Dance like no one is watching…

Last week I had a further valuable experience of ‘going within’ with eyes closed.
I was experiencing a therapy called Authentic Movement Therapy on a workshop. I won’t explain all that we did on this training, but just describe that by the second half of the workshop we were engaging in sessions of closing our eyes and focusing on our sensation and allowing that sensation and our breath to be what moved us and our bodies. I had initially been quite self conscious of movement that was not externally directed, that did not have a right or wrong way to do it, but by this point was able to engage in the process and gaining an experience that feels worthy of mention.
It seemed key to me that without words, without thought, without analysis or explanation, I could focus on sensation, as we do in Gestalt, and move into mobilization and experience a fullness and a fluidity of movement and feeling and expression.  In one of my sessions I experienced what I found to be whole, full and healing experiences of retreat, repression, anger, joy, bliss. Experiences I know would take several hours to process with a psychotherapist in words or dialogue. I asked at the end of this particular session how long I had been moving. About 12 minutes was the answer!
What more evidence do I need than this, to know that we are self-regulating organisms, who when we get out of the way of ourselves, can regulate, manage, balance ourselves, not through will, through discipline, through thinking or reading or consulting a guru or analysing, but by letting go of the conscious mind that chatter of ‘shoulds’ and ‘trying’ and allowing a deeper wisdom to guide us. Deep within us we know what we need to do. I felt affirmed and transformed, by this process of dancing as if no one is watching.  It reminds me of how some of our best moments of contact and of therapy are without words.