What are your thoughts, such is your body

Dance and City therapeutic workshops represent an opportunity to better understand ourselves bring quality changes to our lives through creativity, dance, and body therapy.

The workshops are an ideal place for individuals who wish to be more in touch with their emotions who have difficulty verbalizing what troubles them, and who manifest their psychological issues through their bodies in the form of pain or health problems. If you have gone through other of psychotherapy that focus on conversation and have not achieved satisfactory results, through body therapy you will learn to express your feelings and interpret the messages your body sends you.

Psychologist Natasha Vasic, based on her many years of experience in psychotherapy, hypnotherapy, and workshop facilitation, talks to us about the progress of-oriented psychotherapy and its positive effects on our daily lives, bodies, and minds.

The question of the relationship between the body and mind is one of the central issues of philosophy and the subject of numerous scientific studies. It is no longer questioned whether stress affects physical health. The cause-and-effect relationship between emotions and health is known to both professionals and laypeople. However, until the fruitful works of Wilhelm Reich and his followers on the significance of the connection between the mind and body, therapy had not utilized this connection sufficiently.

If you want to enter our small group workshop program, write to us at kontakt@plesigrad.rs

The expansion of body-oriented psychotherapy began in the 200s, and since then, interest in it has been growing, as well as scientific research indicating the validity of this approach. Body-oriented psychotherapy has been developing over the past seventy years, taking into account research from fields such as biology, neurophysiology, neuropsychology, anthropology, developmental psychology, neonatology, and other sciences. However, Wilhelm Reich had a difficult time breaking the ice, and his persistence ultimately cost him his life. His books were burned in 1956 by the American FDA, he was arrested by the FBI as a terrorist, and in the end, he spent the last two years of his life in prison where he died under circumstances that some claim are not clarified.

Reich’s work on muscular armor is continued and deepened by Alexander Lowen and John Pierrakos, who developed a set of exercises that help release tension and blocks through the body. Their purpose is to protect individuals from painful emotions, but the cost of this armor is the inability to experience positive emotions, live a happy life, and express one’s authentic nature. In addition to body therapy exercises, their approach includes touch, breathing, movement, and conversation, as well as some aspects of Gestalt therapy, such as movement and dance therapy, and somatic experiencing.

Thus, body-oriented psychotherapy is based on the concept that people experience the world through their bodies, and not just through their senses, mind, and emotions. Everything we go through on an emotional level is reflected in our body’s appearance, posture, and muscle tone. The development of science has made it possible to experimentally confirm that the body has its own memory. Body-oriented therapists believe that certain memories cannot be accessed through conversation alone but must involve working with the body. It is especially impractical to extract experiences from a person through conversation if they occurred at an early age before the person developed speech.

In everyday language, we often use metaphors that point to certain aspects of experience. For example, we are all familiar with phrases such as ‘show your teeth,’ ‘turn into an ear,’ ‘swallow,’ ‘open your heart,’ ‘stand firmly on your feet’ or ‘build a wall around yourself.’ In body-oriented psychotherapy these expressions are more than metaphors – they represent our psychological reality manifested in our bodies.

If someone is unable to confront grief and blocks their sorrow and tears, a muscular armor will form in the chest area that needs to be worked on in order for the person to ‘open their heart.’ A person who was not allowed to express themselves in their family may have a constricted throat, shoulders, and jaw to remain silent and not express themselves. Working on emotions related to those who prohibited expression can help such a person release the flow of energy through those parts of the body and gain the strength to express themselves and stand up for themselves. A person who ‘does not stand firmly on their feet’ may have a normally developed torso but very weak and disproportionately developed legs, while someone who is rigid has a body posture ‘as if they swallowed a stick.’

We can analyze body posture and muscle tension because at their core lies a central personality problem. The focus of body psychotherapy is on the functional relationship and unity between the mind and body, and it can be of great help in cases of anxiety, depression, issues with sexuality, a poor relationship with one’s own body, fear of intimacy, and many other problems.

We are organizing a workshop in a beautiful space on Sunday, March 14, filled with positive energy, good music, and free dancing.

For more information, call 065/5156-244 or reach out via social media:

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