Movement Medicine was born at the crossroads of dream and devastation, where soul whispered its instructions into the hearts of two seekers. One night, Susannah had a vivid dream: she was told in no uncertain terms: 'Your work is to be called Movement Medicine.' A little later, following the completion of a 13 year pledge to dance for the children who had died in Auschwitz on the very same spot that they had died, Ya'Acov received a map, glowing with life, showing a path of embodied awakening—a vision of a new movement practice rooted in reverence for life, earth, and spirit. There, amidst the ghosts, he received a vision—not of despair, but of possibility. He was told that, 'given enough love, resource and attention, all of us human beings have it within us to rise from the ashes of our suffering and tell a new story.' He was told that healing was not only necessary, it was inevitable—if we could remember to dance.
These two soul-seeds wove together into what would become Movement Medicine: a practice of reclaiming the intelligence of the body, honouring our connection to the web of life, and dancing ourselves home.
Three years of work
Having received the name and the mandala, over the next three years we we worked in all the ways we knew, movement, ceremony, enquiry, until the mystery of the mandala revealed itself to us in a consistent way. That was the beginning of what we imagine will be a lifelong journey of discovering more and more precisely the healing and creative potential of what the Movement Medicine Mandala is?
We continue to be inspired by Gabrielle Roth, our teacher for 18 years, who said that "shamanism is indigenous to its own culture." She meant that a shaman knows the suffering and dis-ease of their own culture through having worked with these within themselves. This doesn't mean that we cannot learn from shamans from other cultures. We certainly have and continue to do so. And we are super grateful for that. It simply means that healing methodologies and understandings evolve to meet the wounds they are designed to transform.
Movement Medicine is a contemporary tradition which is inspired by and honours indigenous traditions. It is not an imitation or copy. Anything that has been shared with us by indigenous traditions is integrated with the express permission of those cultures. The feathers and beads that are part of our work now have been given to us and indeed we have been asked to wear them in ceremony as a direct honouring of and connection with those people and peoples who gave them to us.
So what is the suffering, the dis-ease of our culture which Movement Medicine addresses? One way to name it is disconnection. Disconnection from the sensation and wisdom of our own bodies, from our hearts, from each other, from the earth, from the sacred nature of life, from our own sense of belonging, of purpose, and from the mystery, awe and gratitude of being alive at all on this extraordinary blue green planet.
