What is bodywork?

How does it work?

Bodywork is a movement therapy method based on bodily sensations. In bodywork the focus is not on the mental and emotional effects of pre-defined movements like in yoga techniques. Just the other way around: our bodily sensations and emotions make our bodies move. Just like in different meditation and mindfulness methodologies, our attention is on the awareness of present experiences. Luckily enough, no dance education or experience is required to participate in bodywork sessions.

 

Bodywork is not about exercises that need to be solved. Rather than that, we get into situations that will quickly reveal our personal issues. During bodywork sessions we can recognize our roles, automatic and quite often detrimental operational mechanisms. We might collect out-of-box insights into ourselves and our own social interactions and we can learn to move towards a more efficient and real self.

 

Since we mainly work with movements and not words, we might have a glimpse at our underlying and unconscious operational patterns which evolved in preverbal life phases and which cannot be really addressed by cognitive-verbal techniques. Personal and interpersonal issues are both get handled in bodywork.

 

What happens?

  • We work individually, in pairs, in teams or in the whole group.
  • Participants do not use words.
  • Facilitators support processes with verbal instructions.
  • Experiences are guided with music.
  • At the beginning and end of bodywork sessions, verbal sharing supports understanding experiences and our ability to put them into good use in practice.

 

What can we use bodywork for?

Bodywork can be used in two strongly interconnected areas:

 

Awareness

 

By developing our awareness – our awareness of the present and our body – we can cope with upcoming challenges more efficiently, our performance and the quality of our social interactions and wellbeing improve. A study in 2016 summarized the findings of various research papers and justified the following statements:

Performance

By being aware of our bodily sensations, we arrive at the present moment and our attention becomes more focused. As a result, we work more efficiently and we can make better decisions. The liberating moments we experience during such exercises might also lead to advanced performance.

Social interactions

Due to the enhanced (body) awareness, we are able to listen to others more carefully, we can approach conflicts without judgement and we can switch perspectives more easily. All this might come handy during decision making, disputes and sales activities, as well.

Wellbeing

Bodywork – just like any other physical activity – releases stress and mitigates the symptoms of burn-out. Since we experience a kind of flow in the course of free and improvisational movements, we will be able to think more out-of-box and we can connect to our own creativity.

 

Self-knowledge

 

We might all have experienced that we do not understand why we behave in one situation like this or react to a certain impulse like that. It might be caused by events that happened to us in preverbal life phases or in situations that involve non-verbal experiences and their consequences. These issues can be addressed the most effectively on these very layers.

Each and every experience of us runs through our body. We digest and store our conscious and unconscious operational patterns and memories there. The body is like an organ sense which helps us spot what is happening inside. If we learn to reconnect to the sensations and emotions within our body and we know how to interpret these signals, our automatic behavioural patterns will be less likely to define our decisions, reactions and actions. Due to our enhanced and more mature awareness we will be able to switch to a more efficient and more authentic operational mode.

Bodywork can be successfully used in the following areas:

Trust – Ego boundaries
Control – Flexibility
Stress release – Balance Resilience – Coping
Assertiveness – Self-confidence
EQ – Active listening
Productivity – Energy
Intuitive decision-making

 

Bodywork as dance and movement therapy was developed in Hungary and it has become more and more popular in the recent years under the auspices of Bodywork Association. Our facilitiators are all founding members and graduated trainers of the Association.