The Return to Embodiment: consciousness, culture, creativity and flourishing

Kristen Mennona  is a licensed professional counselor, a board-certified dance/movement therapist, a certified eating disorder specialist (CEDS), a registered yoga instructor (RYT 200) and a BTTI trained clinician for pediatric OCD.  Kristen owns Nurture Family Counseling LLC, a counseling practice designed to treat pediatric eating disorders, ocd and anxiety within the context of the family.  Kristen is offering a course through EEIC titled "Pediatric OCD and Eating Disorders: A DMT Approach to Evidence Based Interventions" for clinicians and aspiring dance/movement therapists.  She also hosts an Instagram account called, “The_Body_As” to inspire others to work on body image acceptance and to pass that acceptance on to the next generation. She has presented nationally on the topics of self- acceptance, eating disorders/body image distress and reconnecting to the body. Kristen combines best clinical practices with ancient, embodied experiences for her clients. She believes in the inherent wisdom of the body to bring forth that which needs healing with humor and courage.   

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Marissa Voytenko seeks to bring comfort and beauty through her paintings and sculptures. Marissa has been painting with encaustic, a molten wax medium, for over a decade.   In this conversation, Marissa shares about how her art practice is a practice of meditation, of prayer in which she holds within her consciosuness the suffering in our world as she creates.  Although our conversation took place before the invasion of the Ukraine, where she lived for three years and has many loved ones, her current instagram shares about her art process during the current tragedies of the war. She is selling art to raise money for Doctors Without Boarders in Ukraine.  Originally from California, Marissa received training at the California State Summer School for the Arts.  In 2003, Marissa earned a Master of Fine Art in Studio Teaching at Boston University. She has exhibited work both nationally and internationally.  Marissa resides with her family in the Chicago area and is an adjunct professor at Wheaton College.   Marissa's work can be found online at www.marissavoytenko.com/ or on instragram at www.instagram.com/marissavoytenko/.  Become a patreon of the Return to Embodiment Podcast: www.patreon.com/returntoembodiment

In this conversation, I am speaking with Grace Bella Harman LPC, R-DMT, an embodied grief guide. Grace traces the origins of her pull to this work, sharing her own experiences of loss and transformation have equipped her to trust that grieving is a sacred process that requires the intentional engagement of the body. Grace holds sacred space for people to utilize their bodies to move through, process and ultimately be transformed by their grief.  In fact, her facilitation is driven by the belief that your body is the most primary, vital and intelligent resource for navigating the waters of grief.  Grace offers individual and group sessions for people who are in the midst of grief, both old and new, and she is offering a training this year for therapists who are interested in deepening their skillfulness and experiencing their own transformtion so that they can better guide others through the waters of grief. For more information on sacred grief groups for therapists and clients, you can visit her website at: https://www.gracebellaharman.com/ 

Become a patreon of the Return to Embodiment Podcast: https://www.patreon.com/returntoembodiment

In this conversation, I am speaking with Melissa Walker MA, LPC, R-DMT about the integration of the worlds of somatic psychotherapy, dance/movement therapy and sex therapy.  Melissa takes us along her personal journey of how a full body "yes," arose in relation to witnessing bellydance as a teenager, which propelled her on the path that lead to publishing of her book, Whole Body Sex: Somatic sex therapy and the lost language of the erotic body in January 2021. Melissa describes the importance of cultivating safe-enough space for conversations and experiences to unwind the harmful conditioning that has been inherited from a sex-negative culture to free us to access pleasure and cultivate intimacy.  She invites us into the magnificence of the body and the language of the erotic self, which is a world of discovery and a foundation for learning to relate lovingly to another. Melissa can be found online at www.embodiedrelationshipscenter.com/, and in addition to clinical work with individuals, couples and groups, Melissa provides trainings for therapists on her method of somatic concentric sex therapy, with trainings coming up in February in Boulder, Colorado and August, 2022 in Bellingham, Washington.  For more information or to join us, visit: 

https://embodiededucationinstituteofchicago.hubspotpagebuilder.com/sex-therapy-training 

For trainings and clinical support, visit Melissa at https://www.embodiedrelationshipscenter.com/concentric-sex-therapy

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In the fourth season of the podcast, I am so delighted to share the ongoing conversation that inspire and enlighten me, specifically for this episode the importance of ecological belonging.  This season the podcast is full of conversational inqueries about how the lived experience of our bodies informs the essence of how we understand our lives and our being within the world.  Welcome and thank you for joining us.  

This summer, someone asked me a question: 'can dance therapy help with sexuality?'  I realized this is probably a question many people have wanted to ask, but none have had the courage to ask me before. So, I decided to reflect and offer this musing. First of all, I am not a sex therapist, but next season we will be interviewing a sex therapist, so please stay tuned!  Secondly, I have agonized over my wording, because quite honestly, I tend to be private about this conversation.  However, I am determined to hold inquiries about embodiment with the care and respect they deserve, and the topic of the erotic and sexuality requires it. I have examined some key principles of dance/movement therapy in relation to the erotic: increasing embodied awareness, expanding a movement repertoire, understanding movement as expressive communication in an intimate relationship, and movement as creative improvisational process.  I do not focus on self pleasure, although that could probably be its own episode.  My reflections are limited in the way that each of our perspectives and experiences are limited, but I believe there is beauty in the particular. So, I encourage the listener to take this as an opportunity to form an inquiry about their own experience of sensuality, intimacy and sexuality in relation to these principles and their own embodied knowing.  

In this conversation, I am speaking with Susan Imus MA, LCPC, BC-DMT, GL-CMA, about her attempts to create language and theoretical scaffolding for the field of dance/movement therapy.  Susan was motivated by a question: how does dance/movement therapy work?  In her most recent article, Creating Breeds Creating. In H. Wentgrower and S. Chaiklin (Eds), Dance and Creativity Within Dance Movement Therapy: International Perspectives. Susan suggests several models for understanding the work of dance/movement therapy including Nine Funamental Mechanisms, A-FECT Model of Aesthetics and Culture, and The Continuum of Interdisciplinary Approaches.  Susan writes about how the field of dance/movement therapy spans the realms of the somatic, the aesthetic, and the psychological, and each of these realms explain aspects how dance/movement therapy works. Susan has created these models as offerings to the field, with the hope that they can bolster education, research and collaboration within the field internationally.  

Susan is Associate Professor and the former Chair of the Department of Creative Arts Therapies in the School of Fine and Performing Arts at Columbia College Chicago. Susan has practiced, educated, and consulted in dance/movement therapy and the creative arts throughout the U.S. and abroad for 33 years. Susan is the former chair of the Education, Research, and Practice Committee for the American Dance Therapy Association (ADTA). She received the first Excellence in Education award by the ADTA in 2006. Susan, originally trained in nursing, has been employed as a dance/movement therapist by 10 different hospitals throughout her career in the Midwest and on the East Coast. Prestigious institutions include Harvard University’s McLean Hospital and Harvard Pilgrim Healthcare, where she was recruited to assist in the development of chronic pain services through the Department of Medical Specialties. Susan teaches a course called Embodiment: A Way to Know Your Patient at Rush University Medical College and in the recent past at the Bioethics and Humanities Department in the Feinberg School of Medicine at Northwestern University. Susan is active in the Arts in Health community working with Rush Generations; a wellness program through the Social Work and Community Health Department at Rush University Medical Center. Susan and the studentsa (arts in health minor) received the Community Engagement Award by the organization in 2017.