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Somatic Movement Dance Therapy: The Healing Art of Self-regulation and Co-regulation

Somatic Movement Dance Therapy: The Healing Art of Self-regulation and Co-regulation

Current price: $162.44
Publication Date: May 1st, 2023
Publisher:
Intellect Ltd
ISBN:
9781789386905
Pages:
352

Description

A comprehensive account of the relationship between somatics, spirituality, and physiology.

In this detailed anatomical text, Amanda Williamson shares her therapeutic practice, rooted in self-regulation, co-regulation, cardio-ception, breath awareness, soft-tissue-rolling in gravity, fascial release, and the importance of parasympathetic ease-and-release. The book attends to key body systems in detail, and how sense-perception of living tissues increases fluid flow and supports fascial health. It is grounded in detailed experiential encounters with afferent sensing, consciously sensed motor expression, interoception, proprioception, the vagus nerve, the cranial bones and nerves, scapulae, sacrum, fascia, and the nervous system. Clients and students share qualitative refl ections after sense-perceiving the state of their living tissues and easing tight tonus through self-regulatory movement.

Somatic Movement Dance Therapy pays detailed attention to applied experiential anatomy and physiology, improvisation underpinned by somatic awareness, the art of directing one’s awareness and attending gently to living breathing tissues, resting egoic mind and settling in the heart. The integral importance and compassion of the co-regulatory embodied witness is shared in this book. Williamson shares processes throughout that ease stress, depression, and anxiety.

Collective foreword from Sarah Whatley, Daniel Deslauriers, Celeste Snowber, and Karin Rugman.

About the Author

Amanda Williamson is director of the Centre for Somatic Movement and Dance Therapy and the Association of Somatic Movement Therapies, UK and the Republic of Ireland. She is the founding editor of the journal Dance, Movement & Spiritualities and an honorary professor at Coventry University (C-dare).

 

Praise for Somatic Movement Dance Therapy: The Healing Art of Self-regulation and Co-regulation

"Amanda Williamson’s Somatic Movement Dance Therapy: The Healing Art of Self-regulation and Co-regulation is an informative text that illuminates the author’s practice and key influences that inform it. She brings her years of experience to create her work—somatic movement dance therapy—based on improvisation, self-regulation, and co-regulation. This book will be of relevance for anyone interested in a therapeutic application of somatic movement and dance, as well as those interested in deepening their understanding of their body through movement, anatomy, physiology, and a non-western lens that moves away from the “[reduction of] mental health to mechanistic approaches” (186).

This text is a welcome addition to courses in somatics—a clear example of a therapeutic practice inviting discourse on the application of somatic practices with strong connections to research in science, psychology, and the mind-body-psyche relationship."
 
— Hetty King