Sitting meditation appears as a central way to study consciousness from within, while movement, dance, and somatic practice remain mostly outside the frame. For those of us who work through movement, this is not a small omission. The body is not only something to notice while sitting still. It is also something that senses, chooses, resists, remembers, imagines, and discovers through action.

Hunger, tension, fear, activation, ease, pleasure, pressure, and irritation are part of how consciousness is constituted and organized. These bodily states influence what we notice, how we interpret what is happening, and what kinds of meaning become available. Pollan and Klein’s conversation points toward interwoven layers of conscious life: the body registering sensation and emotional tone, the mind moving through associations that are often hard to fully articulate, and reflective awareness that can notice what is happening.

They draw on William James’s phrase, “fringe of unarticulated affinities,” to name the delicate, ephemeral texture of experience: the penumbra around a thought, the sensed kinship between one thing and another, and the sense of connection before that relationship is fully realized. James’s phrase points toward a way of imagining consciousness itself. Thoughts, in this view, do not appear as isolated units. They arise within a surrounding field of relations, associations, and tendencies. This brings to mind an anatomical metaphor, fascia: the hydrated, responsive matrix of connective tissue that helps make the body one continuous system, where a shift in one place can travel, echo, and affect the whole.

If consciousness is tied to bodily feeling, subtle association, and reflective awareness, movement becomes one plausible mode for exploring those domains. The interview emphasizes that feelings begin in the body and that a great deal of conscious life may depend on learning to notice and interpret bodily signals. Movement-based practice can bring bodily feeling into clearer view, give form to what is vague or pre-verbal, and cultivate awareness from within unfolding action. In movement-based therapeutic work, consciousness can be observed as a mental event, and it can also be tracked as impulse, timing, pattern, inhibition, gesture, posture, rhythm, breath, weight, and relational response. A person may sense pulling back, tensing, wandering, suspending, reaching, or collapsing before language fully arrives.

Therapeutic movement brings reflective awareness into action. It tracks consciousness as it takes shape through the moving body.

Later in the interview, Pollan and Klein discuss the concept of “spontaneous thought,” mind wandering, daydreaming, and creativity. This adds another dimension to the conversation. Consciousness is not only something we observe through meditation or track through bodily feeling. It also wanders, associates, and drifts. Insight often arrives indirectly, through images, sensations, memories, and associations that do not follow a linear sequence. In movement-based therapy, movement can create a space for meaningful wandering, where experience can move outside its usual patterns without becoming aimless. A person may begin with a simple physical invitation and discover that a shift in direction, a pause, a repeated action, or an unexpected image brings forward something that would not have been reached by thinking alone. In this way, movement gives spontaneous thought a physical life without needing to explain it too quickly.

James may not have meant “fringe” in a cultural sense, but the word carries another layer of resonance for me. It evokes what has been pushed to the margins, and in Western culture, the body has often been pushed to the fringe of what counts as knowledge. We are trained early to sit still, stand in line, follow instructions, manage impulse, and privilege thinking over sensation. Movement-based practice belongs, in part, to a broader return to the intelligence of the body and to forms of knowing that have been devalued, disciplined, or treated as secondary.

This work investigates consciousness where it is already happening: in sensation, gesture, impulse, relational exchange, symbolic emergence, and the growing capacity to notice experience as it unfolds. Movement offers a way to study awareness from within action, tracing how feeling becomes form and how meaning begins to emerge through the expressive body. In this sense, movement is not only an object of attention. It is a way of participating in consciousness as it happens.

End note:

This piece responds to “Michael Pollan’s Journey to the Borderlands of Consciousness,” an episode of The Ezra Klein Show published on March 31, 2026.

This raises an important clinical question: what allows play to remain safe enough to be useful?

Calling something play does not mean does not mean the nervous system experiences it as playful. Play can become confusing, exposing, invasive, or too intense when there is not enough agreement about the frame. Many people carry memories of this. The rules were unclear. The tone shifted without warning. Something went too far. Someone felt embarrassed, misunderstood, mocked, or hurt. What was supposed to be play became shame.

This is part of what makes therapeutic play so delicate. The same looseness that allows something new to emerge can also make a person feel uncontained. When the usual management of the self relaxes, more becomes exposed. A person may feel awkward, uncertain, or more emotionally vulnerable than expected. This is often where resistance appears.

Resistance is one of the most useful signals in expressive and somatic work. It can appear when someone is approaching fuller expression, whether through sound, movement, emotion, image, role, or relationship. In those moments, self consciousness may take over. A person may deflect, freeze, collapse, withdraw into thinking, become confused, or tighten in a way that limits range. These responses are often the nervous system’s way of controlling exposure, preserving dignity, and staying connected to a sense of choice.

Expressive work can make a person visible before they feel ready. Sound and movement bypass polished language, making affect more immediate through gesture, posture, voice, or facial expression. The clinical task is not to push past resistance, but to welcome it into the container and work with it in a way that increases choice. Choice can be built through small adjustments: more distance or less distance, eyes open or eyes closed, more silence or more sound, a smaller movement, a shorter time frame, a different orientation in the room, a pause. a return to breath. When resistance is treated as information rather than obstruction, the person can begin to experiment with increments of visibility while keeping dignity intact.

A Winnicottian frame is useful here because it locates expression inside the conditions that make play possible. For Winnicott, play is not simply discharge, performance, spontaneity, or self expression. Play happens in a relational and environmental field where something can emerge without being forced. It depends on enough safety, enough trust, and enough room between inner experience and outer reality. In Playing and Reality (1971), Winnicott describes this middle area as “potential space,” writing that “playing takes place in the potential space between the baby and the mother-figure.” Potential space is the area between inner life and shared reality. It is where a person can say, move, imagine, pretend, gesture, or symbolize something without it having to be taken too literally, too quickly. It is not “just pretend,” because real feeling is involved. But it is also not ordinary reality, because the person is allowed to shape, suspend, exaggerate, try on, revise, or retreat from what appears. Play depends on both freedom and safety. There has to be enough freedom for something spontaneous to emerge, and enough safety for the person to remain connected to themselves while it emerges. If there is too much control, play dies. If there is too little structure, play can become exposure, confusion, or overwhelm.

Play depends on both freedom and safety. There has to be enough freedom for something spontaneous to emerge, and enough safety for the person to remain connected to themselves while it emerges. If there is too much control, play dies. If there is too little structure, play can become exposure, confusion, or overwhelm.

A safe clinical container protects potential space. It gives the client enough structure to know where they are, what is being invited, how far they are being asked to go, and that they can pause, refuse, modify, or return. That structure allows the client to enter expressive material without feeling captured by it.

In somatic and expressive work, this matters because the material can emerge fast. A sound, gesture, posture, or facial expression may reveal affect before the client has organized it into language. The person may suddenly feel seen, exposed, strange, young, embarrassed, powerful, tender, or unsure. At that moment, self consciousness may arrive as a protective function. The task is to preserve the potential space where expression can remain playable. Working with resistance through play means shifting the aim from ambition to curiosity. The question becomes: what conditions allow the person to stay connected to what is emerging?

This is why play needs a container. A container is not only a boundary around the work or a set of rules to prevent harm. A good container is an active clinical condition. It is created through care, timing, consent, clarity, pacing, attention, and collaboration. It gives enough structure for vulnerable material to appear and enough freedom for that material to emerge in its own way.

There is more to say about the specific layers that help create this kind of container: permission, timing, witnessing, mirroring, proximity, amplification, and the improvisational choices that arise inside the session. For now, I want to stay with the larger point: the container is what allows play to stay play. It protects the possibility that something vulnerable, charged, awkward, or unfinished can enter the room without becoming overwhelming, performative, or shaming.

Reference

Winnicott, D. W. (1971). Playing and Reality. London: Tavistock Publications.

This excerpt is adapted from “Therapeutic Applications of Contact Improvisation,” a chapter I coauthored with Gabrielle Revlock for Resistance and Support: Contact Improvisation @ 50, edited by Ann Cooper Albright and published by Oxford University Press in 2024.

The full chapter explores how Contact Improvisation can inform therapeutic approaches to touch, attunement, mindfulness, agency, and relational support. For this Substack post, I am sharing a lightly edited excerpt from the section focused on my own psychotherapy practice at Body&Being.

Full citation:

Brandes, Aaron (Brando), and Gabrielle Revlock. “Therapeutic Applications of Contact Improvisation.” In Resistance and Support: Contact Improvisation @ 50, edited by Ann Cooper Albright, 194–211. New York: Oxford University Press, 2024.Introduction

Introduction:

From our most common gestures of high fives, pats on the back, handshakes, and hugs, we rely on touch to form meaningful bonds with other people. A tangible reminder that we are not alone, these connections, physical and emotional, bolster us as we weather the unpredictable ups and downs of life.

Many people recognize the importance of touch in their lives, and yet they encounter barriers to access. They might not have a person with whom they have a touch based relationship. If they do, the touch might be fraught, inconsistent, harmful, anxiety producing, or otherwise limited.

As longtime practitioners of Contact Improvisation (CI), we, Gabrielle and Brando, count ourselves among the many dancers who will testify to the benefits of engaging in this partner dance form. There are myriad ways in which CI contributes to our well being.

In this chapter, we hone our focus on how the evolving CI pedagogy scaffolds multiple levels, depths, and qualities of touch, creating a container to safely explore nonsexual interpersonal body to body contact. Drawing from our unique career pathways combining movement, choreography, fascial bodywork, psychotherapy, and evidence based mindfulness practices, we have developed therapeutic material inspired by CI that articulates safety, empathy, mutuality, and agency through touch.

Our aim in suggesting ways that CI might be adapted and bolstered is to make the benefits of touch accessible to a wider range of people who may or may not ever identify as Contact Improvisors. In this chapter, we offer insight from our two different contexts: Aaron is a licensed psychotherapist, and Gabrielle is a professional dancer and educator.

My Story:

For two years, I lived at the Kripalu Center for Yoga in Lenox, Massachusetts, and participated in the intensive Ashram based lifestyle program where I would practice breathwork, pranayama, and yoga several hours each day. I remember during the evening concerts, while the guests would sit complacently on BackJacks enjoying the music, some of my cohort and I would dance ecstatically in the back of the chapel. It was during that time that I met one of the musicians who encouraged me to visit Earthdance.

That was over 20 years ago, when I took my friend’s suggestion and attended my first CI jam. I witnessed in amazement dancers transforming their legs into ramps and their shoulders and spines into launching and landing pads. Dancers were mutually supporting each other through rolling and sliding on and off each other’s bodies. I remember sensing the childlike play as people collaboratively curved, contorted, and remolded themselves to fit into the negative spaces and contours of each other’s body shapes.

Upon an invitation, I was whisked into the percolating dance activity. The energy that I was so rigorously building in my yoga practice at Kripalu exploded in my dancing. That jam opened a new paradigm and allowed me to reexamine what is possible in human play and connection. This began my lifetime love and dedication to Contact Improvisation.

Six months later, I moved out of Kripalu and into Earthdance. During my early years of training in CI, I had the great fortune to learn from masters of the craft, including Steve Paxton, Nancy Stark Smith, Karen Nelson, Nita Little, Kirstie Simson, Keith Hennessey, Andrew Harwood, and Chris Aiken.

In a workshop Aiken was teaching, he guided us in imagery and movement that engaged the fascia of the body. Aiken provided an anatomical framework for us to experience how fascia encompasses muscles, muscle groups, bones, blood vessels, organs, and nerves, binding certain structures together, often indicating stagnation, while allowing others to glide smoothly over each other, indicative of healthy tissue. As I danced, I felt the elasticity of my fascia allow for the lengthening, stretching, and softening of my tissues. This embodied practice liberated my movement, and I became fascinated with fascia.

Sometime after that, at a weekend CI jam in Boston, I attended a lecture by Tom Myers, a renowned fascia expert. In his presentation, Myers showed a slide of an early photograph of Steve Paxton and Nancy Stark Smith dancing. Myers commented that, in his opinion, Contact Improvisation was the most perfect movement form for experiencing the myriad of the body’s fascial connections. I was sold. I enrolled in the Anatomy Trains Structural Integration Certification Program in Maine, under the tutelage of Myers.

I feel blessed to have participated as an original member of Nancy Stark Smith’s Underscore dance and research group, which met weekly for over 10 years. The Underscore is a long form dance improvisation structure developed by Nancy Stark Smith. It has been evolving since 1990 and is practiced all over the globe.

This opportunity was another foundational influence in my CI career. The physical state Stark Smith named “Bonding with the Earth” is a section within the Underscore practice where practitioners lie on the floor, surrender to the forces of gravity, and tune into their internal embodied experience. This often leads to another aspect of the practice that she named “Overlapping Skinespheres,” which includes sustained moving compression between two dancers.

Each of these states allowed me to stretch beyond my normal perception of time. Sinking into a depth of awareness of my embodied experience, I noticed the profound therapeutic effects on my nervous system.

CI informed movement had a significant influence on my career as a bodyworker, and it continues to shape my work as a psychotherapist. My research continues along a lineage of improvisors and thinkers that celebrate pushing CI in new directions. It focuses on how I can maintain health and longevity in my dancing. Subsequently, this form can be practiced as a healing technique that is engaged in an ongoing exploration of how to help people discover the somatic and emotional tools to handle the complex problems of our current world.

The Value of CI Informed Touch:

CI disrupts the habituated use of the hands as the primary tool for initiation. Body parts such as the back, torso, shoulders, legs, and so on are just as likely to be points of contact. To maintain the connection, both partners engage in a subtle reaching toward one another at the point of contact. Should one person decide to shift or end the contact, they only need to reroute the orientation of their reaching.

The use of touch via all surfaces of the body is a unique feature of CI, and as a result, this specific mode of utilizing and perceiving touch has not been researched extensively within the field of psychology (Jackson 2022, 26).

Recognizing ourselves as active agents capable of both giving and receiving at the same time can be a profoundly empowering realization in any situation, particularly when it comes to physical contact. More research evaluating the benefits of reciprocal touch is long overdue.

When we are in our frontal orientation, able bodied people tend to rely on their vision. When we are oriented toward spherical space, we pay more attention to physical sensations and sounds.

Parallels Between Mindfulness and CI:

Paxton’s 1972 performance of Magnesium is considered to be the catalyst for the development of Contact Improvisation. In that work, the dancers are in a flux of dynamic movements, hurling their bodies through space and absorbing each other’s impact. The performance ends with a demonstration of the Stand, otherwise known as the Small Dance.

Maintaining the integrity of the spine while engaging in a relaxed standing posture, the Small Dance brings our attention to the nuanced self corrections from our reflexes as gravity gently tips us off our center of balance. This standing meditation quiets the mind and reduces extraneous movement so that we become more aware of the intelligence of the body. “Tension masks sensation” is an oft cited quote from Nancy Stark Smith (Koteen 2008, 51).

The Stand, through its easy posture, prepares the dancer for high risk dynamic transitional moments because their ability to notice and respond quickly to stimuli has been sharpened. When contact with another is introduced, it is not advised to dive into one’s fastest and most daring dance, but rather to take the time to attune to your partner. Observing your own small dance, that skill of listening with curiosity to your personal body experience, including your mass in relation to gravity and the tiny weight shifts that keep you upright, can then be applied to your partner’s body through the points of contact.

As evidenced by the Stand, mindfulness is at the core of CI and has been since its early development. “Beginner’s Mind” is a concept from Zen Buddhism that eloquently describes a mode of perceiving devoid of preconceptions. For many people, this involves slowing down to reduce the likelihood of falling into the groove of reactivity.

Nita Little, a founding collaborator of CI, offers her students the prompt to “move at the speed of your attention.” Little’s instruction directs her students to slow down their movement in order to notice and feel more. There is no one way to respond to a partner’s touch, so the more you notice, the more choices you have for how to respond.

Instead of leaping to interpret or create a story about the emotional subtext of touch, in CI we learn to investigate the physically based attributes of touch, such as deep or light compression, moving versus static, and so on, as they shift over time.

Gabrielle likes to say that CI is a “series of missed opportunities.” Throughout the dance, there are countless invitations that present themselves and just as quickly disappear. There is no striving in CI. While it is typical for beginning dancers to have an attachment to achieving certain moves, for instance a lift, the seasoned dancer is constantly working to orient toward the unknown, having gained comfort with disorientation and trust in their reflexes.

We would argue that all of the seven Attitudinal Foundations of Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction, nonjudging, patience, beginner’s mind, trust, nonstriving, acceptance, and letting go, relate directly to CI pedagogy (Kabat Zinn 2013, 21).

In 1979, around the same time that Contact Improvisation was emerging through the body based research of Paxton and his collaborators, Jon Kabat Zinn was developing Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR). MBSR, a widely practiced, evidence based therapeutic modality, is defined by Kabat Zinn as “the awareness that arises through paying attention, on purpose, in the present moment, and non judgmentally to the unfolding of experience moment by moment” (Kabat Zinn 2003, 145).

Daniel Lepkoff, another founding CI collaborator, offers insights that correlate to this definition of MBSR:

My own fascination in dancing contact improvisation was the discovery that through my physical senses I can gather information directly from my environment, that using my own powers of observation I can shift my perspective, have new perceptions, and free myself from my own conventional/habitual ways of seeing. (2011, 40)

Here, Lepkoff sees CI as an exercise in paying attention, being present, and staying curious.

Applications of Touch: Body&Being Psychotherapy

Prior to embarking on my career in psychotherapy, I had already begun incorporating CI informed touch into my bodywork practice. The profound moments of release and expansion I witnessed during these specific sessions made a lasting impact on me.

My training in improvisation influenced how I worked with clients, guiding and encouraging a much wider range of choice making in their movements as I would work with them. The improvisational movement provided certain clients with a unique opportunity to discover newfound freedom and agency in their bodies.

I approached the unconventional aspects of weight exchange and improvisation within my practice with caution. The notions of rolling over my client, or positioning myself beneath them, or encouraging spontaneous movement choices, felt somewhat eccentric within the context of a therapeutic setting. However, it was precisely these elements that proved to be potent and beneficial in my practice. Many clients expressed how unique and beneficial the experience was for them when we engaged in these CI informed practices.

We ventured into something that was beyond traditional bodywork, and the noticeable benefits inspired further exploration. These moments could come from larger ranges of motion and could also be felt within the micro movements when we tuned our attention to those subtleties.

Paxton compels us in the Small Dance to sharpen our focus with meticulous precision and refine our awareness of the subtlest nuances in our body’s movements. This informed my bodywork. For example, by carefully positioning my hands beneath the client’s shoulder blade and applying gentle upward pressure to the scapula, I could guide clients to engage and feel the subtle movements in that area. As the pads of my fingers respond to their minute shifts, we engage in a tiny dance together.

In this process, we establish a reciprocal listening and responsiveness to each other’s movements, pressure, and pauses, deriving delight from the exploration of new pathways within the tissues.

It is crucial for me to approach the application of touch with utmost care, considering the disparities influenced by factors such as gender, race, age, class, and ability. As a middle aged, middle class, able bodied, cisgender white male, I am mindful of the potential impact of these factors when it comes to the introduction of touch in my sessions. This level of physical connection may not be appropriate for various reasons.

In such cases, significant benefits can still be achieved through guided movement exploration without direct physical contact from the therapist. The Social Work Code of Ethics states:

Social workers should not engage in physical contact with clients when there is a possibility of psychological harm to the client as a result of the contact, such as cradling or caressing clients. Social workers who engage in appropriate physical contact with clients are responsible for setting clear, appropriate, and culturally sensitive boundaries that govern such physical contact. (National Association of Social Workers [NASW], 2017)

Many psychotherapists avoid touch and refer to professionals in other disciplines, such as massage therapy, if they believe touch would be integral to their healing. However, there is a rich tradition of body based psychotherapy that dates back to Freud, who described the ego as being first and foremost a body ego (Caldwell 1997, cited in Zur 2023).

The use of psychotherapies that utilized touch continued with Reichian, Bioenergetics, Gestalt, and hypnotherapy, among others (Zur 2023, par. 15). Many who argue against the use of touch in psychotherapy do so on the basis that it will inevitably lead to sexual intimacy between therapist and client (Zur 2023). However, this is not the case. Well trained therapists learn to manage erotic transference and countertransference while maintaining professional boundaries. Furthermore, the norms of Contact Improvisation dance disentangled physical touch from sexual intimacy by creating a language that emphasizes physics over chemistry.

Paxton writes:

I tried to create CI as (using the current linguistic codes) sex neutral, or sex agnostic. . . . I tried to present objective mutual physicality. I was mindful of the infinite subjective varieties of feeling that intimacy may conjure, so as a spokesperson in early CI I tried to present the view that touch need not be considered only from the perspectives culturally and perhaps genetically inculcated for us, but as a vehicle leading only to a form of dance. (1993, 257)

Through its diverse vocabulary, CI has broadened our perspective of touch beyond societal norms. As Jackson states:

The core skills needed to make contact, both intra and inter personally, support a multitude of relational skills such as building trust, of self and others, increasing secure attachment, and building intimacy. (Jackson 2022, 39)

The following case study with “Clarissa,” a composite of a few clients, illustrates the application of CI informed touch in psychotherapy.

Clarissa was a graduate student with a history of sexual trauma who sought treatment to relieve intense anxiety and isolation. During our first session, Clarissa shared that she was dissatisfied with talk therapy and sought me out because my professional bio describes somatic and dance based methods.

As is my standard practice, in my initial orientation, I explained the potential benefits and risks of psychotherapy. I explained how I incorporate elements of Internal Family Systems, Dance Movement Therapy, somatic psychology, and CI informed touch. I stated that as a social worker, my ethics prohibit me from having dual relationships, including sexual relationships, with clients.

For clients like Clarissa, who are eager to explore CI informed touch, we typically begin our sessions with verbal processing. This initial phase allows us to build rapport, gain insight into the challenging narratives in the person’s life, and establish a strong foundation before introducing touch.

Before we choose to incorporate CI informed techniques, I provide the clinical rationale behind each approach, discussing their potential benefits or drawbacks in relation to the client’s treatment goals. We take the necessary time within this conversation to explore the client’s comfort level and willingness to engage in this particular form of touch, ensuring their ongoing and active consent.

In my initial verbal assessment, I learned that Clarissa had internalized pressure to succeed academically from her parents and that fear of rejection contributed to hesitancy to advocate for herself within her academic program. This general fear of asserting herself, along with her history of sexual trauma, made her avoid dating, even though she wanted partnership.

I saw how she became dysregulated as she attempted to describe her fears, leading her to avoid talking about them in detail. Before we explored any form of interpersonal contact, I guided an individually based warm up that highlighted the importance of tuning into her body’s signals and connecting with its wisdom. This sets a framework for Clarissa to have a visceral experience of consent and choice making. The embodied meditation also helps with calming the nervous system and anchoring the chaotic energy from the outside world.

We began by finding a comfortable position on the floor. I invited Clarissa to choose whether she preferred to lie on her back, side, or belly, and continually invited her to shift as desired. Our brains spend a large amount of time processing, deciphering, interpreting, and making sense of the visual stimulation within our environment. So I encouraged Clarissa to close her eyes in order to eliminate these distractions and take all that processing power to focus inward. It can be helpful to rest the palms of the hands gently on the eye sockets or just below on the top ridge of the cheekbones.

Our hands are supremely adept at conveying and receiving information. From a neuro receptor standpoint, they are some of the most sensitive and intelligent parts of the body. Together, we took time here to rest and acclimate to this new way of being, with our other senses opening up.

After a period of silence, I asked Clarissa about her experience. She commented that she felt more relaxed and somehow closer to the ground, with the tension in her body and in her thought patterns releasing.

I instructed Clarissa to continue communicating through her hands over various contours of her body, feeling how this has an impact on her nervous system. This is a time to notice what feels comfortable, what parts of the body feel like they need more attention, and perhaps any feelings or sensations that are challenging. It can be a radical act to experience the full range of sensations in the body.

In her seminal essay, Audre Lorde (1978) writes about the radical act of feeling our pleasure in the face of a patriarchy that is trying to condemn and erase this experience, especially from women. She claims that to feel pleasure in the body and to embrace this more intuitive sense is a significant form of our liberating power.

This can feel especially vulnerable while someone else is sharing this intimate space, yet this can be a powerful part of the process in building the therapeutic relationship. I convey to Clarissa that this is her practice. She has agency to reclaim the power of her embodied self, of her sensual experience within this movement exercise, and any vulnerability that might enter in is welcome.

This process can have the same level of intimacy as writing a journal entry. Clarissa’s body becomes her diary as she has an authentic embodied conversation through movement.

We transition into more expanded movement through exploring a deeper connection with the floor. I model movement patterns such as reaching out into space and then curling back into the body. I also demonstrate how to use resistance against gravity by pushing away from the floor or softening tone and yielding back into the floor.

Using these tools, I encourage Clarissa’s solo improvisational choice making, listening to her body’s authentic impulses, trusting its innate wisdom, its sense of timing, and knowing when or how her movements might want to change and evolve.

In reflection, Clarissa commented that her movement revealed deeper emotional blocks. She felt a mix of resistance and exhilaration. It reminded her of times when she tried to assert herself but held back because of fear.

Through fostering this environment of ongoing learning and reflection, Clarissa was gaining agency over her sensations and emotions. She felt equipped to communicate her awareness about how she holds on to certain thoughts and feelings. This translates to clients being able to make more empowered choices in their lives.

In our session, this skill enabled Clarissa to advocate for the support she needed and served as a healthy foundation for exploring CI informed touch. I introduced the concept of sitting back to back while sharing our experiences verbally.

The back, supported by the spine, is often a more shielded area of our bodies, which can make it feel less vulnerable to start with. In this exercise, while sitting back to back and feeling each other’s spines, we focus on our breath and movement. I guided Clarissa to observe her breath and see how it impacts both of us as we breathe together.

For many people, it can be a relief to connect without facing each other. Sometimes the frontal orientation can feel intimidating or even confrontational. This actually dates back to Freud, who had clients lie down on a couch during sessions to encourage open sharing without eye contact. Also, the ease and comfort we might experience sitting with this mutual support is similar to Freud working with his clients as they lay on a couch. Dr. Ofer Zur comments that Freud felt this position relaxed tense musculature and regressed clients to earlier states of development by lowering their defenses (2023).

Leaning into each other, we noticed the shared warmth and observed how our breath expanded into each other’s spine. We then leaned in with more weight to provide additional support and create different sensations. We each played with comfort and discovered how this interaction was a physical conversation. It’s a way to experience connection and mutual support in a different way than what we are normally used to, and thus can be a profound awakening.

When we were reflecting about the back to back exercise, I noticed Clarissa’s demeanor shift as she spoke in a lower and clearer voice, continually expressing a sense of being more grounded. I asserted that her regulation was facilitated by her active participation, as she could push her energy into my back. Additionally, I believe that our mutual focus on this larger area of the body, coupled with the sustained physical contact, allowed her to experience herself within a stronger container.

During the session, while maintaining ongoing consent through pausing and checking in about the experience, Clarissa was able to express a boundary relating to her history of abuse. Clarissa expressed some confusion and disorientation during the mutual pushing. She thought I was pushing too aggressively, and part of her felt like she couldn’t assert herself. She expressed her fear and hope that I wouldn’t be angry with her for speaking honestly.

I expressed appreciation and relief in hearing Clarissa share her vulnerability so openly and assured her that I don’t take it personally. I explained how this is welcome in our sessions and is a path toward establishing trust. With Clarissa’s request, we continued to stay in back to back physical contact.

She was visibly emotional and expressed that it was remarkable that she could express her boundaries and provide feedback. Rather than reacting negatively or dismissively, I listened and acknowledged Clarissa’s experience. This exploration helped Clarissa rewrite her narrative. While in the past, she felt helpless, this session offered the freedom to make choices with support rather than abandonment. Clarissa’s voice was heard and respected.

This example illustrates how embodied nonjudgmental presence fosters client empowerment and healing. CI can help teach the concept of different kinds of relational support, and the practice of CI reminds us to feel and acknowledge the support around us, which can be transformative.

Through a combination of CI informed movement and exploring her feelings through talk, Clarissa was increasingly able to maintain emotional regulation while exploring her trauma and anxiety within this session.

As time went on, Clarissa reported that during times of stress between sessions, she practiced embodiment and emotional regulation techniques learned in therapy, which helped reduce her overall anxiety. She reported greater willingness to speak up for herself at school and became more comfortable tolerating the anxiety that came with doing so.

Clarissa expressed her frustration with the emphasis on academic subjects rather than learning how to relate through touch. We both recognized the significance of finding a home within oneself and of reestablishing the connection with the earth as a way to help address the isolation she felt. We further reflected that this can allow for a deeper understanding of ourselves in relation to our world. It can cultivate awareness and gratitude for the earth and the force of its omnipresent gravitational embrace.

When we reacquaint ourselves with our bodies in relation to gravity, it can be a grounding and healing antidote to the existential crises we face.

Susan McConnell, a somatic psychologist, writes:

“When I am open to be impacted by my clients at all levels, cognitively, emotionally, physically, energetically, psychically, this strongly attuned state bumps us up another quantum level, where we are held in a relational field that has surprising transcendent potential” (2020, 96).

CI informed touch has the potential to create conditions so that we have direct access to immediate physical feedback and communication, and where our comfort is both dependent on our own abilities to take care of ourselves and supported by a relationship that is collaborative.

As a therapist, I recognize that the art of my therapeutic practice involves striking a delicate balance between providing unwavering support for the client and creating a physical space that offers honest and direct feedback. I believe that by doing so, clients can connect with their authentic humanity and establish a genuine connection with me.

Conclusion:

From early childhood and continuing throughout one’s life, touch plays a crucial role in a human being’s development. Intentional positive touch is a necessary ingredient for healthy social integration and contributes to a stable psyche.

We are social beings, and there is no modern invention, weighted blanket, sleep pod, hug shirt, or otherwise, that can substitute for the deep seated attachment benefits that come with physical contact with another person.

Navigating touch among a population impacted by COVID 19 has its challenges. Certain people are more fearful of touch, and even innocuous contact can be construed as threatening or dangerous. Consequently, it is uncommon for mental health therapists to focus on touch as part of their practice.

However, it is reductive to assume that touch itself is what creates harm. It is far more complex, with a myriad of contributing factors. As Janet Moursund, PhD, and Richard Erskine, PhD, explain:

“While the no touch rule may provide legal safety to the therapist, it could be depriving the client of precisely the thing that would most help them heal” (Moursund and Erskine 2004, 33).

We are acutely aware of the need for more resources to explore interpersonal contact within a framework of safety and collaboration. Our therapeutic work, informed by CI, lays the groundwork for reciprocal touch to become a welcome component to wellness. We advocate connecting mind and body, mental health, and somatic intelligence, and we believe that a grounded self helps generate a bonded community and a better world.

Selected References:

Brandes, Aaron (Brando), and Gabrielle Revlock. “Therapeutic Applications of Contact Improvisation.” In Resistance and Support: Contact Improvisation @ 50, edited by Ann Cooper Albright, 194–211. New York: Oxford University Press, 2024.

Caldwell, C. 1997. Getting in Touch: The Guide to New Body Centered Therapies. Wheaton, IL: Quest Books.

Jackson, Kellyn. 2022. “Where Contact Improvisation Meets Dance/Movement Therapy: An Embodied Group Artistic Inquiry.” American Journal of Dance Therapy 44: 21–44. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10465-022-09360-7.

Kabat Zinn, Jon. 2003. “Mindfulness Based Interventions in Context: Past, Present, and Future.” Clinical Psychology: Science & Practice 10, no. 2: 144–156.

Kabat Zinn, Jon. 2013. Full Catastrophe Living: Using the Wisdom of Your Body and Mind to Face Stress, Pain, and Illness. Revised and updated edition. New York: Bantam Dell.

Koteen, David, and Nancy Stark Smith. 2008. Caught Falling: The Confluence of Contact Improvisation, Nancy Stark Smith, and Other Moving Ideas. Northampton, MA: Contact Editions.

Lepkoff, Daniel. 2011. “Contact Improvisation: A Question.” Contact Quarterly 36, no. 1: 42–44.

Lorde, Audre. 1978. Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power. Brooklyn, NY: Out & Out Books.

McConnell, Susan. 2020. Somatic Internal Family Systems Therapy: Awareness, Breath, Resonance, Movement, and Touch in Practice. Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books.

Moursund, Janet P., and Richard G. Erskine. 2004. Integrative Psychotherapy: The Art and Science of Relationship. Belmont, CA: Thompson Brooks Cole.

National Association of Social Workers. 2017. NASW Code of Ethics. https://www.socialworkers.org/About/Ethics/Code-of-Ethics/Code-of-Ethics-English.

Paxton, Steve. 1993. “Drafting Interior Techniques Paxton.” Contact Quarterly 18: 72–77.

Zur, Ofer. 2023. “To Touch or Not to Touch: Exploring Prohibition on Touch in Psychotherapy and Counseling and the Ethical Considerations of Touch.” https://drzur.com/touch-in-therapy/.

Donald W. Winnicott, Playing and Reality, 1971.

Play is a clinical way of reclaiming range. It invites a person to experiment with less familiar forms of expression: a different voice, a new rhythm, an unfamiliar posture or gesture, a more direct impulse, a less managed way of being with another person. Through these experiments, a person can access more of how they feel, move, speak, respond, imagine, and relate. Over time, this can loosen habitual patterns that have become narrow, guarded, or overly controlled. Play can be spontaneous and still grounded in awareness. A person can let something unexpected happen while continuing to track choice, consent, timing, and relationship. In this kind of frame, play is not an escape from seriousness. It is one way serious material becomes approachable. Through play, hidden material can become available, expressed, and integrated. Play becomes a way of giving form to the parts of the self that have not yet found their way into ordinary language.

There is much more I hope to write about play, including affect, imagination, impulse, resistance, mutual influence, and the ways play can make room for what has been difficult to approach directly.

Here, I’ll share reflections that come from working with clients, teaching workshops, and developing the structures I use in somatic practice. Some pieces will explore the tools I use within movement scores and embodied experiments. Others will trace the frameworks I draw from and blend, including Authentic Movement, Drama Therapy, Contact Improvisation, IFS, and mindfulness. I’ll also use this space to articulate the values that shape the work: radical humanism, play, creativity, agency, and the body as a source of wisdom.

I am beginning this Substack as a way to gather these threads over time and make the practice more visible, one reflection at a time

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