Sharing Reflections

Emily Katsuno started the Diploma programme in autumn 2024, taking 2 modules this year
- Infant Movement Development
- Authentic Movement & Therapeutic Presence.
Each student writes a journal to track and process their experience on the course. Here she kindly shares some of her reflections on both modules.
We began at the beginning this weekend and have been exploring the movement patterns that come with embryonic evolution. We all begin life as a single cell…just one cell. And we have all lived this. Embodied this. Experienced this.
I find it fascinating that we’ve all been there! Pulsating away as just one cell before the many transformations take place that make us who we are today and that we can potentially go back and re-experience this journey through embodied practices. And how embodying these states of fluidity, beingness, pulsation, vibration and flow between expansiveness and containment (e.t.c and more) can support resource, regulation, movement repatterning and regeneration in our adult bodies.
We have been returning too and remembering the very beginning of life. Our arrival. Our underlying life force and this year we will go on an embodied expedition exploring the movement patterns that take us from the single cell to upright human.
There are many therapeutic benefits to this work which I look forward to sharing in my somatic yoga classes, one-to-one yoga therapy sessions and maybe some somatic movement explorations/workshops.
As well as being therapeutic this practice feels artistic, creative, intuitive and explorative and is for everyone and everybody and I look forwards to sharing more as the year unfolds.
I love that this work originates from dancers (developmental movement is the work of Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen and Linda Hartley studied with her and founded IBMT) so for me this weekend was both a new beginning and a home coming in many ways.
And on Authentic Movement & Therapeutic Presence.
We stand in a circle.
Arms reach out to the side without touching.
A singing bowl rings once.
The movers enter into the empty space.
The witnesses stay as they are.
The movers move from inner impulses, with closed eyes.
Those witnessing offer presence.
It is silent and time passes.
Three bells signal the end of the practice.
We reform the circle and touch the ground with both hands.
A stripped bare description of my first experience of Authentic Movement & Therapeutic Presence.
This weekend was about stripping back. Not adding more.
Movers invited to move from inner impulses & track and stay with the movement (rather than sensation, emotion or image) and witnesses invited to speak in present tense only of what they saw the body do in movement. Not interpreting or projecting.
I am left with images of a Japanese zen garden. My brain feels like it is reorganizing itself!