The Wisdom of the Moving Body

Awakening Therapeutic Artistry through Movement, Dance, and Embodied Awareness - with Jo Hardy

The Invitation

This intensive CPD offers a dynamic expansion of therapeutic practice, exploring how the subtle currents of somatic awareness—joined with movement, dance, and creative embodiment inquiries—can open new doorways in our work with clients. By weaving the transformative potential of conscious movement into our established practice, we cultivate a fluid, embodied agility. This invites us to inhabit the full spectrum of presence—from deep stillness to dynamic expression—allowing us to meet the shifting rhythms of a client’s process with a widened creative range.

The journey begins with our own embodied inquiry. The intention is to deepen awareness of the ways we move, feel, and think—learning to "mind the body and embody the mind." By turning our attention back toward our bodily homes, we explore movement in a context of self-discovery, relationship, and openness. This personal deepening allows us to access the innate symphony of wisdom waiting just below our skin, revitalizing our own relationship with aliveness so that we may better hold that complexity for others.

For practitioners who already recognize that the body holds keys to transformation, this training offers a complementary pathway: moving from static "felt sense" into dynamic expression. We utilize the shared, universal human language of dance to re-awaken and re-connect us, exploring how to safely guide clients from frozen patterns into creative flow. You will develop confidence in tracking somatic narratives and shaping embodied experiences, adding new tools to invite the body into the therapeutic conversation with safety and precision.

Ultimately, this CPD offers a unique bridge between the depth of psychotherapeutic understanding and the power of embodied expression. As a method of healing, it is both simple and profoundly powerful. Whether you work in a small consulting room or a larger movement space, this work empowers you to trust the body’s intelligence, guiding those you support to drop beneath the story and express the aliveness that lives beneath words.

Curriculum & Key Explorations

Awakening the Dancer Within - We will cultivate an intentional practice of recalling attention from its habitual drift, anchoring it back into the living body to deepen presence and somatic openness. By sequentially awakening the "dancer within" through breath and fluidity, we melt habitual tension and revitalize our muscular intelligence. This empowers us to model grounded vitality, supporting clients to safely inhabit the full volume of their experience.

Cultivating Embodied Presence - We will cultivate presence as a deliberate practice, anchoring in grounding and spaciousness to maintain rounded calm amidst intensity. By deepening our inner receptivity and kinesthetic attunement, we establish the neurophysiological safety essential for the therapeutic alliance, empowering us to meet clients with attuned responsiveness and profound relational depth.

Body Listening and Tracking - We will practice deep somatic listening to track the precise geography of our internal experience, locating ‘what is here now’—the felt sense, emotion, or contraction. By taking this raw material into a dynamic creative movement inquiry, we learn to let the unconscious speak through form. Transforming contraction and judgment into fascination and curiosity supports the cultivation of embodied presence, allowing unspoken stories to find shape and release.

Body Maps - By treating the body as a living archive, we will explore creative mapping through movement and drawing, to both access and bring forth somatic sensations, emotions and the felt sense into visual form and movement exploration. Body Maps allow us to witness and creatively inquire into our patterns by giving space for the body to ‘speak’ and explore rather than be consumed by them. This process empowers us to transform inner states into dynamic resources and self-regulation skills that we can authentically model and facilitate for our clients.

Self State Constellations - Drawing on an understanding of “self-states”, we will explore the unique "shape" of our self-sense, investigating how personal history organises into distinct sub-personalities and self-states. By tracking these parts in the body and giving them expression through movement and dialogue, we illuminate the inner conflicts that often manifest as outer relational challenges. This embodied mapping cultivates a radical compassion for our survival strategies, deepening our capacity to witness the psyche’s structural dynamics and support clients toward integration.

Core Affect and State Regulation - Through a playful movement exploration of our "energetic anatomy," we will map how pleasure, arousal, and spatial presence combine to shape emotional reality. By physically embodying the full spectrum of these core states, we gain a practical compass for reading the nervous system—creating a foundation for safer regulation, precise titration, and a deeper understanding of the Window of Tolerance.

Working with Emotions and Emotional Intelligence - Movement will support us to explore the intelligence of the heart, learning to track emotion as a fluid current of energy moving through the nervous system. By witnessing the full range of primary, complex, and transcendent emotional states, we discover how to speak the physical language of our feelings—letting them flow rather than freeze. This experiential inquiry grounds our "emotional gold," cultivating the resilience to hold intense fields for clients and transform reactivity into regulated, authentic expression.

Relationship Dances: Moving Beyond Isolation - The dance enables us to explore the 'space between us’ and to expand our capacity for presence and attunement. By physically navigating the dynamic currents of connection eg leading / following, co-creating, awareness of form / space / proximity / boundary, we refine our sensitivity to the relational field. This embodied inquiry cultivates a more spacious, responsive awareness, grounding our professional practice in deep somatic intelligence.

Core Learning Outcomes

• Cultivate Embodied Presence: Develop your own somatic awareness as a finely tuned therapeutic instrument, anchoring in grounded spaciousness to hold intensity with calm, resonant attunement.

• Track Somatic Narratives: Refine your ability to read the precise geography of client experience—posture, gesture, breath, and micro-movements—as direct doorways to unconscious material and "felt sense."

• Facilitate Dynamic Expression: Gain confidence in guiding clients from static sensing into safe, creative movement, bridging the gap between talking about the body and letting the body speak its own language.

• Navigate Core Affect & Regulation: Utilize the map of "energetic anatomy" to read nervous system states, skillfully titrating interventions to help clients stay within their window of tolerance while expanding their emotional range.

• Integrate Self-States: Learn to facilitate embodied dialogues between conflicting parts and sub-personalities, using movement to illuminate internal dynamics and foster radical self-compassion.

• Transform Emotional Energy: Acquire tools to metabolize emotional activation through the body, supporting clients to unlock the "emotional gold" within reactive states and channel it into authentic vitality.

• Refine Relational Attunement: Deepen your sensitivity to the "space between" through relational movement inquiries, enhancing your capacity to navigate boundaries, leading, following, and co-creation in the therapeutic field.

• Bridge Body and Word: Master the art of anchoring somatic experience into cognitive understanding, helping clients language their embodied insights to support lasting change.

Whether you're new to somatic work or seeking to expand existing skills, you'll gain immediately applicable tools for bringing more aliveness, authenticity, and embodied intelligence into your sessions. This CPD offers a unique synthesis of therapeutic depth and embodied wisdom, honoring both the precision of clinical practice and the profound mystery of transformation through the body.

Who is this for?

This course is designed for professionals and practitioners who wish to integrate embodied approaches into their work. It is suitable for:

• Psychotherapists, Counsellors & Psychologists Wishing to evolve their expertise beyond cognitive approaches to embrace the profound wisdom of the body and movement in clinical practice.

• Coaches, Bodyworkers & Somatic Practitioners Seeking to expand their movement repertoire, deepen their understanding of relational field dynamics, and integrate trauma-informed somatic tools.

• Creative Arts Therapists, Teachers & Facilitators Ready to refine their own embodied presence and learn practical skills for inviting the body to speak its truth in therapeutic settings.

About Jo Hardy

Jo Hardy brings a unique depth of experience bridging clinical psychotherapy, transformational coaching, and conscious dance facilitation. As a senior trainer on the MA in Mindfulness-Based Core Process Psychotherapy at the Karuna Institute for 12 years (1994–2006), she has long integrated deep clinical wisdom with the vitality of embodied practice. Her therapeutic foundation is further grounded in Biosynthesis Body Psychotherapy and Transpersonal Supervision (CCPE).

With over 35 years of experience, Jo is an accredited teacher of 5Rhythms (Waves and Heartbeat), Open Floor, and was a long-time faculty member of the School of Movement Medicine. Her work is also deeply informed by Amerta Movement (Suprapto Suryodarmo), Internal Family Systems, and Collective Trauma Integration (Thomas Hübl). Known for her grounded clarity and down-to-earth humour, she currently leads The Art of the ChangeWeaver, a year-long training in embodiment facilitation, and teaches workshops internationally with a specific focus on China.
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