Engaging Imagination in Therapy: Movement and Embodiment

Recently, on a walk with my five-year-old nephews, they engaged me in a spontaneous game inspired by a piece of graffiti on a wall. The graffiti was of some simple colourful flowers but there was also a big butterfly on the opposite wall. Yiorgos started with a movement of blowing the petals with all his strength and Agelos reached out to the butterfly. Their movements were activated by their imagination and the final result was a whole story, of the creation of butterflies out of drawn petals on walls.

This experience reminded me of Frances La Barre’s On Moving and Being Moved: Nonverbal Behaviour in Clinical Practice, with its poetic understanding of dyadic movement (both the therapist’s and the client’s movement) and its impact on perception, creativity and reciprocity in the therapeutic relationship. Prior to her, there has, of course, been the work of authentic movement theorists (such as Mary Starks Whitehouse and Janet Adler) who used Carl Jung’s concept of active imagination for their movement practice and for explaining the process of ‘moving from within’, where the unconscious leads the way.

Movement is the first and most basic language for human expression. Rudolf Laban, the renowned movement analyst, postulated that all tones – speaking, screaming, singing – are movement made audible. Later on, child psychoanalyst Judith Kestenberg supported the idea that children (and adults) learn to create whilst viewing, which then allows them to create independently, without copying the caregiver/therapist, when their movement is embodied and congruent.

Therefore, to access the power of our imagination, it seems vital to reach a point of movement awareness, of constructing and reconstructing our self-moving image. Movement can be used as metaphor and as a process of change over time. For my nephews, for example, the movement of blowing the petals was a metaphor for what they imagined happening when butterflies start flying or for when they are created – the petals change to wings.

In order to engage my clients’ imagination I often prompt them to listen to and sense their unconscious movement, both in the therapy space and in their everyday life. One of my clients has the tendency to stretch out with their arms and make a yawning facial expression when they feel stuck in their process and expression. Through my kinesthetic empathy they have become aware of this relational pattern and are now aware of that connection. They are also more attuned to their own imagination and try to transform the stretching movement into a more free-flowing circular movement that then gives them the emotional space for further processing.

Another client kept bringing to our sessions a repetitive claustrophobic feeling when in meetings at work. I encouraged them to consider the restrictions they experienced during those moments and to describe their mind-body in a metaphoric way. They came up with an image of them as a tree and as they were describing their self-image in meetings they started moving their arms upwards, as if to reach something other than human existence and interactions.

That moment was a profound breakthrough in how they experienced the conventions of meetings that require people to sit on chairs and restrict their movements. My client also realised how numb they were feeling in their upper body part and so they started being more aware of minute movements with their hands, torso and abdominals when they felt stuck in those work meetings.

The discontinuity in body awareness that both my clients experience is also noticeable when one embodies societally imposed rhythms versus our own ones that come from exploration. Movement rhythms repeat patterns, meaning that when one’s rhythm is ruptured by conditioning, imagination is consequently trapped.

I often encourage my clients to be conscious of the rhythm of their verbal and non-verbal sharing in our sessions – and, as a therapist, I aim to do the same. What happens in the owning of one’s own rhythm is deeply moving.