Somatic Movement Offering
On September 27th, Coffee & Connections hosted Gillian McGinty for a taste of her class offerings. A licensed creative movement and somatic therapist for over 25 years, Gillian folds her creative arts training into her “whole person” healing approach.
Her fifteen minute teaser—”a gradual awareness of movement as a pre-step to bigger movement” was a dialogue with our surroundings as well as whatever internal place we found ourselves. Sitting in the Colorado Center, sunshine bouncing off the succulents and casting basket-like shadows from the woven metal chairs, Gillian’s gentle questions were invitations: Is there a place in our body that’s holding tension? More unexpected was the follow-up prompt: Is there a place in our bodies that feels good and could serve as a resource to loosen knots or otherwise offer support to our places that need it within our body/mind/emotion matrix?
To access these bodily translations that leverage abilities of one part of us to remedy needs of another, Gillian’s bedrock is the Feldenkrais Method. A movement therapy devised by Israeli Moshé Feldenkrais in the 50s, the method reorganizes connections between the brain and body in order to improve body movement and psychological state. “In my role as teacher/practionitioner,” Gillan says, “I leave space for innate wisdom and resources stored in our bodies to emerge.”
A long time dancer, Gillian innately responded to Pilates (which she wittily renamed Pilat-ease for the classes she teaches). “While classical dance could sometimes be punishing, Pilates taught me to listen and care for my body, expecting peace while gaining strength.”
Her most recent integration training was over the pandemic with the Tamalpa Institute, which houses the Halprin Institute. Anna Halprin and her daughter Daria, a psychotherapist, were key pioneers of dance as a healing art. Anna, who died at 100, trained with Martha Graham and Merce Cunningham, whose “classical modern” dance challenged the classical ballet world. Anna was a social activist in the 60’s along with many post-modernist artists across media (Cage in music, etc). Artists across forms worked together to create improv scores, interacting with the audience, blurring the fourth wall. They named “community” as part of the source energy for art, a departure from the lone genius trope of previous centuries.
“Planetary dance”—Anna’s simple score of walking/running/sitting/standing is open to all. Participants can designate goals such as “I’m running for the children, I’m running for peace,” but most emphasized is the call to love our parts/embrace our wholeness. The training explores movement as healing and incorporates writing and other art-making as optional entry points into process-based work.
Gillian had never thought of herself as a visual artist. However, in the last year of the training, Gillian’s beloved mom died, and in her grief, Gillian lost the pathway to physical expression. She couldn’t dance, even though movement had been a solace and joy since she was a kid. Instead, she drew. Hearts breaking; lungs, center of the heart-space; and amorphic images that represented her grief amassed on paper.
She calls it “mark-making” to remove the pressure of “drawing” and realized that art is another mirror to see “how we’re doing what we’re thinking about” by combining the physical and the abstract. A crayon rubbed over the bark of a tree feels like movement captured, externalized.
Her drawings helped her make the next transition toward movement: beach-walking. She collected transient treasures and “began to allow myself to feel.”
Not all feelings were welcome: “I would show up in my groups dancing/drawing about my grief,” she shares. “At first I thought ‘Do they think I should be over this?’” But the more she allowed herself to externalize her feelings as images on paper, the more movement was available to her, and things shifted.
“I re-learned that slowing down enough to let go of the goal and being with what simply is—a kind of intention-guided surrender—is a path of least resistance.” Love, the ultimate intention, feels at least attainable in these moments.”
Gillian teaches online and over zoom, and in October, started an online Women’s Circle.