe the awareness of the ecological self needs to examine our relationships to the ecosystem, rendering false the understanding of self and the web of relationships we create. Each member and in-dweller of the eco system lives in their own sensory world and experiences reality in different ways, so the sense of self is no longer related to ‘other’ – ‘other’ as the relationship to the world around us. Oliver
(Oliver, Citation2020, p. 5) thinks that it is time to ‘dismantle the illusion of individual human centredness’ and to pay attention to the growing environmental and social problems which have been created by the growth of narcissism and the exploitation of resources at the expense of others and our planet.
After the experience of a pandemic, where realities of death and existential problems and ihave come to the fore, mental health care for everyone has needed a re-examination. for There has been a change in the way we share in the global economy, to the detriment of the poorer countries of the world. Where do we look for the restoration of balance and the readjustment of a new world view? It is found in sensory experience.
How do we rechoreograph the dance of life where we experience the otherness of the whole of creation and maintain the nurture and consideration of ourselves and fellow humans?
Oliver continues (Oliver, Citation2020, p. 7):
we perceive the human condition as one of multiple independent entities vying for individual success, rather than all of us, being not only equal but also deeply interlinked in connected systems…… A first step in reforming our self-identity is to take a deep dive beneath the troublesome veil of illusion which gives us a sense of being an independent I.
How as humans, do we penetrate the illusion?
Can arts and the arts therapies, in particular, for the focus of this article, Dance Movement Psychotherapy, through the exploration of self and creativity through the body mind and spirit, touch the experience and sensation of the sanctity of the natural world and the human need for relationship? A wider understanding of relationship is found in the sense of an ecology or web of relationships, including a relationship with the natural world. The relationship we have with landscape can be a mirror of our inner landscape: the unconscious world. we
Our inner world is found, explored, and symbolised through the depictions and creative expression in art, drama, music and, through the body in dance and movement. Dance has been a sacred response to the natural world through human creativity, expressed in the body and through a desire for heightened experience from the senses. Isadora Duncan in Blair (Citation1986) Isadora Duncan: Portrait of the Artist as a Woman provided the example of a woman expressing her connection to her own body and in its sacred form, her body disrobed her of the trappings of oppression. At the site of the Greek temples, she became in touch with the rhythms of the sacred and her movement expressed this relationship. Her dance expressed the moods and changes of the waves and the connectedness to a greater reality.
The relationship to the universe, and the way we experience is seen in rites of passage and celebrations expressed though dance, marking the seasons and rites of passage which are connected with the elements. This can be seen and experienced in folk traditions and in the early evidence of culture, expressed on vases or as statues.
As Western and colonial culture developed, the exploitation of creation increased as the Western world increased its desire for wealth and domination. This resulted in desecration of the natural world and the need to feel a connection to it.
The ancient dance forms remained connected, via ceremonies and rituals, to the earth, and to the transpersonal, through ceremony and fertility. From the beginning of time, dance and movement, and their relationship with the body, have given us the connection to folk traditions which bond us to the sensation of the weather, the seasons and time itself, and to the sense of the sacred. They also provide an understanding of mystery, and initiation and ritual.
The experience and memory of earlier civilisations were incorporated into the symbols and expressions of the body through costumes and staging. Gestures and postures relied on the rhythms of the body and the rhythms of the music, which had cultural content and importance, and an inner meaning for human experience.
The arts, generally, seek the understanding and formulation of the concept of life: the nature and meaning of the world, and its ecology of relationships.
Elizabeth Templeton, a modern theologian, states that:
Truth emerges in tasting the world, not as a dilettante, but as one who has been invited to live, therefore, to coexist, with all the hope, joy, pain, and passion that that engenders. It demands radical openness to whatever ‘other’ is there. For without that, truth is ghettoised. The world shrinks to an enclave. The complex depths of its integrity are missed. Things are tidied up and made manageable. This holding of the world in its awful marvellousness is indeed characteristic of the child, much deeper than sentimental enjoyment. (Templeton, Citation2019, p. 27)
There is even in depression a need for some change, a desire for the imagination and, despite feeling the bleakness and blankness, a need to return to a life-enhancing reality which has some meaning and significance. If this need is not met in childhood, then the adult might never recover from the absence of sensation, movement or play.
Play is the way we experience the joy of relationship with the environment and with other people as a way of experiencing the ‘dance of life’. Dance is a way of engaging with the sensory connections which develop our creativity, our sense of self and other, and the need for a transitional space where we can exist in safety.
As well as a need for spontaneity, there is a need for an understanding of the entirety of creation and for it to be experienced, not in the way where we see the nature of deadness and oppression in the body, but in the aliveness and in the joy of living. There is a need and hope for balance and a future where hope is central to our understanding of health and disease and how the body seeks enlivened attunement to the sense of a greater spirit of the universe. Maybe there are layers of experience which motivate and underpin the need for soul and spirit and for it to be expressed through our relationship to nature and the connection to creation itself, through the body, mind, and soul.
In Languages of Care in Narrative Medicine, Words, Space and Time in the Healthcare Ecosystem, the author Maria Marini (Marini, Citation2019, p. xiii) quotes from the poem by Constantino Kavafis, (1911) ‘Ithaka’.
In her preface, Marini cites Kavafis, (1911) in (Marini, Citation2019, p. xiii) the fearful figures of Cyclops and angry Poseidon at the start of the journey can be experienced as:
The poem continues:
Marini (Marini, Citation2019, p. xiii) suggests that there is an engaged way of looking at the relationship of this vital energy, ‘this marvellous journey’, and maybe it could find its way into the relationships encountered when someone is ill or traumatised. What she is seeking is health care based on meaning and what is valued is a return to a meaningful life through sensation, narrative and story, what is needed is a sense of balance and our own unique and individual quest through meaning and value.
It is the world of the imagination. Imagination can be experienced through the artistic channels of dance, art, narrative and ritual, music, and the symbolic use of images through the spoken or written word. How do we bring together thoughts of this dance of the imagination, and the fruits of the process of living in the sensory world, the connection we make to our world of nature?
Our relationship to the planet, and the development of the importance of this web of life to existence, feed our imagination and creativity. Life, like the body, must be nourished and the use of dance as a psychotherapy can be a way of nourishing the mindful body. Movement connects us to the space, rhythm and flow of all our relationships and reverberates within the context of our lives, where we create the choreography of our relationship to the universe.
Hildegard of Bingen, in Scivias cited in (Bowie and Davies, Citation1990) was a popular medieval saint, believed in the use of arts in the healing of the soul and that dance was an expression of the surge of the power of nature: ‘the greening’. This was a term she used to describe the flush of growth which she experienced through nature and the wildness of growth on the sides of the river where she lived in Germany. During this time (1098–1179), she used the arts as a means of the self-expression of her mystical life through singing, using scales that had never been used before and the range of the voice expressing high notes never reached before. She accessed this ability through the imagination and her connection to the ‘other’, and yet she had no musical training. She used expressive dancing as a way of translating her inner life, as prayer and through mandalas which conveyed her relationship to the world, with other humans and with the earth.
A model of dance movement psychotherapy, through its emphasis on relationship with the body and its connectedness to the earth, the breath and natural rhythms, provides the means of recovery to a sense of being, through the narrative of the existence of the ’other’, inclusive of the natural world.
How can we find our way back to those connections and the means of sensing? What dances do we have to create to find our many selves, and those interconnections between bodies and souls, and the wonder of the sensing world, which give us the expression and symbols for our emotions? There is a general, global feeling of loss and alienation, which leads to depression and sickness and mental illness.
In the gestures of ‘gathering’ and ‘scattering’, we capture the thankfulness of holding and the jumping for joy, or to be other-worldly. To dig to the depths, in an artistic and emotional way, is to find the spring within the desert: the loneliness and comfort of the wilderness experience or the transformation of the earth through blossom and fruit; and the final connection of message and creation through performance and story.
The feeling of space, or the constriction of it, is reflected in the way we speak of loss or death. There are always body metaphors or movement metaphors when there is a description of loss or depression. We use spatial concepts such as ‘I am feeling down’.
In the ‘Well Gardened Mind’, Stuart- Smith (Stuart-Smith, Citation2020, p. 5) states:
Grief is isolating and it is no less so when it is a shared experience. A loss that devastates a family generates a need to lean on each other.
I discovered the pleasure of wandering through the garden with a free-floating attention, registering how the plants were changing, growing, ailing, fruiting. Gradually, the way I thought about mundane tasks such as weeding, hoeing and watering changed. I came to see it is important not so much to get them done, but to let oneself be fully involved in the doing of them. Watering is calming - as long as you are not in a hurry - and strangely you feel refreshed like the plants themselves. (Stuart-Smith, Citation2020, p. 7)
As we learn to be separate from loved ones, and as we experience death and trauma in our lives, our bodies react: memories and sensations change our perceptions. Our senses shut down and we have need of rootedness and connection. The order and rituals which our body requires need to be heard and felt.
The experience of loss, trauma, change and stress in our attachments affects our immune system (Bullmore, Citation2018, p.156). However, renewal and regeneration are possible within the body by supporting the immune system and finding the interconnectedness within the body (Bullmore, Citation2018, p.159). We can connect to the relationships within the body, through the body -mind relationships, and through the stimulation of the inner connections between the systems in the body. There can be a restoration through the experience of silence through sensory and motor experience.
Abram expresses this in his introduction to his book . The Spell of the Sensuous (Abram, Citation2017, ix)
Humans are tuned for relationship. The eyes, the skin, the tongue, ears, and nostrils - all are gates where our body receives the nourishment of otherness. This landscape of shadowed voices, these feathered bodies and antlers and rumbling streams - these breathing shapes are our family, the beings with whom we are engaged, with whom we struggle and suffer and celebrate. For the largest part of our species’ existence, humans have negotiated relationships with every aspect of the sensuous surroundings, exchanging possibilities with every flapping form, with each textured surface and shivering entity that we focus upon. (Abram, Citation2017, ix)
He goes on to describe the human experience through the senses, through stimulation or moments of stillness
All could speak, articulating in gesture and whistle and a sigh a shifting web of meanings that we felt on our skin of inhaled through our nostrils or focused on with our listening ears….
Every aspect of the earthly sensuous could draw us into a relationship fed with curiosity and spiced with danger. Every sound was a voice, every scrape or blunder was a meeting… And from all these relationships our collective sensibilities were nourished. (ix)
So how do we return to the sense of self which restores us and gives us balance? How do we return to the safe harbour of self-rootedness in the body? Where can we understand our need for a return to connectedness and restoration?
Dance movement psychotherapy can give us the means to experience the body and the dance of relationship, which shivers and quivers with life and allows us the narrative of health and rootedness through where we feel the flow of connectedness through nature and the narrative of our own body, and through our experience of sensing, and understanding our own bodies and the wider issues of connection. Abram (Citation2017, p. 284) expresses that feeling in the present moment of being, of sensing the body and its rhythms. Through movement and understanding we re-sense and reconnect:
However, I may be concerned by events unfurling on the far side of the globe, and however insistently those happenings shove themselves through my various screens and headsets, my primary responsibility must be to the realm I ceaselessly inhabit with the whole of my creaturely flesh and to the palpable relationships…. Only by giving primary value to the full-bodied world of our face to face and face to place encounters…. and only by really opening and offering ourselves to the local earth-unplugging us from the digital thrall and stepping out to wander and bask in the scents drifting from the night river… to recalibrate our organism… For we are human only in contact, and conviviality, with what is not human.
This splitting is likely to remain dormant in our unconscious unless we experience some somatic symptoms which require our attention. For example, when experiencing panic attacks, chronic pain, irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), or having eating difficulties, we start paying more attention to our bodies and taking care of them. We are more likely to make changes in our everyday lives, such as eating nutritious food and eating seasonally, exercising more regularly, taking long walks in nature, and spending more time resting and attuning to our somatic experiences.
Can dance movement psychotherapy become the bridge for connecting not only the body with the mind, but also the earth with the body? Ecopsychology calls for a reconnection between humans and the natural world or, l more precisely, a re-awakening and development of this connection (Davis & Canty, Citation2013). Davis and Canty (Citation2013, p. 599), also underline that ‘ecopsychology sees the environmental crisis as rooted in a psychological crisis where humans of modern, industrialised, and technological civilisations have separated their identities from the rest of the natural world, which leads to seeing the planet as (merely) a material resource for human consumption’.
Freud thought of a newborn hunger as emotionally all-consuming, total in its oblivion of anything else, a self-absorption that he thought at once ‘autistic’ and ‘oceanic’’ (Freud 1903/1953), as cited in (Fogel, Citation2013, p. 13). Has mankind regressed so much to the sucking stage that it has become insatiable, and iis only focused on its primitive needs, even if that means the destruction of the primary caregiver, mother-earth in this case?
Using dance movement psychotherapy as a transpersonal agency for transformation and change, ‘the body is a vessel that contains who we are, in which we relate to ourselves and one another’ (Kornblum & Halsten, Citation2006), as cited in (Berger, Citation2021). ‘The Spell of the Sensuous’ (Abram, Citation1996, p. 48) mentions that ‘the world and I reciprocate one another. The landscape as I directly experience it is hardly a determinate object; it is an ambiguous realm that responds to my emotions and calls forth feelings from me in return’. Hence, an Eco-somatic approach to this earth-body split (Beauvais, Citation2012, p. 277), through the lens of transpersonal ecology, could be included in our clinical work as dance movement psychotherapists (Berger, Citation2021).
Hayes (Hayes, Citation2013, p. 30), in her book Soul and Spirit in Dance Movement Psychotherapy claims that ‘in transpersonal Dance Movement Psychotherapy a return to the body is considered as a return to soul and spirit and to guidance’. She nourishes her readers with a metaphor: ‘the growth of the soul as a plant because the movement of soul is first down into depth and darkness, then up into height and light’ (p. 34). She continues describing ‘the roots of a plant correspond to the sensing body, the water absorbed from the earth corresponds to the fluid circulating in the vascular systems, the seed corresponds to the heart of the body, and the flower to imagination and the leaf to thinking’ (p.35). When ‘the body becomes the holy ground’ (Conger Citation1994, p. 70), as cited in (Hayes, Citation2013, p. 71), we may no longer feel separated and alienated from nature. We nourish ourselves and then we are more able to be with and hold other people’s experiences, without anger, sadness, and fear emerging all at once.
In a society where ‘self-separating behaviour is encouraged’ (Hayes Citation2013, p. 39), small acts of resistance such as reclaiming our ecological self and ecological identity could change the course of humanity, ‘prompting a resulting ecological ethos’ (Davis & Canty, Citation2013, p. 601).
Henry Miller said ‘the moment one gives a close attention to anything, even a blade of grass, it becomes a mysterious, awesome, indescribably magnificent world in itself’. Given that, ‘‘the Anthropos’ - the being that according to the ancient Greek meaning of the word ἄνθρωπος looks up at what ‘he’ sees - that is, looks up to the sky—is not and never was a neutral figure’ (Barla & von Verschuer, Citation2022, p. 138), dance movement psychotherapy can foster that inner desire to look up again, to not be neutral and consumed by our ego, but to nurture our souls and nurture our liaisons with the community. We can assume that once we are afraid of seeing our inner truth, and denying our (destructive) emotions, we may project them in the outer world, mirroring the internal battle with we go through.
As mirroring in dance movement psychotherapy can provide the basis of attunement, understanding and holding of the client by the therapist, then the client themselves could introject that mirroring and can create a more secure attachment with nature. ‘Nature [could be] a mirror that can help us to gain new perspectives on how we relate to one another’, as the dance movement psychotherapist can be the mirror of expanding the client’s movement repertoire and be the witness of this development (Beauvais, Citation2012). By ‘using images of earth, water, fire and air, we can encourage our bodies to become more fluid, through identification with the elements’ (Hayes Citation2013, p.126). With a fluid body, we can connect more to nature and uplift our souls. Through this poetic image, Hayes (Citation2013, p.77) says the ‘soul is like a willow tree with roots in the water of spirit, trunk growing out of the bank and branching into the air, a creative expression of spirit in matter’ bringing us home to our bodies and the depths of our being.
More than ever before, with the ongoing social turmoil we face on a daily basis, we lose touch with ourselves and our bodies and souls. Always being on guard, trying to plan ahead and to protect ourselves, puts us in a defensive mode. However, in these moments, we are more in need than ever of the body-mind-earth connection. We can’t survive unless all these three elements exist simultaneously:
We know ourselves to be made from this earth. We know this earth is made from
our bodies. For we see ourselves. And we are nature. We are nature seeing nature.
We are nature with a concept of nature. Nature weeping. Nature speaking of
nature to nature. (Griffin, Citation1978, p. 226)
Carefully crafted rituals making use of emotive music, dance and drama can dramatically bring a mythical event of the distant past into the present. If devised with sufficient skill, they can also yield an aesthetic ecstasy that enables participants to ‘stand outside’ their mundane selves for a moment. By acting out a ritual role with skill and concentration, we can leave the self behind and, paradoxically, achieve self -enhancement. Through the arts we experience a more intense form of being and feel part of something larger, more momentous, and complete. (Armstrong, Citation2022, p. 27)
We need to rediscover the dance and relationship to the planet which expresses ritual, and the narrative of our relationship to the earth and its place in our lives and the cosmos. It is our ecology of relationship which restores us and redeems the planet, and we feel that surge of creativity which gives us expression through the senses and the arts.
We have within our emotional life and in our spiritual life a need for restoration and reparation, and within our hearts, bodies, and our voices we have the need to restore our relationship with the earth. Through the dance of life, we re-engage with our bodies, and we reclaim ourselves and the sanctity of the respected body and the respected earth. We bow in thankfulness and show our restoration is complete when we understand the sanctity of the living world and the body in its fullness of what is complete. We offer our open arms in adoration and an opening to ourselves to the ‘other’ and life streaming, and to the senses, through the touch of a finger and the breath of the wind. Let us begin to move and shift with the wind and find the emotional and spiritual world and experience through the body mind connection which nature has given freely.
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Additional information
Notes on contributors
Jill Bunce
Jill Bunce trained as a Dance Movement Psychotherapist in 1991–1995 at the Laban Centre and completed a piece of research which was published in the ‘Nameless Dread’, 2006. She has worked as a Dance Movement Psychotherapist since then and still practices working with children and adults. She has always been interested in the transpersonal as her first degree was in theology and remained interested in the body mind soul relationship and the relationship to nature and ecology. She has been part of the initiative of the HIPC (UKCP) to include ecopsychology as part of the training standards. She gained her doctorate in 2008 on the development of a different ethos for Dance Education and has established a training course for Dance Movement Psychotherapy at Derby University in 2010. She has organised workshops and lectured in Finland, Russia, Greece, Spain and Romania, Hong Kong and Australia
Christina Gougouli
Christina Gougouli holds a degree in Psychology from Aristotle University of Thessaloniki in Greece and a master’s degree in ‘Dance Movement Psychotherapist’ from the University of Derby in the UK where she was also a visiting lecturer delivering workshops in research modules. She is a trained Kestenberg Movement Profile analyst and she is currently a trainee at the Hellenic Institute for Group Analytic and Family Psychotherapy. She has board experience working with children and adults in both Greece and the UK. Since 2016, she supported people with eating difficulties; charities supporting adolescents & adults with mental health difficulties; outpatient units in children’s hospitals; organisations supporting the development of children in the autistic spectrum, and refugees in Open Accommodation Sites in Central Greece. She has established her private practice in Larissa, Greece. She is also an associate Dance Movement Psychotherapist at Amna, formerly known as the ‘Refugee Trauma Initiative’ and a psychologist-psychotherapist at ISPA, an organisation supporting the psychosocial development of children, adults, and families.
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