This review examines Soul’s Body: Active Imagination, Authentic Movement, and Embodiment in Psychotherapy (Stromsted, 2025), highlighting its integration of Jungian depth psychology, Authentic Movement, and embodied psychotherapy. Drawing on personal reflection and decades of clinical experience, the reviewer explores Stromsted’s synthesis of movement, imagination, archetypal psychology, and trauma healing as pathways to transformation. The book emphasizes embodied inquiry, compassionate witnessing, and the body’s innate wisdom while honoring the sacred dimensions of therapeutic practice. Rich clinical narratives, mythology, poetry, and lived experience make this work a significant contribution to dance/movement therapy, Authentic Movement, and embodied approaches to psychotherapy and spiritual development.
Dance/movement therapy is a psychotherapeutic approach that uses movement, body awareness, and embodied communication to support healing and wellness across different populations. In dance/movement therapy treatment, movement serves not only as a primary mode of intervention but also as a tool for assessment. There is growing interest in quantifying components of movement within dance/movement therapy. However, the specific movement components most relevant for clinical assessment remain unclear. This study aimed to generate a framework of quantifiable components of movement and physiological function and examine how dance/movement therapists rate the importance of aspects of motor fitness, spatial engagement, and breath quality. Thirty-three therapists anonymously rated the importance of patient improvement in items defining speed/reaction time, balance, coordination, movement accuracy, agility, and spatial engagement. A one-way analysis of variance revealed significant differences in importance ratings across components, F (6, 86.90) = 221.38, p < 0.001. Notably, spatial engagement was rated as “not at all important” and was rated significantly lower than all other components (all p < 0.001). Although breath and all aspects of motor fitness were rated as important, post hoc analyses indicated that breath was rated significantly more important than speed/reaction time (p = 0.029) and movement accuracy (p = 0.025). These findings lay the groundwork for understanding which components of internal and external movement are clinically meaningful and emphasize the potential to integrate objective physical and physiological data into embodied therapeutic practice.
This study investigates how intentional dance prayer (IDP), an approach derived from authentic movement (AM), can provide spiritual and therapeutic benefits. The theoretical foundation draws on Merleau-Ponty’s body phenomenology and prior AM research. The empirical work was a six-year longitudinal qualitative study, using a practical-theoretical reflection process to examine participants’ experiences of IDP. This article presents participants’ first-person accounts of the insights and transformations—emotional, spiritual, and bodily—that emerged from the practice.
This article documents an internship site visit, conducted by a dance/movement therapy (DMT) clinical supervisor (CS) and a DMT graduate program associate director (PAD). During this visit, a second-year DMT graduate student (S) shows CS and PAD her internship environment and invites them to participate in her individual treatment session with a pediatric patient (P) she has been treating in a children’s hospital in New York City. Three authors (CS, PAD, and S) collectively recount their lived body experiences of participating in the DMT treatment session led by S and share their inner reflections on the importance of being together with others during uncertain times. In this practice-based reflective essay, the authors attempt to illustrate what takes place in a Pediatric Medical DMT session and their collective experiences of navigating safety in clinical practices.
This study aimed to investigate the effects of a dance/movement therapy (DMT) program with a focus on emotional self-regulation (ESR) for adolescents with intellectual disabilities (ID) during the transition from school to post-school in Hong Kong. In response to the growing awareness of mental wellness in youth with special educational needs, research based on dance/movement therapy and self-determination theory was conducted by the author who was also the researcher. This mixed-methods study utilized a randomized controlled trial and focus groups. Fifty-one students and five school staff members from five special schools participated. Students were randomly assigned to intervention and control groups. Data were collected using the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire and analyzed with a T-test at pre-, post-intervention, and at a 14-week follow-up. Verbal data from focus groups were analyzed using thematic content analysis with NVivo, and non-verbal, art-based data were triangulated with verbatim transcriptions. Quantitative results showed significant improvement in the intervention group for all variables at the 14-week follow-up. Qualitative findings revealed processes related to emotional self-regulation and highlighted practices, such as providing students with a positive, novel, and impactful emotional self-regulation experience. The DMT ESR program contributed to improved emotional self-regulation in adolescents with intellectual disabilities. The findings from this study contribute to the fields of emotional regulation, DMT, special education, and psychotherapy research.
Dance/movement therapy (DMT) research on DMT for deaf adults is particularly limited. There is a need to explore whether deaf adults who participate in DMT sessions would report higher scores on self-esteem, self-efficacy, and wellbeing. This paper reports a non-equivalent control group quasi-experimental study on the impact of DMT on deaf adults’ self-esteem, self-efficacy, and wellbeing in the city of Mumbai, India (N pre-test = 56; N post-test = 51) compared to a waitlist control group (N pre-test = 55; N post-test = 47). DMT sessions for this cohort comprised weekly face-to-face therapist-guided group sessions for 48-weeks. Individual tasks in-between sessions were recommended, which entailed journal writing or jotting personal reflections after each session. Two Indian sign language experts were present throughout the group sessions. The two dance/movement therapists observed and worked through the participant’s developmental phases using the power of movement. (Schmais, American Journal of Dance Therapy 8:17–36, 1985) Eight healing processes in group dance/movement therapy sessions were the guiding principles for this therapeutic repertoire: synchrony, expression, rhythm, education, vitalization, integration, cohesion, and symbolism. The participants reported higher scores on self-esteem, self-efficacy, and wellbeing measures in comparison to the waitlist control cohort. Disaggregated findings revealed that gains were particularly higher for female participants, participants with postgraduate or professional degrees, participants engaged in paid service or self-employed, those who attended more than half or 25–48 DMT sessions, and who completed 25–48 DMT tasks in-between sessions. DMT can be potentially effective for bolstering deaf adults’ psychological resources.
In this study, clinical supervision within dance/movement therapy is considered in depth. The lack of and need for a consistent theory of supervision in dance/movement therapy is highlighted, including both supervision outcomes and common techniques and approaches used within the discipline. A Delphi method study is used to determine the consensus on the topic of dance/movement therapy supervision from a panel of experts. As a result of the study, the expert panel comes to a consensus of 71 statements regarding dance/movement therapy supervision. These statements are interpreted, dance/movement therapy supervision is defined, and connections are drawn to the value of body-based learning and specialized supervision for dance/movement therapists.
This study explores the healing elements inherent in the six movement principles proposed by Taiwanese choreographer Lee-Chen Lin, which emphasizes the mind-body connection, and connects them to the movement elements of Laban Bartenieff Movement Analysis (LMBA) to explain the implied possible bodily felt experiences that can apply to dance/movement therapy. Based on the analysis, Lee-Chen's principle DING ((sic)) is similar to Bartenieff's nine principles of head-tail connectivity. JING ((sic)) can be understood as stillness, one of the twelve basic movements of LBMA. SONG ((sic)) can be understood as the concept of core support. CHEN ((sic)) is similar to the concept of Grounding. HUAN ((sic)) can be linked to the concept of strong, sustained, direct, bound flow, which is a compounded effort factor, and JIN ((sic)) is described as fighting. This study also discusses the existence of similar concepts for body-mind health across the different cultures between the East and West, which is a meaningful finding and a bridge tool in the clinical and educational practice of DMT.
