Movement is Therapy

From a young age, I have been a mover.

I always felt like I had more energy and emotions than my body could contain. I felt like I carried some of the pain of my lineage as a Jewish woman, of a family with trauma and mental illness, and I also felt incredibly sensitive and porous to the world around me. I first learned to channel my energy into gymnastics and  and dance at a young age. Once adolescence hit, it became harder to navigate my internal world, and an increasingly complex external one, and an eating disorder became my way of managing it all.  Until I couldn’t manage, and I turned to intensive therapy, where the underlying depression and anxiety that had been muted via the eating disorder now were turned WAY up in volume.

My first therapist suggested I try some gentle movement like yoga, and I initially scoffed,  “Oh, because yoga is going to ‘cure’ my eating disorder?”.  Yoga became my therapy.  Alongside the cognitive-behavioral therapy, it was the first time I felt I could be with and in my body in many years.  I went on to became a certified yoga teacher.

As I moved through life, I found myself yearning for a deeper experience of embodiment, and I knew there were parts of myself I wasn’t accessing through more conventional talk therapy.  Following a near-fatal car crash in 2017, I turned to somatic therapy, knowing that there was trauma from that experience that I needed to literally move and process in my body.  I have since completed a 9-month somatics practitioner training.

Somatic (body-based) work became the modality in which I felt most at home as both client and practitioner. Somatic  practice has allowed me to be more fully with the discomfort, the uncertainty, the pain and the joy of my experience in my own body and life.

And so I’ve arrived as a fully self-actualized and transformed human.

Just kidding. Sometimes I do wish there was an estimated time of arrival so we could plan a bit more in advance. But I’ve learned that living is an ongoing process of arriving and becoming. Movement has truly been the medicine in my own healing and recovery journey. For me, movement is therapy and therapy is movement.