Heart Reaching Through My Fingertips—A Dance Therapy Session in San Francisco

Dance therapy allows us access to the parts of ourselves that are best expressed through metaphor and poetry.  If we use the language of the body to describe our emotions and feelings we automatically lapse into metaphoric speech.  Anxiety becomes “my stomach was in knots,” fear morphs into “I felt my heart drop,” and sadness or depression says “every part of me feels heavy.” 

In my private practice I often use both dance therapy and attachment work (focused on our relationships, both to ourselves and others) and I hear feelings expressed in this poetic language daily.  Often these expressions, when allowed, transform into a deeper understanding of oneself and one’s life when movement is integrated.  The metaphors of feeling become poetry in the body and movement becomes both poetry and prose: those things that are most poetic, those sensations felt in the body, need no translation.  It’s as though our primary language for feeling, for doing, for being has always been movement and when we try to translate it for our thinking brain the essence is lost. 

I had a recent dance therapy session with a client I’ll call Katie that reminded me how feeling, metaphor, and DMT work together. She’s aware that I am writing about this session and identifying details have been changed.

Katie recently went on a trip where she was able to see her mother. She described her joy at being in her mom’s presence. Sensing that this relationship felt particularly safe and nourishing to the client (secure attachment), I asked her to feel into her body and locate what she felt and where.  Katie described that her feelings about her mother were located in her chest and it felt like “the Grinch when his heart grows two sizes” a reference to how the Grinch stole Christmas.

I asked her to stay with that sensation a bit longer and to allow that sensation of a secure connection to really be felt in the body.  Often when we have any level of anxiety or fear, we attend to the sensations that feel the most threatening.  I wanted to give her a moment to simply feel good and allow her to lower her stress levels and feel secure in her own body.

The next moment, I asked Katie if she felt comfortable moving with these particular feelings of love and security.  The prompt I gave her was “imagine that your heart’s center is leading the movement.” 

The client began to explore having her heart lead each movement she made.  “It’s as though my heart is so big it wants to burst out of the limits of my body.”  Her movements started as slow with some acceleration and a little bit of indirectness that lent a lilting quality to each move.  She would raise her arms up and open them in a moment that expanded her heart and what she was feeling.  The client and I noted as we slowed the movement down, that there was a contracting in, a gathering, before expanding into the heart-centered movement to get maximum range and impact.  It was as though she needed to come back to herself before opening up to give.

In another moment the client reached with her arm but commented “It’s like my heart is reaching through my fingertips” which struck me.  As our session came to a close I had the client slow and find a natural end to her movement, a moment of stillness, and we sat together to process all the movement and the meaning that arose from that movement.

From the session I noted a few things about the client’s process and then reflected on our larger capabilities as humans.  Is it possible that we, in our human form, with our emotions, are always trying to express something that is larger than ourselves?  That when we express love and security our feelings and emotions want to burst the seams of our all too human form to say THIS, this, is bigger than all the things that you are paying attention to in this moment?  The second thought I had, as cheesy as it may sound, is what if every time we reached for someone we envisioned our heart reaching through our fingertips?  How would that change how we interact with each other and how we acted when someone reached for us?  Could that drive for attachment and connection, which we are wired for, be more easily attained?

There may not be any answers to any of these questions but coming back to each movement and how it feels in our respective bodies feels like the closest thing to an answer.  Movement, and dance therapy in particular, offers a glimpse into all we contain and cannot say without the poetry of embodied physical expression.  When we move, our brains can finally turn off and rest.  When we move, we come home. 

If you have questions about dance therapy in San Francisco or dance therapy in general, please feel free to contact me, Lisa Manca, MA, LPCC, BC-DMT, at (415) 212-8780 or email me at lisa@lisamanca.com.