I have revised many of the theoretical ideas about the practice of psychotherapy that I learned in training at Chiron. But I cherish the experience I had in the training of coming to know myself as an embodied subject – the sense of aliveness, of vibrant contact, and of trust in listening to the body. This involved intense experiences of connection with others, of catharsis, and of permission to feel and explore a wide range of feelings and sensations and impulses.

Perhaps one way of describing how my own conceptual goal posts shifted since then is that in the early notion of body psychotherapy the emphasis was placed on expressiveness for its own sake. Over time at Chiron that basic model was heavily revised towards an intersubjective model. Now in my own work with clients I place the emphasis on relatedness. Expressiveness and relatedness are intertwined in complex ways, but it makes a difference which of these you see as most fundamental.

This course is not designed primarily to fulfil a training function nor to impart skills for working with clients, though that may well happen as a bonus. Rather the emphasis is on creating a space for embodied exploration for its own sake in a group. This occurs through experiment, movement, self-observation, and creative activities.

Using the BMC framework as a map we will see and feel how each body system contributes its own qualities to awareness, shaping focus, intentionality, responsiveness, rhythmicity. What arises through sensing, visualising, moving, and other modalities of self-discovery is a renewed and differentiated relationship with one’s own body. This fundamentally alters and enriches our own presence and supports a deep attunement to the other.

Much attention has been focussed recently on self-regulation and interactive regulation of the autonomic nervous system as a means of managing dissociation and hyperarousal. (Ogden, Rothschild) This is an important skill for therapists to develop. What has been underplayed in this focus on the nervous system is the way in which differentiated use of other body systems can support, complement and even protect the nervous system from overload.

I believe that in order to work effectively with clients, and to maintain our own vitality and resourcefulness as therapists, we also need time away from being a container for the clients’ feelings and dysregulated states. Time to come back to our own embodied process, time to become re-acquainted with the specific contours of our experience of ourselves. Often it is only illness, burnout or crisis that catapults us into a committed attention to our body for its own sake.

Embodiment in my definition of the word is the opposite of dissociation. Neither state is permanent, there is a dialectic between them. The difference between one’s person’s relative ease with embodiment, and another’s perpetual struggle with pain, disorientation, dysregulation, has a great deal to do with their developmental attachment history, as well as with later life trauma, and the all important context of culture and history. Apart from and in addition to psychotherapy, body-focussed explorations that involve creativity, self-sensing, movement, sustained enquiry and expression, can support the process of embodying.