Rachel Michael – Movement and Mission

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Embodied Perspective

Embodied Prayer as Mission (Grove booklet) 

GoHealth LiFT course – where we explore the importance of movement

Rachel Michael is a dance movement psychotherapist registered for private practice with the Association for Dance Movement Psychotherapy UK. Alongside her clinical work she runs a project called Embodied Perspective helping people to experience the benefits of connecting with their body in the contexts of prayer, reflection and healing. Rachel graduated from the University of Wales with an MA in Theology and continues to reflect and write about embodied practice. Her first publication Embodied Prayer as Mission: A Response to Cultural Change, was recently published by Grove Books. 

Gillian Straine: Welcome to the Go Health podcast. I’m Gillian Straine, Chief Exec of GoHealth, an organization with a vision to enable churches and individual Christians to be a healing presence in the world. And this is a Go Health podcast. It’s for people who want to connect health and faith and make a difference in the world. Today we’re joined by Rachel Michael, a dance movement psychotherapist and the founder of Embodied Perspective, a project that helps people explore the benefits of connecting with their body in prayer, reflection, and healing.

So Rachel has an MA in theology, and her work brings together movement, faith, and mission in powerful ways. And she’s recently published her first book with Grove Embodied Prayer as Mission: Our response to cultural change. Rachel, it is a joy to have you on the podcast. How are you today?

Rachel Michael: Yes, I’m well, thank you. Thank you for inviting me.

Gillian: It’s great to have you. And I’m just thinking we haven’t talked much about dance really ever on the podcast, so it’s great to chat about this. Have you always been a dancer? What first drew you to dance? I started going to ballet as a child. I think quite a lot of girls do that. I was about six, I think, when I first went to ballet lessons, and I didn’t really take to it actually straight away, but, we moved house and started going to a different class with a different teacher and, I just began to really fall in love with it. I just felt I could really express myself through this particular mode of creative expression, and I could really put my heart and soul in it. And I just began to feel that it was really something that I wanted to devote myself to professionally.

Gillian: Wow, such a powerful expression, ‘you fell in love with it’. I mean, I also had ballet and in fact, tap lessons when I was a child and the teacher called my parents and they thought I had some kind of medical issue because I would spend the whole time going to the loo to, to get out of it.

So I guess we all fall in love with different things and dance, as you say there, I think you use expression, is there something there about the use of our body being able to say things that maybe words can’t?

Rachel: Well, I think so, yeah. It just transcends words, really. I think for me it was something about the non-verbal, because I think there are the certain things which we’re not, you know, entirely conscious of.

They’re not sort of foreground, they’re not sort of at the tip of our tongue. You know, it’s difficult to articulate some things and there is a whole realm of, of knowledge that can’t actually be verbally mediated. It has to be expressed in a non-verbal way. And so I think that’s what was really speaking to me.

Gillian: And you’ve brought together, and we’re going to get into this.

You’ve brought together your love of dance. You’re falling in love with moving your body and using it to express stuff, move beyond words. You’ve joined that together with theology and faith. How did that joining together bit happen? Did you always dance and then found theology and then put them together? Or is your relationship with God part of this love you found for dance?

Rachel: Well, I think the theology part came in later. I mean, I did pursue, a short career as a classical dancer, but then I began to feel that there was perhaps more to me as a person than I could really express in that way. It’s a very demanding profession. It was very all consuming. And I, I just sort of felt that I was kind of being called on to something different. I didn’t really know what it was, actually.

Over time, I just began to feel I wanted to carry on dancing. But I wanted to work with dance in a way that was helping other people. And I trained in dance, movement therapy as it was then. And that training really opened something to me, which was much less to do with performance and much more to do with the, connection with one’s inner life.

Gillian: Tell me more about this. So you trained as a dance movement psychotherapist, and this project ‘Embodied Perspective’. How, how does it work? So how do you…what, what happens in a session? So I know what happens in traditional psychotherapy because I’ve had that. You sit down and you talk. How is dance, movement psychotherapy different? How would a session work?

Rachel: Well, dance movement psychotherapy is the use of movement and dance and body awareness to further personal integration and growth. It’s based on the belief that there’s an interrelationship between body, mind, soul and spirit. And many dance movement therapists work in all sorts of different fields and different contexts. And, you know, it can take many different forms. But for me, one at the beginning parts is helping people to just cultivate a kind of compassionate self-awareness.

So in a way, it’s about helping people just to connect with the body, to be with themselves, to be with what is.

Gillian: So if so, for example, if I could just like, just use it, say somebody comes to you and they they’re in grief, they’ve suffered a terrible loss. Do they have to be a dancer in order to engage with dance movement psychotherapy?

Rachel: No, nobody has to be a dancer in order to engage with dance movement psychotherapy. I see the word dance in some ways as being about the dance of life, the dance of thoughts, the dance of memories, the dance of emotions, the dance of intentions. I mean, in fact, physicists tell us that at the heart of reality, everything is a kind of dance of energy.

And so that’s kind of how I see it in some ways with dance movement, psychotherapy, when we connect with the body, we’re connecting with a flow of movement and energy. And so there’s no need to have any professional experience. It’s not really based on technical skill or athleticism or anything like that. It’s just movement as a kind of raw material, which everyone uses really all the time. We’re always moving, even when we’re still, there is still movement happening.

Gillian: So in traditional psychotherapy, they would see the talking as, as a way to unlock or reintegrate some part to yourself. Is that  the same theory with dance? When you talk about connecting with the energy, is that the healing that you’re looking for? Some kind of reconnecting?

Rachel: Yeah, we’re looking for a connecting, a reconnecting with aspects which perhaps a client might feel uncomfortable with or feel conflicted about. But it’s also about affirming what is already healthy in a person. You’re not sort of necessarily zoning into the problem area. It’s about the whole, and it’s about just attuning to what is there at a sensory level. And we’re talking about the physical senses. The other, the kinesthetic sense, the sense of movement or the felt sense, the sense of how things are held in the body. The body just mediates the whole of a person, and that includes what is healthy and life giving and enabling us to flourish, as well as that which is perhaps broken or hurting or limited or conflicted.

Gillian: And in traditional talking psychotherapy, the relationship with the therapist itself is really fundamental.

Rachel: Yes.

Gillian: I got to build up trust and creating a safe space.

Rachel: Yes.

Gillian: How do you do that with the dance? Do you dance with the person as well, or how do you build up that relationship?

Rachel: I mean, I think this is not really about dance fundamentally.

It often starts in very small ways. I mean, I can give you an example of one client who I work with. She actually is comfortable with dance and she has a dance background, but we don’t start with that. We start by she just comes in. She just shares with me how she’s doing, what’s been happening for her. And then we just take time just to sit and with her agreement, I suggest you might to just sit and atune to her body, actually feel into her body where she’s seated, feeling into the feet on the floor, feeling the chair underneath her, perhaps feeling the surface of the skin, perhaps feeling the flow of the breath. And as she does that, she kind of maybe picks up on something that’s there for her that she she would like to explore. And that might be a, a physical sensation, or it might be something that she’s still thinking about from the week. And as she’s speaking, very often movement comes out as we’re speaking. You know, there are movement cues that that, we can pick up on as a therapist. So she might be kind of talking about conflict. And, you know, her hands come together and there’s a kind of, perhaps a sort of one hand kind of pressing against the other – there are these movement cues that kind of give us resources that we can pick up and work towards. So, again, you know, with her agreement, I might suggest that she kind of spends a bit of time feeling into that, seeing what’s there in her body, how that wants to perhaps develop and what it might say about how she what she’s going through. And and we sort of develop it from there.

Gillian: What about music? We often think about dance and music go together. Is that part of helping people express?

Rachel: It can be, but I tend to use music that’s fairly neutral. That’s kind of, not to giving too much of an emotional steer. That doesn’t kind of intrude too much, I suppose with other clients, you know, in light work with music to perhaps help someone to just tune a little bit into different emotion.

Gillian: I’ve just got in my mind the flip side of what you described there – which seemed very gentle and peaceful and just working with the body. What if somebody’s, and this might be a really silly question, Rachel, like has got anger, but it’s really buried. Is this…say that they could put on some loud music, help them get it out of their body and they can express the rage that’s got trapped? Is that the same type of thing?

Rachel: It just depends entirely on the individual client. It depends where they’re at in that process of healing. You know, anger quite often has to do with, a trauma experience. And in dance movement psychotherapy we work quite carefully with trauma because people can very easily become overwhelmed. So I can give you an example of something which sort of speaks into what you are asking.

I’ve had a client who gave me permission to share this example today. So, she is someone who’s been working through deep trauma in her life, and, as she was talking about a particular aspect of her experience I noticed that her hands were moving together a lot. They were kind of clenching and unclenching, and she was moving her hands together and moving her fingers over each other.

And, I asked her whether it would be okay to just give some attention to that and, and see what was there for her. And so with her agreement, she just took some time just to kind of feel into that movement of her hand and what reflected on what that was expressing what that might be holding for her. And she said that she felt like a bottle with a cork in it, and the bottle was about to explode.

So that’s a very, very vivid image and, you know, expresses a very strong emotional state. But I knew that we had to work carefully with it. So I, I suggested that she might just imagine taking the cork off the bottle just a tiny little bit and seeing what wanted to come out. And, she felt okay to do that. And as she did that, then she made start some take some really, strong, forceful movements from her centre out to the sides, really kind of pushing out with hands flexed, really feeling into her personal space and the edges of her space really filling out into the space around her. And afterwards she just expressed that that was a really liberating moment for her. Because she had always been told that she was too big and so that she had kind of grown up feeling as though she had to constrain herself the whole time.

Gillian: Yeah. Wow.

Rachel: And this feeling of being able to just open out and really fill out the space really liberated her and had a big impact on her sense of self and just really brought in a different sense of self for her.

Gillian: That’s as an incredibly powerful story, Rachel, and thank you for sharing it and getting the permission to share it as well, because, we often reflect on, we often reference ‘The body keeps the score’. That book written after the Vietnam War and the study of trauma, the study of post-traumatic stress disorder and how so much as is locked in the body. And if if one suffering from PTSD, then they can often be stuck, can’t they, in, slop or drop  – with a very low energy state, stuck very stuck state, or stuck in fight or flight, which is a hyper energetic, hyper aroused, hyper vigilant state. Both very much a bodily state, aren’t they?

Rachel: It is.

Gillian: And have you seen with your work examples of when that tuning in that you’re talking about. I see now what you’re saying, Dance doesn’t quite cover it. It’s like tuning into the body work, isn’t it?

Rachel: Yeah, yeah yeah. Well it’s certainly when you’re sort of working with the body and movement, that resource the nervous system. We can do grounding work, feeling into the floor, anchoring, seeing the solidness of the ground underneath. You know, just self touch can be quite soothing. Rocking movement, shaking movements, releasing.

Gillian:  Weighted blankets, things like that can help get there.

Rachel: Yeah, yeah, yeah. All of these things kind of help to support that part of the nervous system that enables us to recover from anxiety and overwhelm.

Gillian: This embodied approach, is it feels, it’s not, we know it’s not new, but it feels quite new compared to traditional talking therapies. How do people find your work or your the type of work that you offer, Rachel? Do you find they’ve tried other things and they don’t work, and that’s why they end up working with you? Or are people seeking, people’s knowledge, you know now is such that they know where this is embodied and they know sitting and talking might not work for them?

Rachel: Well, yeah. So I think there are a lot of people now who are looking for embodied approaches, both to therapy and to spiritual practice. And for me, it tends to emerge from prayer sessions that I facilitate online or workshops that I’ve done. And then people come and say, you know, I’d like to do a bit more, you know, do you work 1 to 1?

And, you know, I am licensed for private practice so I can take that kind of work. But if people approach me for that.

Gillian: So let’s talk a bit about this link to, prayer and spirituality that that angle on your work. Because for many Christians, they’ve maybe grown up or somehow absorbed this idea that the body is something to be suspicious of. And certainly in in prayer. I’m sure this is something you’ve come across, but I wonder how you help people, who have that view of the body and how you invite them into a healing space that takes the body very seriously?

Rachel: Yeah, I mean, it can be a challenge. I think I’m the people who come to me are probably people who are really seeking something along those lines. So, I mean, it’s a number of different questions there… So I mean, there’s a quite a simple process that I go through which is really like a mindfulness meditation. So connect, I just kind of help people to connect with the body through sensations, through breathing, through movement and make connections as we go along with perhaps Scripture, scripture passages or short excerpts, short phrases of Scripture. And, of course, there’s always a link between the body and the breath and the spirit, which helps people to orientate themselves to prayer as they’re just connecting with their body, that connection between breath and spirit in which, in Scripture, you know, these same words is used interchangeably quite often. So that’s an immediate link. And then there are other links we can make with particularly using Psalm 139. There’s all sorts of references there to God seeing our frame, God knowing our substance, God laying a hand on us and being fearfully and wonderfully made. And all of that really helps to locate these practices, which might be a little bit unusual for people within the context of prayer. So I think that they bring those two together is often really, really important.

Gillian: It’s like the church is sort of discovering, is discovering, once again, this, this deep interlink we have, with our Scripture. So interesting. Rachel, we just released a course on Spiritual Intelligence, which is the scientific study of wisdom in effect, you know, neuroscientists, psychologists all getting involved to measure spiritual wisdom and, and the way that they suggest, thank you, science, that we can increase our spiritual wisdom is through embodied prayer practices.

Rachel: Oh right!

Gillian: So it’s been a delightful course to write because we really engage with these top science people and, and then be able to say, the church has been doing this for thousands of years. So things like kneeling and posture and breath all so important, connecting with God. But what you’re bringing out here is the connection, the next step on is their importance in our healing journeys as well, right?

Rachel: Yes. Yes, absolutely. Yeah.

Gillian: I’d like to move to just, just to make the next leap if I can, because you write about this stuff – embodiment, prayer therapy as mission. Right. What what do you mean by that? Let’s get into that.

Rachel: I was motivated to write about embodied prayer and make links with mission because I’m just aware that so many people outside the church seeking and, choosing, prioritising forms of spiritual practice which really value embodiment. The body is central to many of these practices. Thinking, for example, of, you know, tai chi, yoga, five rhythms dance, mindfulness, meditation. So many people are drawn to these practices, and so many people feel that in order to flourish as spiritual beings, they need to prioritize integration of body, mind and spirit. And so it seems to me that there’s a kind of gap opening up between, you know, people who might call themselves spiritual but not religious and maybe not perhaps relate to the church particularly easily.

And Christian churchgoing people, the spiritual forms, the ideas about embodiment, the valuing of embodiment, the teaching about embodiment, and the practice of embodied forms of spiritual growth, whatever you want to call it, prayer – there just completely different. And I really feel that unless the church can kind of reach out to somehow across that gap, then our mission will be impeded because it’s not just a passing phase. You know, this, this, this movement towards the wisdom of the body is underpinned by the emerging science which you just referred to. And it’s really revolutionary for our culture because for so many years, thousands of years, really, there’ve been this underlying belief in the dualistic, in the dualism of mind and body.

Gillian: Yeah. And I couldn’t agree with you more, Rachel, on that. But you know what? It just feels like there’s quite a few obstacles to get…that we together have to get over, because when I think church dance movement, I have two thoughts. And it’s not that I agree with them, but there’s two things that come straight to mind. It’s the arguments of vicars have about having yoga in church halls always causes an argument. It’s one of those things, yes, or Tai Chi. And also maybe folk that in church, especially in Britain, there’s a there can be in some communities a certain stiffness of the body in church. And maybe and also maybe some, some people got negative experiences or worries – ‘we’re going to have to do liturgical dance, start running around’. So there’s lots of obstacles. How do you suggest we get round some of them, or have you had examples of good practice?

Rachel: I mean, I agree that, you know, the things you’ve identified are obstacles. I think one of the main obstacles that I encounter is that when we encourage people to connect with their body, we cannot connect with the body at depth without kind of drawing our attention from the external world to ourselves. And we don’t really get much help in my experience of Christian teaching, with that kind of aspect of drawing into ourselves, focusing on ourselves in the context of prayer. You know, maybe in prayer ministry you get that, but but not generally. It’s almost as though our selfhood has to be kind of left out. We always need to somehow reach out to others or reach up to God.

And that’s even though Jesus has, you know, Jesus said, the kingdom of heaven is within you. We don’t really get much help. And I think that we also tend to overemphasize the negative. So in the book of Common Prayer, in the Morning prayer, there is this phrase in the confession ‘there is no health in me’. In us, I think it is. ‘There is no health in us’. And people have been saying that over and over again for about 500 years. And, Judith Russell speaks a little bit about this, actually in her book about shame. You know, it’s really firstly, it’s not true. There is plenty of health in us and there is plenty of good in us, and we need to be careful I think about how we speak to about ourselves and you know and how we speak to ourselves about ourselves. Because we cannot possibly connect, make a positive connection with our body if we believe there is no health in us.

Gillian: Yeah.

Rachel: It’s just not possible. So these things are quite deeply ingrained, I think. You know, what is true is that you know, all that is good in us all is flourishing and health giving is ultimately sourced in God, is all sourced in the divine. And these are things that we can give thanks for and, come to appreciate and, and enjoy at the same time as honouring God. So I do think that’s quite a big obstacle, really.

Gillian: It’s interesting in that because there’s there’s hundreds of years of theological thought in that phrase, ‘there is no health in us’. You know, it’s related to sin and our, obedience under God and our need for reconciliation. So it’s complicated stuff.

Rachel: It is complicated.

Gillian: and and is deep. But for me, I think a lot of this, I think that’s why I want to pick up again on your word mission. If you want the church to grow, that’s not where we start. – There’s no health in us, especially if we’re thinking one of four has – the Adverse Childhood Experience survey showed 1 in 4 adults between the ages of 25 and 75 were traumatized as children, we are dealing with significant trauma in our community. So how we promote what we do and how we frame these difficult conversations around what it is to be a human being needs some careful thought, doesn’t it, if you want people to come in our door?

Rachel: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, I think that phrase is from one of the Psalms, isn’t it? And it sort of expresses how the psalmist felt on a particular day, and we can all identify with that, but it’s not necessarily helpful to kind of keep repeating it as a was a statement of fact.

Gillian: Yeah. It needs much more unpacking, doesn’t it?

Rachel: Absolutely.

Gillian: So, I mean, I have to say, ah the devil’s advocate, that’s the wrong thing I’m looking for. I quite enjoy just pausing when I preach. I don’t preach that much and inviting people just to breathe and just to come present. And you can feel, oh, this is really different. This is a bit countercultural. Why are we not just listening with our brains and getting them…So that’s something I’ve used certainly to get to remind people they’ve got bodies and remind myself, I’ve got a body in church. What else can people do? If they’re church leaders or ordinary lay Christians in the in our communities to just do some awareness raising around the power of being embodied in terms of our relationship with God?

Rachel: Well, yeah, I think it all comes down really to the same kind of practices for me. So just taking time to slow down, I mean, as you were saying, just taking time to to slow down, to notice the flow of your breathing, to notice how your body moves with the breath to make, you know, remember the link between the flow of our breathing and the presence of the spirit with us, just maybe laying a hand on part of the body just to kind of deepen that sense of connection with your body, blessing parts of the body in the way that we perhaps are offering them to God in the way that we live. So just very simple things really, and maybe just bring in some words as well. Maybe something like, come, Holy Spirit, thank you for your presence. Help me to be open to you. You’re leading in my life. Just all of these are so simple things. It sounds like it would be, you know, nothing really. But actually to do them can be really, really make a big shift. And the other important thing is just not to judge yourself, not to be critical, not to be sometimes, you know, I go into a, a congregation, I like to have a chat with people at the beginning, and, and I say what we’re going to be doing and, and they say, oh, I’m going to be rubbish at that. It’s like immediately you kind of go into this kind of judgment about, you know, the right and wrong of it and, and, and that’s just something to really catch and try and release because God just loves it when we come before Him with the whole of our being. You know, I think God just delights in that.

Gillian: If we can return to where we began, talk a bit about dance again, because there’s something really joyful, isn’t there, about dance, about connecting and freeing. You know, it’s there in our Bible when Miriam – when they all go through the Red sea. Reed sea. Miriam danced, and there’s, we are in a society where maybe we’ve always watched Strictly Come Dancing. We think dance has to be like that. And in my I, in my head, always. Do you remember that song, Baz Luhrmann song about wearing sunscreen and says dance, even if you’ve got no where to do it except your own kitchen? Yeah, there’s something really joyful in that. Maybe. Especially if no one’s looking. You can just take a moment just to connect and be silly and and move and find that joy again. In some of this, where does joy sit for you in amongst all of this?

Rachel: Oh, well, I think it’s really, really at the heart of it, to be honest, because once you kind of can connect without being judged and without judging yourself, then you can begin to really taste movement and just appreciate it. And then, you know, movement generally, you know, can feel great. You know, it sort of affirms our sense of being alive. We can sense into what feels good. Some feels good to have a stretch, feels good to just shake out the tension, it can feel calming, it can feel energizing, and it can just really, enable us to to just delight in the sense of being alive, really.

Gillian: Oh, that’s so beautiful. Rachel, thank you so much for sharing your wisdom and insight with us today. You know how I want to finish this episode. You’re probably not going to like it, but it’s that strictly thing that goes, Keep Dancing.

[LAUGHTER]

You know what? You’re doing amazing work in terms of healing. You’re doing just such needed work, I think for the church and Christians today, reminding them they’ve got bodies and the seeking of the divine through the body. It’s really needed in our church today. But I’m so glad we’ve come round the end and and talked a bit about joy because it’s really exciting, vital, life giving work. So thank you for being with us, on the podcast.

Rachel: Pleasure.

Gillian: And, you know, the conversation doesn’t stop with this podcast at GoHealth. We will continue it. We’re going to pick up the conversation over in our GoHealth Community, where, we have a space where together we seek to flourish in health and healing. Having tuned into people like Rachel to give us some ideas. As a member of the health community, you receive weekly blessings, weekly inspiration, access to all our online courses, and the chance to connect with others in our online gathering. Others who also share this vision of health and faith working hand in hand. And you can find out more over on Gohealth.org.uk. In our show notes we can, we will share some links about Rachel’s work and her book as well. So finally, thank you hugely to Rosie Dawson for producing this podcast and to Wendy Lloyd for all her work on both the podcast and the Go Health community. So until next time, thank you for listening and may you know God’s joy and healing presence in your life.