I asked Alison to write a testimonial about her experience working with me and she sent me back this short essay. I think it encapsulates really well what this movement practice is about and what anyone can get out of it so I’m sharing it as it is.

As I prepare to move, the learning experiences with Claire as my guide and witness in movement meditation (Amerta movement) resurface. Dropping into my body, I become aware of the shape it is making and the relation I have to my surroundings. How do I begin? On the floor, sitting, standing up. I become aware of tension in my body and realise my body often becomes tense as if it needs to hold itself together to be able to think. Through this awareness, I can let the thoughts go and bring my focus into my body. I breathe.

Where is my impulse to move? The impulse can only be felt in my body; if the impulse were in my thinking mind, it would be a thought.

I follow my body to the floor with all my senses: touch, weight, smell, sound, balance. I trust my body’s wisdom to move, to get stuck, and to resolve itself. I wait, listening and becoming aware of the need to close my eyes, to feel my inner presence. Then I open them again to be present with my surroundings.

I find myself rolling across the solid floor, which at the same time brings me a comfort of being held. My body meets furniture and objects, and tactile curiosity allows me to explore these, deepening my awareness and relationship with my surroundings. Coming to sit gives a new perspective of my environment and the way I move: shuffling and crawling, noticing which parts of my body are framed within themselves and what shapes they are making there. When my legs want to stretch long and feel their weight, I stand. My feet slowly explore the way my body changes and adjusts to a new view of my surroundings. Feet on the ground, hands in front, hands moving through space. I can explore again.

This movement meditation closes after climbing on a chair. My body brought me here, and when I stop, sitting cross-legged, I can sense a new perspective in a familiar surrounding. I feel at home in my space, in my body. I have arrived.

This small snippet of my now-movement meditation practice expresses some of the exercises Claire offered and guided me through in our sessions, inspiring me to trust and attune to the flow of my own moving body and my movement in relationship to my surroundings.

Through Claire’s presence and intuitive approach, I was taken back to a time before judgment from others changed the way I moved, before I became unduly conscious that my body could do something wrong or offend others.

After all my sessions with Claire, I came away with a strong sense that I need nothing and that all I need is within my body. By being in my body and letting it speak through movement, I became energised.

Claire is incredibly intuitive about another body. Witnessing the impulse of that body to move and where it might stop itself, I was encouraged to recognise these impulses and choose if I wanted to follow them.

This attunement to the flow of my own movement and my environment was not present with such ease or trust before these sessions. As a dance movement psychotherapist, I was aware of constraints in my patterns of movement and my body via analysis of behaviour and a long process of trying to embody this body through different practices.

With Claire as my witness, I revisited these constraints of movement, and her guidance allowed me to feel them and move through them whilst having a relationship with my surroundings. I found profound sensations of trust within myself and in the surrounding nature. This sense of safety is non-verbal and can only be felt through the body. This is something I can now access within myself and is one of the greatest gifts I received.