Areas › Your body › Posture and how you carry yourself
When you start paying attention to your body, things wake up. More feeling, a deeper breath, memories arriving sideways. That is the practice working, not the practice going wrong.
Say this at the start, not afterwards. People who were not told tend to decide the movement made them worse and stop, when what actually happened is that something stored for a long time found a way to surface. Tenderness, sudden tiredness and unexplained tears all belong on that list. Slow down, keep breathing, and let it be there without turning it into a project for the next ten minutes.
Qur’an and Sunnah
They fall down on their faces, weeping (Quran 17:109). Being moved to tears is described as something that deepens a person, not as a sign that something has broken.
وَيَخِرُّونَ لِلۡأَذۡقَانِ يَبۡكُونَ وَيَزِيدُهُمۡ خُشُوعࣰ ا۩
They fall down on their faces, weeping, and [the Quran] increases their humility.’
Qur’an 17:109read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
A scoping review mapped the neuroscience research across the arts therapies, dance movement therapy included, and found the field still largely exploratory. So the account of old material surfacing through movement is clinical observation with a thin research base under it for now. Telling someone in advance that it may happen costs nothing and spares them the conclusion that they have been harmed.
Bokoch R, Hass-Cohen N, Espinoza A, O'Reilly T, Levi E. (2025). A scoping review of integrated arts therapies and neuroscience research.. Frontiers in psychology doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
Bodies hold on to things that words never reached, so moving them opens the box.
When not to
If what surfaces is overwhelming rather than merely uncomfortable, stop the movement and get proper support before going further alone.
This one is still a draft. It is waiting on a scholar and a clinician to read it before it is published.
Near this one
Keeping your eyes open holds you in the room while you feel what is going on inside. One channel on where you actually are, one on yourself.
Play belongs here. Being a lion, a tree, a hissing snake, the way children do it with no embarrassment at all.
Calm is only half the training. Plenty of people are more frightened of stillness than of adrenaline, because stillness puts the guard down.