Areas › Your body › Posture and how you carry yourself
Play belongs here. Being a lion, a tree, a hissing snake, the way children do it with no embarrassment at all.
A lot of people meet trauma work as something solemn, and solemn is easy to sit through without ever softening. Silliness is harder to fake. If a breathing practice leaves someone feeling about seven years old, that is not a lapse in seriousness, it is a state that needs energy and safety at the same time, which is often the exact combination that has been missing for years.
Qur’an and Sunnah
They will come to you on foot and on every kind of swift mount (Quran 22:27). People arriving from everywhere by whatever carries them is a picture of bodies gladly in motion rather than bodies being marched.
وَأَذِّن فِي ٱلنَّاسِ بِٱلۡحَجِّ يَأۡتُوكَ رِجَالࣰ ا وَعَلَىٰ كُلِّ ضَامِرࣲ يَأۡتِينَ مِن كُلِّ فَجٍّ عَمِيقࣲ
Proclaim the Pilgrimage to all people. They will come to you on foot and on every kind of swift mount, emerging from every deep mountain pass
Qur’an 22:27read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
A school based dance movement psychotherapy programme for children with emotional difficulties was found feasible and acceptable, though with sixteen children it tells you nothing about whether it works. At the other end of life, in a trial of 204 older adults with mild dementia, dance movement therapy improved psychological and neuroendocrine measures against a waitlist and did about as well as conventional exercise. Playful movement is at least taken seriously enough to test, and the older adult trial is much the stronger of the two.
Zoe Moula; Joanne Powell; Shirley Brocklehurst; Vicky Karkou (2022). Feasibility, acceptability, and effectiveness of school-based dance movement psychotherapy for children with emotional and behavioral difficulties. Frontiers in Psychology doi
Ho RTH, Fong TCT, Chan WC, Kwan JSK, Chiu PKC, Yau JCY, Lam LCW. (2020). Psychophysiological Effects of Dance Movement Therapy and Physical Exercise on Older Adults With Mild Dementia: A Randomized Controlled Trial.. The journals of gerontology. Series B, Psychological sciences and social sciences doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
Play only happens when a body has energy and feels safe at once, which makes it both a sign and a route.
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
Take a shape that asks something of you, warrior or mountain, eyes open, the middle of your body switched on. Then, without coming out of it, drop your attention inside and let the pose hold you instead.
What frightens a body is usually not how hard a thing is, it is having no way out. So put movement as an offer. If it feels alright, you might try lifting your arms.
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.