Can a two-person enquiry made through co-created movement reveal a profound sense of interconnectivity in the therapy room?

Guided by Buddhist teachings that call us to place our awareness on the body, this article explores the impact of the client’s moving body on the therapist’s moving body and vice versa. It discusses how coming into relationship is at a fundamental level a physiological process which always creates movement responses in oneself and the other. This enquiry posits that because of this, we are by our very nature always resonating and interconnecting with the world. Case material attempts to evidence this by describing how, in coming into relationship in the therapy room, movement always arises. I posit that this movement can often be patterned, (as we are conditioned by earlier relational experiences) and that by witnessing these patterns of movement we have the opportunity to become aware of our ‘stuck’ and painful relational strategies. This increases the possibility that those parts of us that hide, turn away, yearn and resist can be discovered, acknowledged and brought into relationship in the therapeutic encounter. In so doing, a critical shift may occur, away from the experience of being separate with a perceived fixed sense of self, so often felt and experienced in daily life, towards a deeper truth; that there is always underlying relational interconnectedness. This can help free us from our tight over-identification with the character of ‘me’ caught in repetitive patterns of being and move us instead into a potentially freer, more dynamic sense of emergence; the taste of the ‘non-self’ responsive to the ‘here and now’ and full of compassion.