ONE BREATH COLLABORATION: An Exploration Into Kinesthetic Improvisation

After going through personal loss that I struggled to process through my normal means at the time, I sought out Jobeth Eckerman who worked with me on the soul-level for about a year. Through that work and immersing myself in ideas around the mechanisms of consciousness through Boston Carter’s Shamanic Behavioral Model, I became interested in Gabrielle Roth’s 5 Rhythms practice.

My healing and self-inquiry path had taken me way outside of the world of listening to my body and its intuitive knowing and deep into the world of the specifics of yoga poses with external interests, agendas, and dogma. I also became a mother and a yoga school owner during that time. I went through a divorce and then remarried; I finished my master’s and started a PhD. My soul, speaking through me via my body, kept challenging me to ask the same question. What do I need to learn? How does my body truly reflect my essential self? Who really am I? This One Breath pracitce evolved from that exploration and was a stop on my path.

Dancing the Medicine Wheel, loosely using Five Element theory as a template for music provided rhythms and context that could inspire what I described as enlivening our kinesthetic consciousness. Some degree of kinesthetic consciousness seems to be necessary for bodily concern. There are many similarities to dance movement therapy and other body psychotherapies. Body psychotherapies, which are not limited to one therapeutic modality, are founded on the concepts of somatic awareness, embodiment, and repairing or strengthening the mind-body relationship. Fundamentally, we are all already embodied. But the word has come to mean more than this.