Somatic movement is an experiential, healing practice used to help cultivate deepened body awareness, expand our bodies’ capacities for movement, and consciously release stress or tension. Somatic movement practice can help individuals to develop greater emotional awareness, balance and resilience. Doing somatic work can be freeing, helping us to deepen our relationship with self and others.

My movement classes offer ways to release stress, calm the nervous system, improve respiratory function, and can help us to gain embodied awareness of how we habitually hold shape and meaning. I invite you to experience the body as a holistic system. We tune into the body’s anatomical systems. As I guide you in moving with anatomical awareness of your bones, muscles, organs, flesh, fluids, and cells this can help you expand your consciousness about where you hold tension or feelings in the body. You become more aware of the various sensations you experience, and this affects how you process the world around you.
Somatic movement awareness supports not just recovery from injury or operation, but also helps with overall well-being because we gain awareness about the ways we unconsciously hold tension with our bodies as patterns and emotional blockages. With expert guidance, movement provides a means to process lived experiences and memories that become lodged in our bodies as unprocessed feelings, including trauma.

As a teacher I like to help individuals enhance clarity, connection, and precision in movement. I bring a depth of formal and informal training, along with vast experience in dance teaching and performance, and a PhD in Dance. Most recently, I formally trained in systems of body awareness to become a Registered Somatic Movement Therapist. My formal training of 5+ years as a registered practitioner of both Dynamic Embodiment® and BodyMind Dancing® provides clear and systematized ways to be more fully connected within our environments, family relationships, social and political landscapes. Beyond this training with Dr. Martha Eddy I have also studied with various Master Teachers in embodiment training such as Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen Body-Mind Centering® and Janet Kaylo of Laban/Bartenieff and Somatic Studies International ®.

Added to these formal training programs, I have done extensive work since the early 1990s in cultural dance research, embodied ecology, and as an activist with indigenous communities in both Africa and North America. These experiences imbue me with a sense of deep relationship to reciprocity and caring, a respect for ancestral knowledge and indigenous ways of knowing, and affirm my ongoing commitment to justice and clarity in relationship with the land.

For those who cannot…

I am developing movement workshops to think about memory in belonging because I am interested in how we can be more inclusive in how we think about dementia.

Some of our deepest longings as humans is to have love, friendship and belonging. For 10 years I experienced the aging process with my mother and watched her experience the effects of Dementia with extraordinary grace. My mother is a person to whom I am very deeply joined to in an ancient way, as a friend of my soul, and our experience of being in relationship during these changes was profound. I helped her to find pieces of herself, walked beside her throughout her slow losses, fears, suffering, and loneliness. 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, cannot develop friendships. For the dementia person the soul-knowing of another person can still continue as a sense of belonging.

The dementia person also has a lot to teach us. She or he seems to carry the wisdom of awakening to the eternal, the timelessness within oneself. The person with dementia 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. My mother’s experiences taught me to explore more deeply this sense of belonging on earth.

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

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.