Do you sometimes struggle to put words to your emotional experience? Do words feel incomplete when expressing what your body and soul are experiencing? Every day we move through the world with a laborious demand on our bodies and minds, leaving little room for us to be with ourselves fully.

What is Dance Movement Therapy?

Dance movement therapy is a form of psychotherapy that invites you to explore the healing dialogue between your body, mind, and spirit. To begin the therapeutic process, one does not need a background in dance. During sessions, movement and dance are brought in to accompany you in meeting yourself authentically, honestly, and compassionately. When words are not enough, dance movement therapists invite you and guide you to look to the body and its expression for answers. Dance movement therapy is a healing approach that welcomes embodied experiencing and embodied communication.

The therapeutic use of dance and movement is a form of holistic healing that explores symbolic movements through the therapeutic movement relationship. Through movement exploration and verbal processing, you can explore new ways of being in your space through your dance, through your movement, and through a deepened body-mind connection. Dance movement therapy can help you integrate new senses and understandings of self by exploring varied movement patterns and movement qualities.

Repose offers individual dance movement therapy as well as group dance movement therapy classes at Repose Studio.

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Dance Movement Therapy Can Help With

• Grief

• Anxiety

• Life transitions

• Identity formation 

• Depression

• Substance use disorders 

• Depersonalization and dissociation

• Somatic symptoms 

• Confidence and self-esteem

• Building relationships

• Chronic pain

• Arthritis

• Family conflict

• Emotional Regulation

Our Dance Movement therapists undergo rigorous training and have verified certifications to practice. 

What does a Dance Movement Therapy class look like?

During a DMT session, your dance movement therapist may introduce embodied practices such as authentic movement, free movement, improvisation, guided instructed movements, body scan meditations, mindfulness meditations, somatic sensing, verbal processing, music and song, gestural expression, vocalizations, and breath-work to help you come to understand your body on your path to healing.

Do you need a dance background to engage in Dance Movement Therapy?

WORK 1:1 WITH OUR DANCE THERAPIST NOELANI RODRIGUEZ - BEGIN TODAY 

To be in a dance movement therapy session one does not need any previous dance training.  Dance movement therapy welcomes your body’s expression as is and sessions will be the space for you to connect to your body. Dance movement therapy allows for your body to join the conversation in your healing process by meeting your emotional somatic experiencing. In a world where so much is demanded from our bodies, dance movement therapy invites one to meet their bodies in ways that are compassionate, authentic and healing through creative expression.

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Our Repose instructors work from a client-centered, holistic, LGBTQIA+ affirming, sex & body-positive, and culturally competent lens. At Repose, we honor and value the influence of the therapeutic alliance on clinical outcomes. Thus, we encourage all of our instructors to engage in continued supervision, training, and discussion of their students’ experiences to ensure that any and all obstacles to clinical success, conscious or unconscious, are identified and addressed.