Mindful Movement Talking Story is a workshop dedicated to exploring the confluence of movement, words, and deep witnessing(change to: Embodied Witnessing): listening to the stories that the body carries, to the movement of the body that longs to be expressed, and to the impulses of the body that most deeply represent what is meant by the idea of the 'self' as an awareness created through relationship (Johnson, 1994; Reich, 1933; Sieck, 2016). Each of the six days of this retreat is divided up into a morning and evening teaching segment: In morning sessions, participants are guided through explorations of free-form improvisational movement inspired by music, silence, and deep compassionate witnessing, Participants are encouraged to find and follow their body's own deepest impulses rather than follow imperatives of choreography or other people's expectations, even when in partnership. This attention to somatic signals allows participants to gain a deeper experience of the shifting awareness and differentiation among sensations, feelings, emotions, and cognitions, inspiring what Somatic Psychology (Fogel, 2006; Levine, 2010) describes as bottom-up processing; in other words, creating opportunities for greater cognitive and emotional resilience not through imposing new cognitions (top-down processing) but rather through recognizing sensations as the triune brain's building blocks of higher cognitive processing. A generation of neuroscience spearheaded by Allan Schore's (1994) research has elucidated the profound effect that embodied relationship has on affect resilience and regulation, and on most if not all of the outcomes attempted by the practice of clinical psychotherapy. By practicing moving the body in community and relationship while always in the context of autonomy, participants of this workshop hone the skills essential for successful psychotherapeutic outcomes: empathic attunement, deep witnessing, differentiating and integrating sensation, emotion, cognition, self and other; and facilitating the most profound healing through a liberation of the body's eloquent but wordless impulses.

The evening sessions integrate the morning’s somatic awareness skills with the stories we carry consciously and unconsciously. In the group tradition of Michael Sieck’s (rev. 2016) Threefold Way (www.threefoldway.com), participants explore eliciting, holding, and embodying the narratives that implicitly mold and define ourselves and each other, and the unconscious psychic and somatic adaptations we make to thrive despite our developmental challenges. Participants explore different modes of holding a container for other people’s stories, through group limbic attunement, role playing, group movement, and aspects of therapeutic touch.