Workshops with Seónagh

Seónagh’s somatic coaching draws from her vast background and training in the field, and her clients gain greater awareness of parasympathetic processes in movement. Movement exercises and can assist individuals to gain greater control over the “voices in our heads” that drown out authentic responses. With coaching assistance, and through the use of repeated movement or by exploring the area of authentic movement, clients recognise and overcome limitations that are no longer serving them. Somatic movement exercises are often followed by short writing exercises, painting or speaking after moving.

Salt Spring Island: An Embodied Ecology Retreat , July 13-17, 2023

Brought to you by  @dharmainmotion and  @Dynamic Embodiment Somatic Movement

Facilitators: Somatic Dance Artist Dr. Seónagh Kummer, Robbyn Scott,  Soto Zen Buddhist Priest Kristin Diggs, and Dr. Martha Eddy collaborate in several workshop offerings. 

Workshop Titles: Finding Voice During Conflict-Constructively, Embodied Ecology: Somatic Approaches to Reconciliation and Belonging, The Role of Reflexes in Recovery, Discovering Dynamic Movement in Stillness, BodyMind Dance classes, Somatic Movement Labs, and Dynamics of Touch for advanced practitioners.

We respectfully acknowledge that we are working within the unceded territory of the Hul’qumi’num and SENĆOŦEN speaking peoples. We are committed to bringing justice and reconciliation, to helping carry grief, and to standing up for Indigenous peoples’ ties and rights to land, cultures and languages.

Workshops and Retreats Ongoing: Dance Somatics, Mindful Leadership

Dharma in Motion:

Workshops for Dance Artists, Organizations, or Small Forums

Anyone who has the courage to manifest a new project will greatly benefit from connecting with a guide who helps us to clearly engage with our internal fire. When you are working toward actualizing a new vision, whether artistic or organizational, you are on the cusp of change. You need to stay open to the miracle of presence within, around, and outside of you. The experience of being deeply encountered in the presence of another human being is an important part of helping us connect to our dharma. There is something in another human presence that is equal to the longing and pull of our hearts, and in this type of relationship where we feel “seen,” we can more easily connect to our purpose and life force. My work is to help you honour the immensity in your heart, and to help you listen to or adapt to the tug in your heart.

This workshop is adapted and designed specifically for you, your small group, your dance group, or your forum. This is for anyone who is embarking on a journey toward a new frontier and wants support to help you realize this. I have supported individual dance artists who are working toward new choreography or business goals, a group of dance company members who are building new works together, individuals, leaders and emerging leaders in organizations who need support to realize a new vision, and groups and individuals learning how to communicate and grow while holding conflicting visions. Embedded within this workshop are tools for communication through somatic awareness, somatic practices for building better internal communication, and tools to help you articulate a clearer vision from within and work in the most constructive way towards your goal. Book a free consultation now to learn if this is the best fit for you.

Lead Embodied

This workshop draws attention to our body as a resource that helps individuals to overcome perceived body limitations and to have a greater sense of their own agency. Our bodily experiences over a lifetime impact our health, shape our worldview, and affect how we perceive and process new awareness and relationships. This causes people to suffer, struggling with communication, losing touch with how they feel, and to develop either a lack of compassion or confidence. Through Embodied leadership training we become more adaptable, and learn how to be adept at resourcing our strengths in the face of change, chaos, and uncertainty.

Seónagh designs and adapts her leadership workshops for the needs of specific populations. Some of her workshops are designed to address the issues women face in leadership positions.

Mindful Movement

Somatic Movement is a rich area of dance that brings greater awareness to how our bodies know meaning in our environments, social/political contexts, family relationships, traumas, or other experiences. Somatics is an experiential practice that helps to raise consciousness about how our body experiences. The way we process our body’s experiences shapes our world, our relationships, and even the health of our bodies. Systems of body awareness are highly developed by dancers, and assisting us to gain clarity of connections and control over precision in body movement. This workshop helps you understand and connect to the body as a holistic system.

Dance and Creative Workshops

For those who cannot…

Artistic Director Dr. Seónagh Kummer invites you to participate…

For 10 years I experienced the aging process with my mother after she could no longer be independent. I watched her experience the effects, losses and pains of Altzheimer’s and Dementia with extraordinary grace. The experience of staying very present with her during this time has been profound, and I collected treasured life lessons.

My mother is a person to whom I am very deeply joined to in an ancient way, as a friend of my soul. I began to develop dance movement about her experiences, and our experience together of being in relationship during these changes, of helping her find pieces of herself, of walking beside her throughout her slow losses, fears, suffering, and loneliness. I am working toward some meaningful projects related to this disease, and collaborating with theatre artist Carolyn Dunn, and dancer-collaborator Rosa Rodriguez Frazier.

One of our deepest longings as humans is to have love and friendship. The person with dementia often experiences a deep loss of loneliness and isolation that is worsened when she or he cannot remember the friend from the day before and thus cannot build or develop friendships. For the dementia person the soul-knowing of another person can still continue to be present as a sensed belonging. Even if there is a sense of being both outside of time and in the moment, the dementia person who carries the wisdom of awakening to the eternal, to the timelessness within oneself, may still be able to feel a sense of belonging to an energetic complexity of life. In this way, she or he can continue to deepen her presence on earth.

As I develop movement for a dance piece I am creating I am opening up to a wider community interested in movement ideas about memory, time and belonging. My mother’s experiences teach me to explore deeply this sense of belonging on the earth, and as part of this process I am developing movement about timelessness and memory in belonging. Movement can help us attune to different fluids of our bodies such as Cerebrospinal Fluid, and this can help to create a sense of equanimity, balance, and being at peace in the moment, which relates to timelessness and belonging. The experience of such movement is healing and helps to create a sense of peace.

Wild Woman Archetype–Dance Workshop (online or in person-location varies)

This workshops explores memory and belonging through the lens of the life-death-life cycle of a Wild Woman archetype. Learners explore these archetypes with movement, and create new movement that evokes for them the concepts of memory and belonging. Participants may reference objects, photographs and landscapes that evoke these concepts, and their stories may become part of a collaboration in the development of a new piece.  Sign up to have your story be part of this piece. Write “Wild Woman Workshop” in the subject header of your email to seonagh@seonagh.com

Dance Workshops

Seónagh leads several specialized in-person dance workshops, which are designed for both experienced and inexperienced dancers. Workshops are focused on a variety of topics: Creative Process, Dance Dramaturgy, Creative Development, Dance and Wellness, Performance, and other topics.

Peace Activism and Somatic Body Maps

Seónagh has been doing deep work and mindfulness practice for over 30 years. As a somatic educator she aligns dance and therapeutic aspects of somatic movement with the work of Gandhian activists. Her workshops and events on Embodiment and Social Justice assist participants to interrogate and discuss bodied “ideals,” which shape our understanding of who and what body is considered normal, safe, deserving, and beloved.

What is Somatic Movement?

Somatic Movement is a rich healing practice that brings greater awareness to how our bodies experience our environments, social/political contexts, family relationships, traumas, or other experiences. Somatics has affected many areas of the arts, yoga, social sciences, and wellness by raising consciousness about how our body experiences shape our world and the health of our bodies. Systems of body awareness are highly developed by dancers, assisting us to gain clarity of connections and control over precision in body movement. This field understands the body as a holistic system.

The Somatic Movement field draws from a number of important dance and wellness experts of the 20th Century such as Ingmar Bartenieff who created a system to understand the developmental aspects of human movement. Seónagh uses these tools in coaching and choreography to help individuals process learning, to draw attention to how our body experience impacts our health, shapes our worldview, and affects how we perceive and process new awareness. This can help individuals to overcome perceived body limitations and to have a greater sense of our own agency.

What is Somatic Coaching?

Seónagh’s somatic movement workshop for ISMETA at Gibney Dance, NYC (2019)

Somatic movement exercises are often followed by short writing exercises, painting or speaking after moving.

Seónagh’s movement exercises and somatic body mapping techniques assist individuals to gain control over the “voices in our heads” that drown out authentic responses. Awareness of how our early patterning affects us is empowering, and can help individuals to recognize and overcome limitations or restrictions they might have developed and carried in the bodies since childhood.

Seónagh observes her clients holistically-meaning she understands our minds, bodies and the environments we live in are not separate. She works to analyze and understand her clients’ habitual movement patterning, which relates closely to emotional-psychological factors such as human needs, childhood development, culture, internalized shame, and other social factors. Her exercises vary according to her clients’ needs, and are designed help people to have breakthroughs they might not have recognized without assistance.

Seónagh draws from over 30 years of training in dance and somatic techniques such as Bartenieff Fundamentals, Authentic Movement, Laban Movement Analysis, Somatic Body Mapping, Experiential Anatomy, and multiple other therapeutic dance traditions. Dance somatics has greatly influenced the way that yoga and other embodied practices are taught, and Seónagh’s mission is to help articulate this, and to share these beautiful traditions with those who wish to learn.

Slow Peace

As the Creative Advisor to the International Gandhian Institute for Non-violence and Peace, Dr. Seónagh co-facilitates workshops with Dr. Reva Joshee and Dr. Jill Carr Harris. These workshops introduce participants to Gandhian principles, helping them to think about principles in relation to their own life and work. In part, these workshops are designed to interrogate bodied “ideals” that shape our understanding of who and what is normal, safe, deserving, and beloved.

What is Somatic Practice?

Seónagh’s work is multifaceted and focuses on physical processes and subjective processes of the body as “lived consciousness.” She draws techniques from her ongoing training in Certified Movement Analysis, Somatics, Authentic Movement, the Heifetz Needs Matrix, and more.

About Somatic Movement

Somatic Movement is a rich area of dance that brings greater awareness to how our bodies experience our environments, social/political contexts, family relationships, traumas, or other experiences. Somatics has affected many areas of the arts, yoga, social sciences, and wellness by raising consciousness about how our body experiences shape our world and the health of our bodies. Systems of body awareness are highly developed by dancers, assisting us to gain clarity of connections and control over precision in body movement. This field understands the body as a holistic system.
The Somatic Movement field draws from a number of important dance and wellness experts of the 20th Century such as Ingmar Bartenieff who created a system to understand the developmental aspects of human movement. Seónagh uses these tools in coaching and choreography to help individuals process learning, to draw attention to how our body experience impacts our health, shapes our worldview, and affects how we perceive and process new awareness. This can help individuals to overcome perceived body limitations and to have a greater sense of our own agency.

Scope of Practice

As with many somatic practitioners, Seónagh’s work covers the following international scope of practice, set out and refined by ‘The International Somatic Movement Education and Therapy Association’.

“The purpose of somatic movement education and therapy is to enhance human function and body-mind integration through movement awareness. Our profession, as represented by ISMETA, encompasses distinct disciplines each with its own educational or therapeutic emphasis, principles, methods, and techniques….Somatic movement education and therapy is applied to both pedestrian and specialized activities for people in all stages of health and development. The work can be communicated either on an individual basis or with groups.”
—ISMETA

The practice of somatic movement education and therapy includes:

  • postural and movement evaluation
  • experiential anatomy and imagery
  • movement patterning and re-patterning
  • communication and guidance through touch and verbal cues

Each method helps students and clients in some way to:

  • refine perceptual, kinesthetic, proprioceptive, and interoceptive sensitivity that supports homeostasis, co-regulation, and neuroplasticity
  • recognize habitual patterns of perceptual, postural and movement interaction with the environment
  • improve movement coordination that supports structural, functional and expressive integration
  • experience an embodied sense of vitality and create both meaning for and enjoyment of life

*Please visit The International Somatic Movement Education & Therapy Association’ (ISMETA) for further information about this international profession.