Opening to the Body’s Intelligence and Inner Teacher with Andrea Juhan
Ailey Jolie (00:00)
The first question I have for you today is one that I ask all of my guests right at the start of our time together. And I would love to hear from you what being in your body means at this chapter or moment in your life.
Andrea (00:12)
Excellent question, of course.
The short answer is the ability to feel and deal, which comes from attachment therapy. But if I were to elaborate on that, I would say it's the capacity to feel all of the important life events that are brought to us, the capacity to feel and deal with all those events with the minimum of defenses.
Ailey Jolie (00:36)
Mmm, I love that little add-on and a minimum of defenses.
Andrea (00:40)
Right, because there's always going to be a certain strategy of protection or orienting, but using the absolute minimum so that we're out of emergency and vigilance mode so there's more receptivity in the being and the body for all the good things that life has the potential to bring us.
Ailey Jolie (00:58)
I love that answer because even in it you tie together your clinical expertise and the movement that you've done. And I spent time researching you, listening to you on other podcasts, like doing all my due diligence, like the good student I am. And I loved your journey. I found it very interesting how you moved from touch work into clinical and then into dance movement. And for the listener who's really new to you,
Andrea (01:17)
you
Ailey Jolie (01:24)
Could you just share a little bit of what that journey was and why you feel like all of those pieces are so important in what you call movement is psychology and psychology is movement. I would love to hear a little bit of that arc and that beautiful statement that I heard you make on another podcast.
Andrea (01:40)
Yeah, well, I think I've had an untraditional journey because I've come bottom up, not top down. I started early in my life as a dance teacher doing aerobics. I mean, this is the 70s, doing the aerobics and the yoga.
Ailey Jolie (01:46)
Hmm.
Andrea (01:56)
know, jazz, dance and all these things. And I was at Esalen Institute, which is a unique and amazing place to be, to be educated, to receive all sorts of teachings from so many different amazing teachers. And so I pretty quickly got on the massage crew there and did some deep tissue training and the stalt work and
And yeah, it's like the Rolfing series and anatomy. So I started with body. I started with, you know, hours and hours and hours a week, hands on with this parade of people that would come down to the bed and that's one and just learning what creates change through my hands and through the rhythm of moving with another body where they are mostly passive and I am moving the body. And I'm sure if you researched me at all, heard
what I've said, because I said it over and over, I remember the day where I'd been working all day, lowering shoulders, lengthening torsos, easing the face, all these beautiful things. And then, have you ever been to Iceland?
Ailey Jolie (02:59)
I haven't, I know. Every time I try, something happens. It's just not meant to be.
Andrea (03:00)
Ooh, you have a treat. Yeah, yeah, no,
no, well, yeah. So anyhow, go up from the badge and you go into the lodge, which is where everybody eats. And I would see these bodies that I had just transformed just even before they got to lunch, shoulders back up, tensions back on, know, faces back into, you know, the masks that I had seen. And I thought,
wow, okay, it's just not enough for me to do it for them. Somebody has to do this with me. The conscious mind needs to do this with me. And that started my investigation into psychotherapy. I started with family therapy, oddly enough, just because that's what was available and that sense of the collective, with the collective imprint on the body and its beliefs and that.
I think it's unique to have such a base with my hands and my body to know kind of what's happening in a body from an intuitive, resonant point, and then adding what are the dynamics of the psyche that have created this situation, that are creating this relational exchange between me and this person. And of course, because I was always a mover, it just
you know, those threads all came together. They were never not together for me, just because of the situation that I was in, which I am so thankful for.
Ailey Jolie (04:19)
you
would love to hear from you a little bit more about the movement side of your journey and your expertise because I love dance movement therapy and it's been so profound and healing for me, integrated for the psychedelic assisted psychotherapy that I did. Like it really healed that stuff that was left over from some not so great experiences. But whenever I bring it up to my own clients, they have no idea what I'm talking about when I say dance movement therapy. So I would love if you could
kind of just even explore that field in that area because it often seems like so tucked away.
Andrea (04:59)
Right, in the back wards, as it were. We work with dance movement therapy traditionally with people who cannot communicate or exchange in your normal ways, right? They're schizophrenic, they're autistic, they're something that so we, clinicians throughout the years tried to find other ways to engage in contact through severely dysfunctional people, which is just like, obviously possible and essential and important.
But it's only just, you know, that it's a narrow band of what's possible.
Ailey Jolie (05:26)
No.
Andrea (05:28)
I had the good fortune of meeting Gabrielle Roth and Anna Holbrunn kind of at the same time. And at that time there was Emily Conrad. I just had these amazing pioneer women, which I loved, coming from traditional art into the healing art of movement. And I think that's the biggest differential is that we are using movement for healing, not performance. And most people will think of movement
as performance. I'm not graceful. I'm not a dancer. I rarely even use dance in my title because so many people associate it with something that they're not. So I lean into the movement aspect that because we all, we do walk, we do breathe.
Ailey Jolie (06:03)
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Andrea (06:12)
So the movement for me, like you, was always a refuge. I'm a deeply feeling person. I come from a pretty traumatic background. I didn't know how to deal with my own intensity of emotionality and the kind of trauma that was moving through my body. And finding the rooms with Gabrielle Roth first was just such a godsend.
because it really allowed me to realize, this is not a problem. It's not a problem. It may feel difficult, but if I stick with it and move with it, things change. Things change. That's the first principle. It's like, if you move with and towards, it will change, period. There's a law of physics or something, you know? Is that that will happen. And I learned to trust that very early on. Additionally, I think the...
Ailey Jolie (06:41)
Mmm.
Andrea (07:03)
the embrace and the...
immersion into altered states of consciousness to realize that that different states of consciousness will at will instigate or facilitate different levels of healing and that often the typical level of consciousness we have is not the most conducive one to healing. So, you know, for years and years, decades, I had my private practice and then I had my, you know, go across town and I go to the studio and I do my dance work.
Ailey Jolie (07:32)
Thanks
Andrea (07:32)
all of that. And it was always painful for me to feel with my private clients what they're missing in terms of that sense of rest and ease in a relational field. The ability to play, to play and be creative in a relational field. Knowing that that was so much of the womb, that's what was missing was the safety of being in company.
Ailey Jolie (07:40)
Hmm.
Andrea (07:55)
in company with available resident others. And then like, why is that being the dance studio? And I would see people moving and just either discharging all of the stuff that they were going on or going straight above it, that bypass just like, woo, let's go into the ecstatic realm, which is lovely and fun. I'm not dissing that, but I do think there's a missed opportunity in terms of really needing the different choreographer, the psychic.
physical choreographies in our body that do cause suffering and we can meet them in movement. So does that help?
Ailey Jolie (08:28)
There,
yes, there are so many things that you said that I'm just like made a mental list. And so I wanted to go back to one of the first things that I heard. Thank you, mind, for doing a really good job here. You spoke about movement as healing instead of movement being performance. And what that really like brought up for me was very open about this. I have like a really traumatic childhood with a lot of sexual violence, a lot of sexual exploitation, but I had dance. And for me, that was,
So, so, so healing. And I never felt objectified when I was dancing, even though I had ballet teachers who were telling me this and I hadn't, you know, someone who was abusive, who was a teacher. And I had all those parts. But when I was moving my body, it was like the performance was over. But as soon as the music stopped, the performance began. And why I would love to dive into this with you is because we live in a society where most femme bodies are forced into performance with
the male gaze or being objectified, whatever that is. And I would love to hear from you how specifically movement as healing is so important for those people and reclaiming, actually, I don't need to perform in any area of my life, not here and not elsewhere. And what you've maybe seen in all your years of supporting people and using movement as a healing tool.
Andrea (09:37)
Thank
Yeah. Well, first of all, I would not make a gender difference because I think the male body is also subject to a lot of performative expectations that are not of all value and often not reflective at all of what's inside, right? Same for female or any gender in between that, right? I think that gender script that we all get is one of the stereotypes that
Ailey Jolie (09:59)
Yeah,
Andrea (10:10)
throws us off this listening, right? We're listening to something out there, not in here.
Well, I think the first skills we learn in embodiment practice is what is actually happening. What is actually happening in here? What is my awareness of what is happening here? And what am I adding to it with my stories, my beliefs, my judgments, my opinions, my expectations, right? So that's the, you know, it's one of the first skills we learn is that differentiation between sensation and story so that we can start to, you know,
because both are colorizing experience. You're always going to have story, but they're not always your best story or the only story, right? So that sense of leaning into sensation and feeling what is true for you. What is actually in the present moment, the truth of what your body is telling you and having in movement the invitation, the beautiful invitation to explore that in a nonsensical way.
to explore that in any way it wants to come about, to use music and rhythm and time to play. think play, as we know, is our primary mode of learning. you know, psychotherapy sometimes is really not that playful. And I think it's a problem there in terms of, you know, we get boxed in. And so the movement brings this sense of what am I actually feeling? And if I can...
give myself permission and I'm in a safe, permissive environment, what does it wanna do? What am I being guided towards? What wants to evolve in me? What's my next iteration of myself as a evolving, developing human and being able to listen for that teaching? Sometimes we don't know how to listen, so we need to learn how to listen for that and embrace that. Notice all the obstacles that come up for embracing that.
and starting to develop the capacity to tolerate what's true for us, to tolerate and accept that often it's tolerate because we, the body in our own nature tends to be pretty, if we're really in direct contact, strong. know, it's a strong, a physical human being is a strong force of emotion, of creativity, of life force.
And a lot of us have been so shut down, so dulled down and so contained that when we start to feel that intensity, we go right out of our window of presence. I'm assuming you know that language. So that kind of nudging that window of presence to actually hold my experience of myself. And the more we do that, the more that become a...
a sense a feeling of self capital S self right rather than all of the other identities I have adapted for coping or told I need to be or culturally I'm surviving by.
Ailey Jolie (12:50)
Hmm.
Andrea (13:01)
And that capacity, that embodied capacity offers us strength and power to be what's true. Just what's true. It's like you don't argue so much anyway. just let them, okay, this is what's true. Let's talk about it. That's what's next.
Ailey Jolie (13:09)
Mm.
You said there that the sensation allows us to tap into kind of the story that's there or find the story. And I would love to hear from you if there are some collective stories that when people kind of move into the sensation, is there collective stories that you kind of feel are most common in the body, regardless of identification that are commonly there, or does it feel like quite a unique, disperse experience?
Andrea (13:41)
It's both, right? There's all these unique dispersed. But then, you know, my teacher, Dick Price, would always say, you know, there's probably about four key themes and everything else is an elaboration on that. ⁓ But I do think there's some core stories and one of them is I'm not enough. I am not enough. And on one level, we could say that's true. We aren't enough. But if we're embracing our spiritual nature, we will always be enough. And to the degree that we haven't embraced.
Ailey Jolie (13:52)
Hmm.
Andrea (14:06)
embodied and become our deepest spiritual nature that that will always be there on some psychological thing. I'm not enough. I'm not enough. The feeling I'm not enough. that you know and along with that is I'm bad, I'm wrong, shame. But I would say that that that's at the core of most body experiences. I'm not okay. Something is wrong with me.
and then all the reasons of what that might be.
Ailey Jolie (14:32)
All the,
yeah, either individual or imagining collective or societally creative like stuff that comes with that. I wanna circle back because you mentioned her name and you mentioned Gabrielle Roth and her being a teacher. And for the listener who doesn't know who that is or how amazing they are, could you share a little bit of not only your experience, but the work that they brought forth?
Andrea (14:53)
Hmm. Deborah Roth was a wild, a wild pioneer in her time. She really came from traditional dance, you know, entered herself, ended up at Esalen in a bunch of drumming circles of the day. Again, we're in the late 60s, 70s, the drumming circles and this, this kind of, you know, I'm sure there were a lot of drugs and whatever going on as well. So there was just this, this mash of
of experience, people, music, bodies. And she just entered that world as deeply as she could and started to map it. She was a brilliant mapper. she started to map what's the flow of energy? What is our energy actually doing? And of course, we know energy rises and falls, right? Activates and settles.
but she started to find the nuances of that in the five rhythms. And that's how she defined it. At first it wasn't there, but then slowly that map came about.
Would you like me to just quickly define that map? OK. So she starts out. And I would, I've learned some things. I would evolve this map. what I mean, her map is so brilliant and so to the core. So there's a flowing, there's a gathering of energy, which you know in other words, know, SE or something might be this kind of orienting the sensing. Where am I? So flowing.
Ailey Jolie (15:56)
I would love that.
you
Andrea (16:17)
which also is the element of ground. We would think of it as earth or water, but more it's ground. It's like getting your ground, where am I? And just collecting energy. And after there's, you know, I'm going to just do it because that's how my body can teach you. It's like just this flowing. At a certain point, we develop enough energy or potency that there starts to be some articulation in that, right? There starts to be a beat or a thought or a structure or a
Right. And that's the energy of staccato, which is it's like, there's there's rhythm, there's speed, there's idea, there's progression, there's there's potency to this flow. so staccato brings us more into focus, right. Brings that brings that more into focus, more into its development. And it builds and it builds and it builds as it does. And we build. anybody who's done the project will understand that.
We build, we build, we build, and it falls apart. It will fall apart. There will get to be a point where like, I don't know what I'm doing. I have no idea where I am. I have all this energy. I thought I knew, right? That there will always be in the creative process or movement, a sense of falling apart or not knowing, right? And that's the rhythm of chaos where
where we enter even a much larger field than our body, where there's so much change and so much possibility and so much input and so much output that there's this kind of expansion of sense and experience into a bigger field of possibility. And that can be chaos. If it doesn't feel like possibility, chaos will be scary. Right? So there's some real skill.
and how to embrace chaos, that energy in a way that feels like potential or feels good or feels like release. If we have a lot of trauma, there's a lot of things that you would need to learn that we do learn, can learn, that you can embrace chaos so that there's a friendliness in your system towards that energy instead of like, fuck, it's falling apart, right? So then there's that chaos with some goodwill and good
core and the body and good work, you you move through that, you move through the chaos, you listen to something bigger, you let the structure dissolve. And through that comes the fourth rhythm, which is lyrical, which is in so many different ways. It's that sense of lightness when you've given up something like you've given up the project and that kind of fresh response to something that that sense of, where am I now? What, you know, that's
Ailey Jolie (18:43)
Hmm.
Andrea (18:46)
It becomes in the dance, when you watch movers do this again and again, the lyrical dancing often has the most authentic expression of that body. Because after cast we can lose our patterning. And so lyrical becomes this place of, you start to see in movers things you hadn't seen before.
The new possibilities, the unique possibilities, the edge of their becoming, what's new for them. And so there's some playing around in that field, allowing play, again, play, play, play is so important. Not goal-oriented, not trying to produce anything, not trying to understand anything, but just allowing yourself to be. And then in...
Gabrielle's map of the five rhythms, then there's a settling down into stillness. Right? Sense of integration, sense of settling, a sense of breathing, a sense of pause and listening, you know, like, oh, okay, that was a wave, right? It was a wave of energy. That one passed. Where am I now? And in that, flow again.
Ailey Jolie (19:49)
As I know, Gabrielle was one of the teachers that you were around and there was others like Dick and Chris Price and I know that they all are visionaries and kind of body-based awareness and I would love to hear from you how those shaped both your understanding of embodiment but the work that you went on later to create in the open floors approach.
Andrea (20:09)
But I think the key thing that Gabrielle taught me was that everything moves. There is nothing that doesn't move. One of her favorite quotes of her, for her, I've adopted it, she says, I can dance the phone book. Literally, just read me the names. I could move the phone book. And I really understand that in that movement is a language that is always available, always happening, never not.
And I really got that from her. So alongside with all of my studies around psychotherapy, depth psychotherapy, family therapy, object relations, Reiki and work, all of these other ways of watching the movement of our thoughts, our emotions. For me, it was always there that we are also moving. We are never not moving. The movement might not be visible.
We might not see it. I think through Emily Conrad, really learned the potency of micro movements, the movements that are happening inside, the pulsing movements, the little movements, the little adjustments that are always happening. So when I'm sitting, standing, whatever I am with a client, it's never not movement. And I think that's something that came from
You know, also in a opera in that sense of all our stories are in the body. None of our movements are random, actually. They're all an expression of something we have known, something we are moving towards, something that is evolving.
Ailey Jolie (21:33)
before this podcast started, I shared that I've been thinking of retraining or adding dance movement therapy into my kind of the things I like and what I want to offer. And one of the things that I have mostly noticed was A, how hard it was to find the field.
even doing a master's in somatics, was really actually quite disheartening that I was like, my goodness, we didn't really touch on these people. And people like Gabrielle or even yourself and a lot of others, they are kind of the pioneers of somatic psychology or how we understand things like somatic experiencing today, a sensory motor, a homey. And as you're speaking, I'm drawing all those little links in my head. And so this is the question that you don't have to answer. You can have a pass. That's very fine. Why do you think or why do you imagine?
I have some suspicions as to why this piece hasn't been brought forward into the of the mainstream collective as there is just like this huge pop psychology explosion, which is why this podcast exists around mind body connection, somatics, embodiment. Like how is this piece and people like you and Gabrielle not more well known? Because this, from when I hear you speak, I'm like, this is the foundation of those other things. And maybe you have a sense.
Maybe you don't. I'm just curious.
Andrea (22:44)
I've got a similar curiosity, of course, right? I had to design my own dance therapy, doctorate, because I didn't find what I wanted. Traditional dance therapy in USA was so top-down, and I'm sure those things have a lot to offer, but I was coming from this incredibly juicy, creative theatrical,
process and to sit down and do movement notation. this is, you know, just a very specific, it was like, okay, this is not a match for me. I need to find, know, and like, you know, the traditional people who came into movement there, like Mary Whitehouse, Mary Starks, Janet Adler, you know, all the authentic movement, I would say is the closest to traditional dance therapy that I love. And I did.
in authentic movement and love it. And still, it didn't include the wildness I wanted, the rawness of emotion and sexuality. I know it does at times, but you're with your eyes closed all the time. So you really miss this relational field, which was very important to me. We haven't really talked about the relational body, but it's so key. think if I were to think of a short reason why dance,
dance movement, that one is we call it dance and that's scary. That implies performance or tap dancing or something, you know, counting numbers. And the other is it's scary. It's direct. It's exposing. It bypasses defenses in a way that is, it's terrifying to people. You know, it cuts short a lot of goings on because you are dropping down to a level of being to being.
Not immediately, but that's the potential where you're going, where a lot of the ego defenses and protections and identities and strategies in the safety of play and moving, which is kind of fine. And I often tell therapists, you have to be careful of that because you can go beyond what someone can actually integrate and ground down and have the skills because it's it's natural to us.
But I think the reason it's not embraced as any kind of traditional therapy is it's big, it's exposing, it has a sexiness. mean, it just has a body, it has this kind of uncontained energy that we all want, right? But society in many ways condemns, particularly for us professionals, right? We're not supposed to be a certain way.
Ailey Jolie (25:03)
I love that.
Hmm.
Andrea (25:17)
So that's my guess. And so I actually did not do, I'm not a certified dance therapist. didn't want that, that was not my path. But I consider myself very much a dance therapist. And the people I train are very much movement therapists for sure.
Ailey Jolie (25:27)
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Could you, I loved your answer by the way, and it was so not what I expected. So I, I, I double loved that. Um, could you speak to the relational piece that's so important in, and, and yeah, for me, those have been the most healing pieces is being in the dance movement practice and just like catching the glance of someone else or even last night I was in it and in static dance and just having this deep moment of seeing a friend and being like, Oh, I see the mirroring here and this is just like,
I don't know any other way we could have gotten that. But I would love to hear more from you about the relational piece, because I do think that is very etchy for people.
Andrea (26:09)
very edgy. And what's interesting is it's completely the truth of the situation. just try to, we are socialized and conditioned to not acknowledge a certain interconnectedness because that challenges our highly held value of individuality. For us in OpenFloor, and this is what I think OpenFloor really did bring also to the field,
is the understanding that there is no embodiment that isn't relational. That the body was formed literally as a little zygote. We were formed in relationship to other tissue to another body. Every step of the way has been in relationship to environment. Alan Fogel, who's kind of an old timer in somatic fields, he talks
Ailey Jolie (26:38)
Hmm.
Andrea (26:57)
very beautifully about our very first perception of self was in relationship to other. There is no perception of self separate from surround or other. And I think that when we're trying to say, I'm going to feel myself without having some awareness of my context or who's there, what's happening and what I might be feeling along with.
this thing I call myself. We're not understanding the true situation of myself. So, I mean, that's in one therapy, that's true as well, is that I feel as a clinician, your body, your lending, I often tell this to my students, you're lending your somatic sensory system to the system of another, just like a parent does to a child.
Right? You are lending them the apparatus of your being, not just your head or your thought. Literally, you are in a coup of re-choreographing.
The value, think, of group practice, like developing communities, we call them in open-floor communities of practice, where there is an understanding that there's certain values and certain skills that embodiment requires. And there's certain responsibilities that all participants need to attend to for themselves. They need that capacity. And once those skills are taught and once those
understandings and values are kind of agreed upon and you have a community of practice, there's nothing that offers greater healing than allowing your body to soften all of those ways that we've been hurt by others and we've always been hurt by others, right? To be able to begin to trust ourselves, to be in resonance with others, to be in concert with others.
Ailey Jolie (28:41)
Hmm.
Andrea (28:44)
to not be afraid of difference, to be curious. That's my key word for relationality. I your key skill is curiosity. And that that's an embodied ⁓ movement, right? I'm curious to touch, I'm curious about proximity, I'm curious about what's the back of you is doing over there. I'm curious about...
Ailey Jolie (28:57)
Mm-hmm.
Andrea (29:07)
where we're the same, you we don't even think about it, but we're doing that all the time. We're always assisting another person. So this is about making the implicit explicit and to benefit from it by making pathways into connection and belonging that are attuned to who we are, not who we're pretending to be accepted, but who we are. That's incredible here.
Ailey Jolie (29:18)
Hmm.
Andrea (29:32)
and essential healing for our culture these days, essential and really missing.
Ailey Jolie (29:37)
I would love to hear about what you've created an open floor and just kind of the journey of creation and what does it look like, what does it support people with, what is it great for?
Andrea (29:50)
You know, I've been around enough and I've had enough structures that I don't have a huge hierarchy that open floor is that more special than other ones. I really don't. I think that a lot of structures are really, really valuable and that a structure is as good as your facilitator who's holding it. And that
Ailey Jolie (30:08)
Hmm.
Andrea (30:11)
what a structure, whether or a vocabulary, we could talk about it as a movement vocabulary. I'm going to speak German or French or whatever, not that German is better than French, but if I'm speaking German, I'm going to learn the architect of speaking German.
I think the essence of a structure, a movement structure that is healing is that it's a mirror. That's what you want is something that's clean enough to reflect back to you what you're actually experiencing. It's not that you learn to do the five rhythms or you learn the 10 core movement resources or that you learn the whole body painting. I mean, all of those things are fine, but what they're about is reflecting back to us who we are.
And so in Open Floor, we, at the time when Gabrielle died, there was a large group of us who felt that it was time to broaden. been with Gabrielle, certainly the founders, Kathy, Laurie, Vic and I, we'd been with Gabrielle for 30 years. That's a long time. And when she died, was really time to say, okay, what's the next expansion of us? And there was a group of, well, four of us and then 14 more.
I mean, practitioners, decades long practitioners. we just got together for this amazing creative process of like, what's essential? What do you do in every class? What's the most important thing? What's the thing people need to know to get to here? And we developed the core movement resources, which I feel happy with. I feel really happy. I might add a few, you know, there's the basic core movement resources are there.
Ailey Jolie (31:26)
Mm-hmm.
Andrea (31:43)
And to learn to teach your body, like, you know, we teach our body to run, we teach our body to walk, if we're going to go through childbirth, we would teach our body to do that, you know. But we don't teach our body how to live in a very stimulating, unstable world. We need certain resources to manage that without defenses. We need certain
Ailey Jolie (31:56)
Hmm.
Andrea (32:07)
Physical resources we need to know how to ground we need to know how to Center. We need to know how to let go Right many people who no idea how to let go of a belief or whatever, you know, so the core movement really resources I think For people who are new to embodiment. I think it's like learning a language is learning this whole new language for yourself that can reflect
Aspects of your being you didn't even know were there because you didn't you weren't speaking the right language. Aspects of your being that don't have words, which is a whole nother aspect. We have all the pre-verbal aspects of your being, much less the intuitive spiritual dimensions that may not have words. And movement vocabulary will help you access the parts of your being that are more than your stories, your concepts.
your aspirations, and to get used to a nonverbal world that I think opens up a lot.
Ailey Jolie (33:06)
You touched on it there by naming spirituality and it was something that I was really struck by when I listened to other podcasts with you but also just kind of started engaging with your work was how you bring the spiritual or kind of some of the transcendent into what you offer. And I would love to hear from you the relationship between maybe spirituality or spirit or whatever word feels best for you or for the listener to kind of swap in their head.
with movement.
Andrea (33:34)
We don't bring it. It's there. That's the first thing. That's the first thing. We don't bring spirituality, know, a leash over to our practice. The nature of being a spiritual being is part of the human experience. And all of humanistic psychology, which is the psychology I was raised in, would say is true, right? There is a nature of spirit that is part of our humanity. And so...
Ailey Jolie (33:35)
Mmm, it's just there. I love that.
you
Mm-hmm.
Andrea (34:02)
Again, I think movement is a shortcut to that because it does drop us through some of our personality layers very quickly.
That is it. First of all is knowing it's there. Second of all is naming. You know, all the little ways that we would name it as someone was moving. Notice what you're experiencing beyond your skin. Notice what you're experiencing between you and your partner right now. You might not have words, might not have a story. Just notice what you're feeling in the room of us.
Ailey Jolie (34:13)
Hmm.
Andrea (34:32)
And you know, as a facilitator, you can really pick key moments when something has really shift, something has really dropped, and you can call attention. Notice this. Notice what your body has to say. Do you welcome it? Do you resist it? Do you have ideas about it? Do you add all sorts of opinions? Notice, just notice that it's here. And then it's more, you know, then you can go further and further. If you were to align with whatever you're experiencing.
How would it move? If you gave words to whatever you're experiencing, what would it say? So again, for me, it's very much bottom up. And then with words, whatever your words are, I'm going to give a whole host. You can call it God, spirit, nature, you know, just to give a range, life force, universal energy, whatever words. But more important to me is what is that experience and what does it feel like and how does it move?
Ailey Jolie (35:23)
Mm-hmm.
Andrea (35:23)
and then
the words come secondary. So I think that it's actually really easy. You just need to know it's there, have confidence that it's there, and that every human body, if you have a body, you also have a spiritual dimension, and to open to that. I make it really clear I'm not a spiritual teacher, because I think the lineages of spiritual teaching, of which I am not a part of, although I'm a great student of,
Ailey Jolie (35:41)
Mm-hmm.
Andrea (35:47)
But I think embodiment is the foundation of creating a good fertile ground for spiritual development.
Ailey Jolie (35:54)
Yeah, I wanted
to ask you this question because being in London, there's two, being in London, being in a city that's so overwhelming, so heady, so fast, very disembodied or disconnected for lots of reasons. That piece or that aspect of being in the body and actually believing that that kind of, what we want to call it, life force vitality spirit is there.
is something that I find a lot of my clients really, really, really struggle with. Even if they have really devout movement practices, there's confinements in which exist in their own mind or their own structuring of their body, which it is very, it hasn't happened just yet for them to touch that piece. And that's why I asked that question, because I was really curious to hear from you. If there are things in the container or you just have that kind of unwavering trust that it is there and it will happen in the right time and the
protection will kind of melt away and they'll come into contact with what's inside each of us.
Andrea (36:46)
Yeah, in Open Floor, we have the relational body mapped out into the hungers. We talk about it as a hunger break, this is a very physical feeling in the body to be hungry for something. And so we know that we're also, we're hungry for solitude at times. We need that. We're hungry for connection. We need that. We're hungry for belonging. And the last hunger is spirit. There is a holy longing.
Ailey Jolie (36:52)
Mm.
Andrea (37:10)
There is a holy longing that the human being will experience at some point in our lives. Developmental situations will add up to everything we know is not working, right? Everything I've ever done is not solving my problem right now. It's those existential crises, it's those transformative moments when we're engaged with something that is.
Ailey Jolie (37:26)
Thank
Andrea (37:34)
you know, definably more than us, whether it's a death or a birth or a, you know, something magical that happens. so I think to, to keep the quality that it's okay to have a spiritual longing that is a part of the human experience. We all want on some level to feel, to feel the world beyond, you know, I'll just say Andrea.
I, know, Andrea is very boring at a certain point and very limited at a certain point. There's so much more to this world than just me. And I long for that. I long to feel that. And I think most people have a sense of that. And then there's going to be fear, right? And which is back to the core movement resources. What core movement resources help one feel comfortable softening an identity, dissolving into something bigger.
Right? If I don't know when I'm, if I don't have a physiological, physical trust in something bigger, I'm not going there. I don't know what it is. Okay. So there are core movement resources that we practice that allow that support that open the door to the experience of feeling yourself completely interconnected with something larger than who you are.
Ailey Jolie (38:46)
I love that because it really brings in embodiment being as both kind of a study but also a devotion, which is a really kind of like interesting place. And I would love to hear just a little bit from you around if there has been really large changes and maybe they've been quite subtle, but how embodiment or your understanding or your experience of embodiment has changed as you've been in this field for so long.
and spend just more and more time with your own body.
Andrea (39:12)
Yeah, well, and of course of aging, right? There's a whole trajectory too, which is fascinating. And now I have grandchildren. So it's so fat, you know, I'm watching these little ones grow again. You know, I had children and just seeing development happening all over again from all that I know now, it's amazing. So the question is, what do we seem to change over time? Well, in the 70s and the 80s, we were very much about
Ailey Jolie (39:14)
Hmm.
Andrea (39:39)
I got to be who I am, I got to be free. The 60s or the 50s has really contained us, there's a cultural containment. I think, I'm a California person, here where I live, that whole explosion of consciousness, of psychedelics, of humanistic psychology.
Ailey Jolie (39:54)
Mm.
Andrea (40:01)
the early expressions of embodiment for me and for most of us and for me as a facilitator was express, express, take what's inside and get it outside so that we can see it, we can feel it, we can play with it. I'm not overly bound inside of my physical body by trying to contain a suppressor, right? And I think that that was really good. I think it was really great. I think that we didn't understand trauma.
I think that we didn't understand the nervous system properly. We learned that by overstimulating and overdoing. Of course, neuroscience learned it another way, but we in this field, we learned it by watching like, that just scrambled somebody. That took them too far. That, that.
Ailey Jolie (40:28)
you
you
Andrea (40:47)
system couldn't tolerate what they were experiencing. So therefore it's not very helpful to them because they weren't even there really. They're just disassociated. And that brought in the finesse of slowing down, more micro movements, subtleties, nervous system regulation, dissecting what disassociation is in the body.
Ailey Jolie (40:52)
Hmm.
Andrea (41:08)
and where it's useful and where it's not and how we can have some control around disassociation, how we can disassociate on purpose rather than just being hijacked by it. So I think those are some of the skills that have come in the last 20 years. ⁓
Ailey Jolie (41:08)
Yeah.
Mm-hmm.
Andrea (41:23)
I also think that at the beginning, embodiment was all about expression, but it wasn't about our personal journey. It was about, you know, maybe archetypal stuff, but it wasn't literally, again, we've just gotten more subtle and more specific about what is my particular unique relationship to what's happening here. And finding some ownership and untangling of things that might have gotten.
tangled or coupled in ways that are not useful for me. So I think those are the big changes that I've seen.
Ailey Jolie (41:55)
really hope that specifically the realm of psychedelic assisted psychotherapy, but I could branch that out into how breathwork has moved. I spent some time training in holotropic breathwork. It didn't end up being a route that I pursued, but I really hope that kind of what it seems like a little bit of a renaissance of this belief of like catharsis or like having the big cathartic release is the healing. I really hope I get some of this nuance that is more kind of held in, I would say,
movement-based psychotherapy or the work that you do, it's like, think you guys, not me, learned that and figured that out. And somehow it just hasn't made it to these other fields where that kind of belief system is still quite prevalent, specifically psychedelics. I can say that working in that space for some time.
Andrea (42:41)
I'm so excited about psychedelic assisted therapy because I really do think that's going to bring our expanded consciousness and some of the, but still I think you need the embodiment to even handle what's going on there. I mean, it's not my field, but there's something else I wanted to say about that is I think there was a flip flop. We had all this catharsis and expression and then we had this, oh, that's dangerous, right? know, bring it in, you'll slow down, you don't want to upset the inner child or, you know, that's not sick.
Ailey Jolie (42:47)
Yes.
Yes.
Yeah.
Yes.
Hmm.
Andrea (43:08)
And I really bristled at that because I didn't want to lose the aliveness and the creativity and the bigness of self that I think is really essential in our world right now. I don't think catering to the smallest aspect of myself is that useful. I think I need to attend. I think I need to heal. I think I need to find a way, but to shy away from.
what might be more edgy or what might be more new, right? We need what's new. Going back is not the only thing useful here, I think. So, in my early training, like in pre-imperinatal therapy, I was like going crazy because they're always saying, shh, my God. It's like, okay, I know there's a baby in the room, but there's also some other things happening here.
Ailey Jolie (43:38)
you
Mm-hmm.
You
Andrea (43:58)
Yeah, I totally appreciate it and understand those that I really get it. I know for myself, I think just because of where I come from, I always in, you know, in honor of Gabrielle, my teacher and Anna Halpern, who was very irreverent. I want I wanted that uniqueness of somebody's expression fully in the world. No apologies.
Ailey Jolie (44:12)
Mm-hmm.
I love that. Yeah, there's many things I could say about just as a clinician or even as a recipient, like finding just that edge of the window of tolerance, of the window of presence and just like expanding that like in the most subtle, eloquent, but also integrated ways is such like such a pristine art form. Like it's just it's so there's something so juicy there when you kind of get to.
to be in that spot yourself, but also as a clinician when you can tell you're in that spot with a client, it's like magical.
Andrea (44:54)
And as I'm watching you, it's like your fingers are doing this. It's playful. That's the element that we bring in is curiosity and play. And that uses a whole other aspect of our brain. ⁓ That little, that edge. It's not, we become less fearful than if we're approaching it from the mind, but if we're approaching it from an embodied playful state, it's something exciting to be curious about.
Ailey Jolie (44:59)
Yes.
Yeah.
Hmm.
So...
My last question for you today is if the listener is new to movement as psychology or movement as healing or just the general realm of embodiment, do you have any kind of departing words for them?
Andrea (45:36)
Well, if you're interested and you haven't yet found your way to a well-held consciousness floor, I would say that's your first step. to welcome, that's the first thing I would say is welcome. You're going to find a lot of people who can create a community of evolution. So that's the first thing I would say. The other thing I would say is be prepared.
to be a little uncomfortable. It's okay. It's okay to be awkward. This is not about learning how to do something correct. And a lot of us really focus on doing something correctly. And in embodiment, there is no correct. And that scrambles us sometimes because we want to just do it right so that we know that we'll be loved, right? And so I think the embodiment practice and finding a conscious dance floor or finding a practitioner is like we have to
ourselves permission to not get it right or not do it right or not be be right or look right but to just go what's true? myself room what is actually true and trust that or at least trust your facility that's going to be okay. You know just trust there's there's a place for you and who you are in this world. There is.
Ailey Jolie (46:36)
Mmm.
Hmm.
Thank you so much for your time today, but also everything else that you offer, your journey to be someone who can offer those things. It was such a delight to get to spend time with you, but also get to learn about you in the moments I spent listening to you and reading and doing those things. You have so much to offer and I really hope that more and more people that are interested in embodiment find their way to both yes,
conscious dance floor but also to what your offerings. Yeah.
Andrea (47:19)
Yeah, well, find OpenFloor then. Find
OpenFloor. have, you know, over 500 teachers all over the world and they've been trained really well. FindOpenFloor.org. Thank you so much. I hope to meet you sometime on the floor. That would be lovely. Thank you.
Ailey Jolie (47:29)
Yes. Yeah, I'll sleep. Thank you.
