Bodylistening

Bodylistening is a person-centred form of body psychotherapy. We can work with awareness,  movement, breath-work, and hands-on contact. 

The Bodylistening process is gentle and explorative, enabling you to access and transform parts of yourself which are difficult to get in touch with by just sitting and talking. Allowing the body to fully feel, express and tell its story can bypass the stuck record of old thoughts and beliefs enabling you to let go of the past, process trauma, and open up to things in a new way. 

We work in a good-sized, private and comfortable space in which you are free to move and spread out (or be still and contained) in any way you wish. 

There is no formula for how we would work or what a session would look like. Everyone is different. Some of the ways  we could work include:

• Moving. Often we hold physical and emotional tension in our bodies and don’t give them the chance to move as they really want to. Working creatively with movement can allow us to access and process our feelings in a new way.
• Breathwork. Working with the breath offers a powerful way to calm an over-active nervous system, and to help you land in your body and process strong emotions safely.
• Hands-on work. It’s difficult to feel solid and secure if your body is out of balance or holding excess muscular tension. If it feels helpful we can use hands-on work to help your system to come back into balance, align, integrate and release. We can also use hands-on contact to connect with repressed emotions and to explore how you relate to yourself and others.  
• Talking. Although embodied therapy can sometimes look very different from traditional psychotherapy, sometimes it really is just ‘good to talk’!
• Trauma work. Trauma is not only generated from single dramatic events. It can also develop from periods of sustained distress and anxiety. Some people also may have had difficult experiences growing up leading to developmental trauma which can have a significant impact in the present. Bodywork can be one of the most powerful and effective ways to let go of these kinds of held feelings in a safe, contained way. This can liberate us from old patterns of behaviour and release long-held tension and stress.

“Working with Marcus has been life-changing, he’s helped me realise my body is an ever-present resource for self-healing and learning.” —M.L.

Dance of Awareness

I also teach a therapeutic dance practice called Dance of Awareness, which is based on the same Reichian developmental model as Bodylearning. Dance of Awareness can be taught in groups, and also bought into one-to-one sessions in various ways. Dance of Awareness can help increase self-awareness while encouraging you to make friends with your body, let go of limiting patterns from the past, and find the confidence to express yourself more freely. It offers a deep exploration of what it is to be in a body and to connect more authentically with yourself and others. It incorporates several strands including character styles, authentic movement, five rhythms and mindfulness.

The Dance of Awareness cycle (sensing, grounding, expressing, releasing, connecting and completing) allows us to revisit our early body history, to celebrate the embodied patterns that make us unique, and to discover new ways of being who we are. As we move, release and breathe together we open more fully into self-awareness and a wider consciousness of our place in the world.

At the moment I am teaching Dance of Awareness mostly on residential weekend workshops. For more information see here.