Dance of awareness

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Dance of Awareness™ (DoA) is a new approach to working with movement, dance and awareness, developed by Tim Brown and Clare Osbond. It has five main streams of influence: Neo-Reichian body-centred psychotherapy; Five Rhythms dance; Authentic Movement; Dance Movement Psychotherapy; and the experiential exploration of Awareness itself.

 

It is a free-flow group based movement practice that aims to increase self-awareness and self- acceptance. It enables us to develop and deepen our connection to ourselves and the world around us. Feeling into the body allows us to connect to our felt sense from where we can touch our innate wisdom and creative intelligence. Practiced regularly it can be a resource for continuing wellbeing on physical, mental, emotional and spiritual levels.

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The DoA cycle - sensing, grounding, expressing, releasing, connecting and completing - follows an energetic wave, charging and discharging over the course of a session. The cycle is based on psychodynamic theory and developmental psychology. The phases of the cycle follow themes of human development from pre-birth through to around five years. This is the time period associated with the growing sense of self which becomes embodied through early experience, and which sets the patterns for adulthood. This gives the mover the opportunity to re-experience their formative years of early development, explore old imprints, and discover new patterns of moving and relating.

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Music is an important element of the process guiding the group through six sequential phases which together form a continuous wave of energy. The phases are:

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Sensing the body directly – arriving into ‘being’ with an internal focus on physical sensation and an external focus on the five senses.

Grounding our bodies in connection to the earth, receiving support

Expressing patterns and movements, ‘this is who I am, this is how I am feeling’.

Releasing the energy that is ready to move in the body, letting go,

Connecting deeper into ourselves – and outwards with others and the world

Completing the journey and coming back to ourselves

The tempo of the music changes as we dance through the cycle, reflecting the emphasis of each phase. There are no special moves, we just move and dance in whatever way feels right for us. Throughout the process there is strong emphasis on body awareness which provides the ground for our experience.