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

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

By Kim RothwellSociety & Culture
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The Return to Embodiment: consciousness, culture, creativity and flourishing episodes

  • Chad Alcorn on integration, healing, and the blues
    Chad Alcorn PsyD is the first clinical psychologist with whom I shared my early understandings of dance/movement therapy as a graduate student, which have grown into the deep knowing found in this podcast.  He has been a steadfast encourager of my professional development, and even of this podcast as a practice of inquiry.  Chad's clinical training includes Adlerian psychology, Accelerated Experiential Dynamic Psychotherapy, EMDR, ACT and mindfulness practices. Chad prioritizes the cultivation of a holding environment within which clients can grow through the implicit experience of a healing relationship.  
    When Chad was diagnosed with stomach cancer at the end of 2019, facing a life-threatening illness propelled him to track his own process of disconnection and to build resources for integeration and reinhabiting the body.  In this podcast, Chad shares with us the hard earned lessons gleaned from this journey including rituals of music-making derived from the rich tradition of the Blues, which foster both individual and collective embodiment in the face of suffering.
    50 min
  • Rhonda Kelloway on embodiment as how we relate to the environment, learn and connect.

    Rhonda Kelloway LCSW MBA SEP recognizes the potential for healing found in the body as a profound and wise guide and teacher. Advanced trainings in both EMDR and Somatic Experiencing, equip Rhonda to offer gentle and effective treatments for trauma resolution.  In addition to over 20 years of professional training and practice, Rhonda has experienced the healing of therapy, support groups and body-energy work, and thereby offers hope from her own experience as well as her professional training.  A life of joy can be created, even in the face of challenges.

    44 min
  • Sarahi Lay Trigo on the inquiry and art of dance as healing
    Sarahi Lay Trigo is a dancer, researcher, and film maker.  After a sudden illness in 2008 left her immobile, with a prognosis that she would never walk again, Sarahi's love of dance provided both inspiration and a concrete practice for reinhabiting and rehabilitating her body.  With the support and love of her family, Sarahi began to move, to speak, and to dance again. Through that experience, Sarahi recognized movement as essential, to survive, to shift out of immobility into life and to generate hope.  During onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, Sarahi once again felt immobilized, this time out of fear and the social isolation, and recognized the need for dance once again as an inquiry into healing. Thus, Sarahi created an experiential dance film with her brother, Carlos Lay, as composer, a movement practice that transformed the stuckness of fear into creative impulse.  This film, Spiritual Battle Trilogy: Facing Covid-19 fear through dance film, traces her healing process of awakening, battling and returning to self.  https://www.strangelovefestival.com/winners/2020/9/25/y79wc8urs2d25wbr13mcxlfyemw4gc
    44 min
  • Season 3 of Return to Embodiment

    In this season of the return to embodiment, I welcome you into another season of conversations about embodiment, trusting that learning and knowing in this area is never finished yet many of us dont realize all that we know because we do not take the time to notice.  This year has been one of deceleration, of stalling out, of grieving, of relocating, and retreating from the pressure to create on a time line disconnected from an embodied sense of timing. Although this introductory musing was created in June, I wasnt prepared to publish until July.  Yet, in reclaiming my sense of timing, and giving permission for life to unfold with a different pace, questions arose:  What purpose does living a rushed life serve?  Is being busy a way of making ourselves useful? What if time was a friend, a beloved, rather than something we fight or attempt to wrestle into submission?  Perhaps living into embodiment is a practice of allowing ourselves to decelerate into all that we do not know, moments of 'useless' presence, so that we can begin to know and to move aligned with the flow of time itself.  Could it be that in useless moments, the boredom and the mystery can coexist.

    12 min
  • Jeff Gilbert on ecotrauma, waking up, and reclaiming our birthright
    There are times when a teacher offers perpective you cannot find on your own.  If one listens, with an open mind, an open body, in this episode, Jeff walks us through his journey into the richest ecosystem on earth, the Amazon River basin.  He describes the dieta, his apprenticeship with the plants and the Shaman, including the hardship as well as the joy, weaving observations of his changing self in relationship with the environments within which he finds himself. Jeff's journey has lead him to integrate his past experiences and study including dance/movement therapy, organizational development, and bodywork with his own healing and awakening to our shared ecological condition, with a vision for the present: to be fully alive, which means noticing when ecotrauma causes us to numb ourselves.  Yet, his vision extends beyond the wounds and the suffering to a hope of true freedom, to move towards community and to find the joy found in right relationship with the earth, with ourselves, and with one another.
    1 hr
  • Hona Backstrom on practice as essential to becoming a practitioner, acupressure points to manage fear, and embodiment as a foundation for health.
    Hona Backstom  is a Doctor of Acupuncture and Chinese Medicine, and a board certified acupuncturist and herbalist. Hona shares about how her experience of dance was seminal in finding within a sense of embodiment.  She speaks about embodiment on seveal levels: pesonal, professional and from a Chinese medicine perspective.  She also provides some gentle guidance into acupressure points that help with curbing fear, during this pandemic.
    Hona reminds us that illness manifests differently in different bodies, so embodiment as a practice of conscious connection and observation of ones own body, is an essential part of empowering both health and wellbeing. Hona offers both virtual consultations and in person acupuncture treatments.  She can be found at www.bluebirdwell.com and on Instagram at Backstrom_acupuncture.
    40 min
  • Peggy Hackney on aliveness, change and the red rocks of Snow Canyon
    Peggy Hackney is co-founder of Integrated Movement Studies (www.imsmovement.com) and teaches in their Laban/Bartenieff Certificate Program.  As a registered somatic movement therapist (ISMETA), a certified massage therapist, and a teacher of labanotation, Peggy Hackney has been working in the world of movement and embodiment for over fifty years. She teaches globally and has written the seminal book "Making Connections: Total body integration through Bartenieff fundamentals" which was inspired and formed by the almost fifteen years she worked alongside Irmgard Bartenieff, who shared the motto: "Constant Change is Here to Stay."  Peggy acknowledges the source and practices which support her ability to find aliveness, and to move with the unknowns of change.
    59 min
  • Cameron Scott on breath, heart and flyfishing

    In this conversation, I am discussing with Cameron Scott his journey of recovery and moving towards authenticity, wholeness and hope.  Cameron is an outdoorsman, a fly fishing guide, a white water rafting guide and a custom home builder.  Cameron finds great satisfaction in his work as a life coach with a focus on helping men to step into the life they want with more balance, worthiness and truth.  In 2018, Cameron shares about his journey of transformation in a TEDxBigSky talk: The Journey Within: A Story of Transformation. For more information, please visit: https://cameronscottcoaching.com/  Cameron embodies courage and compassion in letting go of the old stories that hinder us from life, for himself and others, in this journey of transformation from suffering  to the practices of peace.  


    52 min
  • Learning, grieving and seeking justice
    As we recognize and respond to the ongoing inequities and violence in American society, this episode offers a personal exploration of how the harms of racism and injustice are embodied and impact my ability to hold space.  What does it mean to hold space for learning and change, to cultivate spaces that can acknowledge the traumas of our history and our present moment, to create spaces that propell actions of equity and justice for all of us?  WIth gratitude to all who model the beauty of holding space for grief, for compassion, for growth and for transformation.  A special thank you to Quinlan Mitchell for his poetry. 
    Trigger warning: Please note that this episode has racial violence imagery that could be triggering.
    16 min
  • Monica Peri and Ignacio Lavalle on Psicotango

    Psicotango is dance therapy born from tango culture in Buenos Aires. Ignacio Lavalle and Monica Peri are both students of Rodolfo Dinzel, the tango dancer, developer of a choreographic notation system, and theorist who first described the healing powers of the tango and  urged them to research the healing power of tango for themselves. 

    Monica Peri is a journalist, broadcaster and milonguera as well as a coordinator of classes in psicotango.  Monica's research into tango and its relationship with psychoanalysis has lead to the book Tango: un abrazo sanador.

    Born in Buenos Aires, Ignaicio Lavalle is a pschologist with a masters degree in Analytical Psychology through the Fundación C.G. Jung of PA.  He has studied tango since 2002 in various schools of Dinzel. As a writer and researcher of the healing effects of tango dance. Ignacio offers workshops in public hospitals and consultations on psicotango.  Ignactio practices and teaches tai chi chuan and integrates it with the psychotango.  Ignacio has written the book, Tango: una danza interior.

    Together they have recently translated into English their book, Psico Tango: Danza como terapia, which is available on Amazon and mercadolible.  Psicotango classes  are available both online and in person through their website www.psicotango.com.ar

    In this conversation, Monica Peri and Ignacio Lavalle speak to the elements of the tango that make it such a healing dance form: the embrace, the gaze, the community, the use of improvisation/play/creativity and the rhythm.  Tango generates the creative force of the erotic as an answer to our mortality, challenges limited conceptions of gender, and nurtures community based upon breath and heartbeat and touch. 

    Within our conversation, Monica offers two experientials: in the first, we closed our eyes and placed our palms together, to communicate through the contact points of our hands, shifting leadership and allowing movement to unfold creatively together.  The second was, simply, an invitation to embrace, to savor holding and being held, to remember the experience of being welcomed in a hug, which is perhaps the most compelling argument against disembodiment.

    43 min

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

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The Return to Embodiment is love song to the ordinary, the poetic, the implicit world of the body itself as a place of knowing and movement as our very first language. It's a phenomenological…