Reflections on movement practice and personal loss

An article published in 2023 in the special issue Ecopsychotherapy, environmental movement and the imperative of embodied practice with the earth in mind of the journal Body, Movement and Dance in Psychotherapy, that offers a personal account of loss and how improvised movement in a studio and outdoors offered sacred holding through grieving. Through this piece of writing I share vivid descriptive accounts of dancing through grief, ‘at the edge’ as I call it; yielding to gravity and meeting the stories, memories and emotions that flooded and engulfed me in the wake of the loss of my mother. Losing a loved one is an existential experience all of us must face one day. This intimate presentation of my experience invites the reader to consider how looking death and traumatic loss in the face, turning to empathy and compassion for ourself and to an embodied ecological practice, cracks us open and creates the ground for a reconfiguration of self. Such a sensory arriving to the power of the more-or-other-than human may serve us professionally, I argue, at times of overwhelm such as those we are living through currently.