Main description:

This book focuses on Somatic Movement Dance Therapy and the importance of self-regulation and co-regulation. The chapters attend to self-regulating different tissues through movement, breath, sound and the imagination.

Throughout the book the author shares processes and practices that support participants to balance their living tissues, moving from sympathetic arousal into parasympathetic ease and release. The study of the autonomic nervous system and how to innervate the parasympathetic through breath awareness, heart-sensing and intero-ception is the central through-line in the book.

Uniquely, Williamson attends to the anatomical and physiological complexity underlying the apparent simplicity of somatic movement dance practice. How to sense-perceive and move with attuned awareness of specific body tissues, such the skeletal-muscular and craniosacral system invites the reader into a deep anatomical and physiological excavation of self-regulation. The interconnectivity of fascia, and the importance of cardio-ception, breath awareness and gravity lie at the heart of this book. Sensory-perceptual awareness of the heart is foregrounded as the most important ingredient in the efficacy of practice, as well as gravi-ception, soft-tissue-rolling and fascial unwinding.

Includes a collective foreword from Sarah Whatley, Daniel Deslauriers, Celeste Snowber and Karin Rugman

This is a must-read practice-as-research book, for under- and postgraduate students, researchers and educators and especially important for practitioners who feel the weight and condensation of the mechanistic paradigm.

Contents:

Foreword: Transatlantic Reflections

Sarah Whatley, Daniel Deslauriers, Celeste Snowber and Karin Rugman

Introduction: The Seabed, Waves and Ripples in this Book

Autogenic Self-Regulatory Movement
Sympathetic Holding and Parasympathetic Release: Vagal

Tone and Social Engagement

Fulcrums of Support and Soft Tissue Reorganization
Co-regulation, Cardio-ception and the Transpersonal Witness
Co-regulatory Touch and Somatic Unwinding
Sense-Perceiving the Craniosacral System
Soft-Tissue-Rolling and Fascial Health

Bibliography