# 98 Exploring The Dance of Transformation

Transcript

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We're going to dance for six days straight.

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You ready?

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I said, yeah, why not?

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Right.

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Actually we didn't dance the whole time we danced.

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all morning every day, all evening, every night.

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It's almost like that orgasmic peak moment, which you can get in the dance or when you're creating When somebody really opens up to what they're actually experiencing in the present moment fully, fully receives it and lets it in.

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It always, always, always transforms into something else.

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Let's go.

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So welcome.

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Today we have Katherine Llewellyn.

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She's a transformation catalyst, humanistic psychologist, and she's known for her work with Pellewa and Conscious Dance Facilitation.

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Today we're going to be mostly mindfulness with a touch of health because of Katherine's background.

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Katherine, welcome to the show.

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Thank you.

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And I'm very, very happy to be here with your sunny smile.

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Welcoming me.

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Speaking of sunny, you just said that you're, you went through like four different weather patterns today alone.

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You're in Wales, right?

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I'm in Wales.

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It's, it's all hills and valleys and sheep and birds.

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It's lovely.

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And the weather completely, I live, I'm over, I'm halfway up the side of the valley, I'm overlooking the valley,

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so

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I can be in my living room looking out and I can see three different weather systems at the same time on the hills.

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And in the valley, it's quite extraordinary

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that I do feel like you have the potential background that people have by default on their computers.

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You know how it cycles through the backgrounds, like, you know, if you want visit Wales and you see like this huge landscape and I feel like you just wake up to that.

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I wouldn't be surprised if some of your videos have that in the background, you know, if not, I totally would love to see that.

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Yeah.

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Well, that's an interesting idea.

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Trouble with sunlight, you don't know what it's going to do

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when you're filming.

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So,

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yeah, you know, just an idea.

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It's an idea.

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Thank you.

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So you've, you've had a very interesting journey.

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You're a 1000 percent what we would call right.

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A spiritual entrepreneur.

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Um, You've done, you've lived a life of curiosity and you've gone and if you're interested in it, you've gone for it, which is awesome.

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And I want to express to the audience and, and give them a chance to get a feel for your background and why, why, why consciousness of everything.

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And I think you have an interesting beginning if you want to start with where it all began.

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I think it started with your father, right?

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Yes, uh, well, both my parents actually were kind of unusual.

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She came from an aristocratic background, you know, grew up with nannies and servants and that kind of thing, and she didn't really fit in.

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She was too passionate.

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She was too, she became an artist in Chelsea, which was really, really out there in those days in London.

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My father, meanwhile, came from a really, really working class family, working on the docks, and they all expected him to go that route.

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He was like, no.

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And he went off and got a scholarship and a degree, and they kind of met in the middle in London, completely unlikely, very, Non conformist human beings.

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And luckily and magically for me, they got married and had children and I was the first child.

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And so we were brought up in this really unusual situation.

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He actually retrained as a naturopath and osteopath.

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in his forties, because someone in the family had had an extraordinary cure from something awful was probably something like polio or something that was just cured with nature cure.

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No

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drugs.

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He said, right, I'm dropping what I'm retraining now, which was years of retraining.

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And so we're I grew up in a household which was all about the body will heal itself, that the body is designed to heal itself, and also that the spirit is designed to expand and express.

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You know, there's nothing wrong with us.

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The design is excellent.

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If you don't go in and mess it up, right?

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It's a hard

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pill for some people to swallow too.

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Honestly, I mean, for me as a child, it was just, you know, I was born that way.

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And that's how it was right at the beginning.

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And so there were times as a child when I said, well, why can't we have desserts and sweets?

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Well, because they're going to ruin your health.

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All right, then.

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Now I'm so grateful.

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You know, it was like, okay, you've got a cold.

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Go to bed.

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I haven't got a cold.

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He could tell there was something coming on.

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You know, those people who can tell when something's, you know, before you realize it and you're four and it's sunlight outside.

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You're in bed with the blankets up to your chin.

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You're staying there for four days.

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The doctor comes around and gives your father the medicine.

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He goes, thank you very much, and chucks it down the toilet.

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So I've got a fantastic immune system.

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I'm very healthy.

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And so my energy, quality of my energy is much better because of that.

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And my imagination and my sense of, um, curiosity, as you put it.

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And he was also talking to us about philosophy and doing all kinds of wild stuff.

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Right from very early age, you know, I was going to spend a weekend with somebody at the age of six and she was developing a new modality around nonviolent communication and she was trying out the processes on me.

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I was six.

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Now I didn't know that she was going to become a really well known practitioner, which she did.

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She was a friend of the family.

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These things were normal for us.

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That's great.

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It really, it really kicked me off on that whole very inquiring, curious, don't necessarily believe everything everybody says, don't necessarily believe everything you read.

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And don't be overly upset if you think people are talking nonsense.

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That's their problem.

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It's not your problem.

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You know, your problem is trying to connect with your own truth.

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So that, that means I'm much less badly affected, I think, than some people when they're faced with some of the nonsense that goes on in the world.

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I don't really take it personally because I'm like, Hey, they're on their path, everyone's on their path.

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Yeah.

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And if

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I get obsessed with someone else's path.

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That's my problem.

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And, uh, yes, I agree.

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And a lot of people believe the complete opposite, which, which makes it hard to communicate, to understand each other, to progress, right?

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You have all these unnecessary hurdles that are hurdles that we created for ourselves.

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And it's interesting that like your life started like that, where your father just would, just flip the switch and went a completely different path, went all natural.

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And then when the doctors came and gave the prescription, he, I guess he didn't want to say what he was doing too much.

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And he was like, yeah, yeah, sure.

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And he just flushed it down the toilet.

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So it's, it's interesting how he would just have, I guess, the outside world still not.

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No, too much of what he's doing.

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He kept it kind of like a secret.

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Oh, well,

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no.

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Actually, everybody knew what he was doing.

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Oh.

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He was described for miles around as the local witch doctor and patients would come to him as a last resort when the medical established and written them off and said, you've got this till you die now.

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And he would fix them and come in and tell us about it.

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Huh.

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You know, with a salt bath and stop eating sugar or, you know, he would just, after he died, we found a box of, um, uh, like a little box full of little cards, you know, that you might have for people's addresses in the old days.

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Each card was a different dietary regime and there had to be 150 in there.

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Wow.

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And I thought, we know so little about this stuff.

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Yeah.

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But of course we couldn't.

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Each one, he knew when to use each one, we didn't, and so actually we destroyed it because we knew if we gave it to somebody, even a practitioner, they wouldn't know how to use it safely.

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Interesting.

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Wow.

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So it was, it

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was one of those, the whole, we and the rest of the brothers and sisters were like, what do we do with this?

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Some of the, many of the diets he'd developed himself and he knew when to use one, when to switch to another.

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It was an art.

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Well, that's unfortunate that like he wasn't able to like pass it on or like duplicate it, you know

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I

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mean, I know a lot of people now are finding ways and they're figuring things out, right?

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Yeah, so interesting how your life Started out with such a like really good upbringing and healthy mentally and physically What made you decide to put more emphasis on?

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consciousness

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I think it was, um, I always knew, uh, that there was something about, um, I'm not quite sure how to put it.

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I think when I was very young, I recognized that a lot of the adults in particular around didn't seem to be fulfilled or happy.

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In those days I didn't know the word fulfilled, right, but they didn't seem happy and they seemed to be lying to themselves.

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And to each other and just talking nonsense that they didn't even believe in.

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And, and I thought, why, why are they doing that?

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What a waste of energy.

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It just seemed to me a waste of energy.

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Um, and I was really interested in why do people feel the need to do that?

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There must be a reason why they're doing it, you know, because on the face of it, logically, it makes no sense.

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So why are they doing it?

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Um, How do people live another way?

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You know, how do people be more fulfilled and satisfied?

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And of course, the other thing that came in, and I had that with me as a child.

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an innocent child, you know, I knew nothing really about what it is to be a human being yet.

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And of course, then I hit puberty and young adulthood and everything else.

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And then I kind of discovered all of the, uh, baggage and hormonal and emotional and psychological drama That we all have to kind of go through and I, I realized that these will have a really strong force to them that could enhance our experience of fulfillment, but could also really get in the way by being pulled off track, you know, by having needs that we don't understand.

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And that we're trying to get met, we do stupid things to get them met and all that stuff and then you have to recover from that and oh my God, you know, and meanwhile, all this stuff coming in from the media and what everyone else thinks is the right thing to do and what to wear and all of that.

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So I then kind of got a little bit more empathy for the fact that people were just trying to survive, they were trying to get through as best they could.

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You know, and then later on, as I got older, I also understood that, you know, by the time people reach their thirties, forties, fifties, whatever, they had a lot to lose, you know, in terms of approval at work, a family, you know, just keeping the kids from killing themselves is just a complete mission, right?

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So what are they going to do with their lives?

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Oh my God, she's pregnant.

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She's only 14.

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I mean, you know, all the stuff that parents have to deal with and.

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In work situations, highly competitive, you know, how do you compete and get what you need without losing your soul?

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And how do

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you relate with people?

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You know, all of these challenges that people have, which of course at six, I had no idea about.

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So I just totally naive, but the, the essence of that observation at the beginning carried through.

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And then I went through all my own ups and downs and stupidities, and I'm sure I've got more to come, right?

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For being

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human.

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Absolutely right.

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And I learned an awful lot on my own behalf through that.

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And I, and I came to recognize that it was something about wealth, this idea of wealth, Well, when you say that word, the first people think of is money.

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And then if you widen it a bit, you might think of property, a beautiful place to live or a beautiful car.

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And I kind of hit on this thing of, to me, the most important wealth was the wealth within, which I came to realize was actually consciousness, or you might call it spirit.

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Because I recognize that when, when that's in good shape in me, it does not matter what I have in material terms.

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It is absolutely unimportant.

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And I'm, you know, in awe of the miraculousness of a blade of grass or something, you know, I'm just in a fantastic space because that inner experience actually is the wealth.

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And so I then decided to invest in that consciously.

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I did a lot of trainings, you know, investing in my own self awareness, my, um, emotional capacities, my intellectual capacities, my energetic capacities, and just.

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expanding myself as much as I could, because that means I've now got enormous wealth within that cannot be affected by what's happening in the markets or whether somebody likes me or what the weather's doing because it's inherent.

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It's, it's all the way through me.

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Um, and of course that then fits perfectly back to this whole idea of, could I help people to be more fulfilled?

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Guess what?

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I mean, I got much better chance of doing that.

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When I'm in a good state of consciousness and awareness, because then I'm less likely to get a kind of ego hook into their issues and into their transformation.

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I'm, I'm more able to be more empathic, but without having my own agendas about that person.

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Yeah,

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I can, I can work with giving them space, respecting their space.

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whilst being very present with them, you know, cause I'm, of course that I can't do that a hundred percent, but much, much more so than I would have been able to do if it wasn't for the work I've done and that I continue to do.

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And I know that you, your curiosity has brought you to a lot of, I don't know if you wouldn't want to call them modalities, but there's different aspects of training and you have a good list of things that you've done on that journey of.

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Like you said, working on yourself so you can help others do the same and I, I, I, I, I agree with you, right?

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It's the, the lens that you use when you look at the world and yourself as, as that gets better and cleaner, it's easier to to just do more and do better and be, be happier, right?

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If you feel better, you do better.

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Like, you know, like if, if that's like a tiny, tiny phrase, um, but there's like a, a specific way that you help people and it's called humanistic psychology, and I wanted to get into that.

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Cause I'm like, what is that?

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It sounds interesting.

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Yeah.

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Well, it's very interesting and, uh, it would be possible to talk about it for a very long time and I have done.

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Um, So you've probably heard of psychoanalysis and Freud.

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Yes.

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Right from the very beginning.

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So that was the first psychotherapeutic modality, if you like.

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And it was, it was all about going right back to the beginning and analyzing everything, but particularly focusing on trauma and family dysfunction.

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So it was really focusing on all of that.

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And that would be the first place you would go to find out what the trauma is and what the damage is.

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And that's a particular emphasis and there are situations where that is the best, most useful emphasis for a particular individual person.

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But there came a kind of a backlash later on where people started to say, yeah, but there's a lot of people where that's not the best route because it's just depressing.

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You know, if you don't need to do that, why would you do that?

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Because it can be really, and we can all find something awful that happened when we were a child.

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And we can all kind of wallow in being miserable about it, anyone can do that, but for a lot of us, that's not required.

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So there was a kind of a, and there was also a sort of authoritarianism in psychoanalysis, where the therapist is the authority over the client.

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And I've read some stuff, somebody sent me some stuff about a brilliant piece someone had written.

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I said, this piece is great.

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The only thing that's wrong with it is that the therapist thinks they know best about the client.

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What's that about?

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That's insane.

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I said, yeah, psychotherapy, uh, that's, that's what is based on that assumption.

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Now we all know now that Freud was not a well adjusted guy.

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Right.

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I

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think

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I like how you put that

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understatement.

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Right.

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Um, so.

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Every human being who works with other human being has got their bias, that they've all got their flaws.

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So the minute you put the therapist in charge of the client, the authority over the client, you're going to have hell to pay.

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It's going to be, there's going to be problems, in my opinion, right?

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I've just discounted the whole of the psychotherapy community.

00:18:35.590 --> 00:18:44.500
But then what happened was, um, there was this sense of, no, we want to emphasize growth.

00:18:45.405 --> 00:18:47.816
not just trauma and damage.

00:18:48.215 --> 00:18:49.336
People want to grow.

00:18:50.026 --> 00:18:53.615
There are a lot of people who aren't really damaged, but they want to understand themselves better.

00:18:54.076 --> 00:18:55.566
They want to expand and grow.

00:18:55.586 --> 00:19:00.066
They want to, um, understand their strengths, not just their weaknesses.

00:19:01.046 --> 00:19:09.546
And also there's a lot of people, particularly as, uh, the level of education grew over the decades and people were reading about all this stuff.

00:19:09.546 --> 00:19:10.796
They knew a lot of stuff.

00:19:10.796 --> 00:19:11.671
So.

00:19:14.310 --> 00:19:17.020
These people don't need to go through psychoanalysis, a lot of them.

00:19:17.750 --> 00:19:33.851
What about if there was a situation where it's more of a collegiate discussion between the practitioner and the client, where it's about respect for the client, that respect that the client will naturally grow and flourish and expand, unless you actively prevent them from doing that.

00:19:33.861 --> 00:19:43.260
If you have that as an assumption, and that you respect their, their choice of direction, their choice of path, What they want to work on, how they want to do it.

00:19:43.760 --> 00:19:45.550
And then you're there in service to that.

00:19:46.691 --> 00:19:48.951
And you're showing up really authentically with them.

00:19:49.260 --> 00:19:57.891
So that in relationship, you can be serving them within that rather than they're lying on a couch and you're sitting behind them above them, right?

00:19:59.121 --> 00:20:01.830
Then that could be a much more fruitful approach.

00:20:01.861 --> 00:20:03.851
And that is humanistic psychology.

00:20:04.391 --> 00:20:04.611
That

00:20:04.611 --> 00:20:06.840
was the basis of humanistic psychology.

00:20:07.715 --> 00:20:28.266
So I trained in that in 1996 to 1998 in my early 40s, but when I went on that master's degree, I discovered that for the 16 years prior to that, that I've been working with people, I'd actually been practicing humanistic psychology without knowing it.

00:20:28.665 --> 00:20:29.066
That's awesome.

00:20:29.076 --> 00:20:29.336
Because

00:20:29.756 --> 00:20:33.066
that was my kind of bias already.

00:20:33.955 --> 00:20:38.665
So I thought this is fantastic now I know what it's called.

00:20:40.185 --> 00:20:41.855
And of course, I learned a lot of new stuff.

00:20:41.986 --> 00:20:49.976
You know, I, I learned how to do things much better, more skillfully, more elegantly, and more powerfully through, through the training.

00:20:50.635 --> 00:21:00.221
And I'm not surprised that you naturally went that route because, of how you were brought up and what you saw that needed to be worked on.

00:21:00.230 --> 00:21:02.530
That's, and I agree with that, right?

00:21:02.550 --> 00:21:06.111
Where it's, it's, it's like a consult.

00:21:06.111 --> 00:21:06.871
It's your friend.

00:21:06.871 --> 00:21:12.171
You're, you're talking with somebody instead of, Someone telling you, well, you're messed up and this is what you need to do.

00:21:12.171 --> 00:21:14.030
And, you know, call me tomorrow.

00:21:14.080 --> 00:21:18.010
And most of the movies are like that, right?

00:21:18.050 --> 00:21:22.611
Where are you just like, you know, doc, I'm all messed up.

00:21:23.080 --> 00:21:28.191
And then you have like the person sitting in the chair, doodling like, and then tell me how that makes you feel.

00:21:28.230 --> 00:21:32.750
You know, they're just uninterested and they're just checking boxes.

00:21:33.570 --> 00:21:37.730
Um, which is, I, so I, I do, I do like that, that approach.

00:21:38.310 --> 00:21:41.661
And, um, there's something that I wanted to bring up.

00:21:42.520 --> 00:21:50.540
That you went into, I think, after humanistic psychology is something called conscious dance.

00:21:50.760 --> 00:21:51.230
Yes.

00:21:51.711 --> 00:22:01.711
And, um, I, I love dance because that is you connecting with your body and that's more of like inner work and functionality.

00:22:01.800 --> 00:22:15.931
There's a lot of health oriented with that, but there's something very interesting about, um, your brief description of conscious dance, but I want to, I'm curious, like, what, how, how did that happen?

00:22:15.961 --> 00:22:18.330
Did you come across somebody?

00:22:18.590 --> 00:22:20.161
Was it a curiosity?

00:22:20.500 --> 00:22:22.961
And I want to know what that is all about.

00:22:23.431 --> 00:22:24.221
Okay, great.

00:22:24.240 --> 00:22:26.931
So, have you heard of a lady called Gabrielle Roth?

00:22:27.901 --> 00:22:28.320
No.

00:22:28.530 --> 00:22:28.931
No.

00:22:29.000 --> 00:22:30.891
Or have you heard of Five Rhythms Dance?

00:22:33.461 --> 00:22:37.121
I wouldn't be surprised if I saw it and not knew what it was.

00:22:37.320 --> 00:22:38.270
Yes, exactly.

00:22:38.270 --> 00:22:49.290
So Gabrielle Roth started Five Rhythms Dance at a place called Esalem in California, which was a very, very forward thinking alternative place.

00:22:49.820 --> 00:22:59.030
And she started it because she, uh, she was a natural dancer.

00:23:00.175 --> 00:23:05.415
Tall and thin long black hair, which is just a beautiful, beautiful natural dancer.

00:23:06.155 --> 00:23:16.115
And she was asked to go and work with groups of people who had, who were suffering either from physical things or from psychological issues.

00:23:16.346 --> 00:23:23.816
And the idea that people thought if we can get these people into movement, that's going to help them with whatever they're trying to heal.

00:23:24.336 --> 00:23:28.066
Um, and she could just naturally get them moving.

00:23:28.955 --> 00:23:39.766
Just, she just got them moving and And going through a whole kind of wave of movement, which was very healing for them, very amazing for them.

00:23:40.276 --> 00:23:42.685
And she got very, very popular doing this.

00:23:42.685 --> 00:23:47.205
And she started doing this just with ordinary people and her groups were getting bigger and bigger and bigger.

00:23:47.685 --> 00:23:53.215
And eventually someone said to her, Gabrielle, you've got to train other teachers because you're going to be there, bro.

00:23:53.625 --> 00:23:55.226
And so you've got to break it down.

00:23:55.236 --> 00:23:58.236
You can't just go right and teach you the wave, right?

00:23:58.715 --> 00:24:03.286
So you broke it down to these five different rhythms of movement.

00:24:04.435 --> 00:24:07.855
Which are also kind of parallel to five different modes of being.

00:24:08.675 --> 00:24:14.635
So, uh, the first one is flowing, which is about being really receptive and going with the flow.

00:24:15.256 --> 00:24:22.135
And you can do that in your mindfulness, kind of, or you can do that with your body, going with the flow.

00:24:22.465 --> 00:24:25.925
The second one is staccato, which is about getting very clear.

00:24:26.695 --> 00:24:34.076
So that you can do that in movement, but you can also do it in your mind in terms of I'm making a decision now, this is going to happen.

00:24:34.076 --> 00:24:35.105
That's not going to happen.

00:24:35.276 --> 00:24:37.286
No more of that, more of this.

00:24:38.336 --> 00:24:40.036
The third one is called chaos.

00:24:40.256 --> 00:24:50.905
And that is the most creative one, because that's when you get flowing and staccato mingling together and fully letting go, which you've probably experienced that on the dance floor.

00:24:51.135 --> 00:24:55.506
When you completely let go with your body, you've no idea what it's going to do next.

00:24:55.506 --> 00:24:58.455
It's But you know, it's going to do what it wants to do.

00:25:00.086 --> 00:25:02.105
And you're absolutely free of restriction.

00:25:03.236 --> 00:25:12.516
And it's the same if someone's in a creative place where they're being highly creative, often it's a mess everywhere, someone else walking in would go, what are you doing?

00:25:12.516 --> 00:25:14.836
It's such a, but it's, it's really creative.

00:25:14.836 --> 00:25:20.006
They're right in that creative zone and that creates a kind of a peak moment.

00:25:20.016 --> 00:25:24.915
It's almost like that orgasmic peak moment, which you can get in the dance or when you're creating.

00:25:25.851 --> 00:25:29.891
And the one after that is like a kind of celebratory chilling down.

00:25:29.891 --> 00:25:33.330
It's called lyrical, playful, light, innocent.

00:25:33.901 --> 00:25:48.000
And then the last one stillness is where you're just reintegrating all of your experience of the dance or the creative process, whatever you've been doing, bringing it home, breathing in, grounding it down, and you finish the cycle.

00:25:49.080 --> 00:25:55.530
So something Gabrielle noticed was that a lot of people in their lives were missing out one or other of these rhythms.

00:25:56.236 --> 00:25:57.006
in their life.

00:25:57.915 --> 00:26:03.365
So if they came and danced these rhythms in a kind of a wave, it would help to rebalance them.

00:26:04.096 --> 00:26:14.056
And it also gives them an enormous sense of joy because it would give access, like you were saying, access to all of this energy that's in the body and in the spirit through the movement.

00:26:14.790 --> 00:26:16.421
It's a beautiful, beautiful thing.

00:26:16.901 --> 00:26:17.381
Anyway, how I

00:26:17.381 --> 00:26:21.500
came across it was on the master's degree, where I'm learning about humanistic psychology.

00:26:21.881 --> 00:26:28.171
I became friends with one of the tutors, a woman, and we used to sometimes go dancing together in the evenings.

00:26:28.351 --> 00:26:33.111
And one time she said, do you want to come with me to a five rhythms dance event?

00:26:33.191 --> 00:26:33.911
I went, yeah, great.

00:26:33.921 --> 00:26:34.951
She said, great.

00:26:35.000 --> 00:26:35.931
Six days long.

00:26:36.830 --> 00:26:38.030
Um, it's a camp.

00:26:38.361 --> 00:26:40.000
We're going to dance for six days straight.

00:26:40.000 --> 00:26:40.601
You ready?

00:26:41.500 --> 00:26:42.740
I said, yeah, why not?

00:26:42.911 --> 00:26:43.171
Right.

00:26:43.760 --> 00:26:45.770
Actually we didn't dance the whole time we danced.

00:26:46.931 --> 00:26:50.191
all morning every day, all evening, every night.

00:26:51.060 --> 00:26:58.330
And in the afternoon we had a choice of, you know, body painting, yoga, meditation, et cetera.

00:26:58.931 --> 00:27:03.050
So we did a massive amount of dancing and I absolutely loved it.

00:27:04.060 --> 00:27:05.320
It was really good fun.

00:27:05.590 --> 00:27:12.750
And I subsequently, I then did a lot of five rhythms dance and eventually trained as a teacher and taught it for a while.

00:27:13.211 --> 00:27:18.840
And then probably because of my humanistic background, I then evolved my own version.

00:27:19.385 --> 00:27:25.486
Which is called being moving, seeing, which is, it doesn't have the structure of the five rhythms.

00:27:26.326 --> 00:27:27.276
It's unstructured.

00:27:27.276 --> 00:27:31.885
So the idea is you're just in whatever rhythm you're in at any point.

00:27:33.076 --> 00:27:37.375
And if that means you're in flow the whole time, that's, that's what, that's what you need to do.

00:27:37.986 --> 00:27:39.976
Or if you're going back and forth, that's what you need to do.

00:27:40.066 --> 00:27:46.726
And because of my training and my experience, I can hold a group that's going through all of those shifts.

00:27:48.060 --> 00:27:55.810
You know, and I can read the group, um, in such a way that I can have support and facilitate them through that journey.

00:27:56.651 --> 00:28:03.101
So the journey is meaningful with all sorts of mysterious things going on along the way.

00:28:04.361 --> 00:28:11.530
It's, uh, I like how you internalized it and then you made it yours.

00:28:12.270 --> 00:28:23.425
And, um, my, well, two parts, one, I, my background with dance is more along I'm not sure if you're familiar with breakdancing.

00:28:23.885 --> 00:28:24.286
Of course.

00:28:24.516 --> 00:28:26.155
With the acrobatic dance and all that.

00:28:26.205 --> 00:28:27.215
And it was You can do

00:28:27.215 --> 00:28:27.566
that.

00:28:27.786 --> 00:28:28.316
Yeah.

00:28:28.355 --> 00:28:30.286
Well, now I do my best.

00:28:31.296 --> 00:28:33.016
I've always been so impressed with that.

00:28:33.486 --> 00:28:38.395
It's, it's, it's Physically demanding, energetically demanding.

00:28:38.425 --> 00:28:45.635
I feel like getting back into it just because of it forcing you to be that, that fit, but I'm

00:28:45.655 --> 00:28:46.105
strong.

00:28:46.115 --> 00:28:46.986
You have to be strong.

00:28:47.105 --> 00:28:47.526
Oh, yeah.

00:28:47.526 --> 00:28:49.195
You have to be upside down half the time.

00:28:49.816 --> 00:28:50.895
Um, yeah.

00:28:50.955 --> 00:28:51.165
Yeah.

00:28:51.195 --> 00:28:51.486
When I jump

00:28:51.486 --> 00:28:52.559
into a

00:28:52.559 --> 00:29:07.885
handstand, why don't you, um, But I'm like internalizing what you're saying and I'm having flashbacks of my progress learning how to break this and it's all, it's, there's a lot of flexibility.

00:29:07.885 --> 00:29:12.796
You're manipulating, um, your, your weights, your gravity, your center of gravity.

00:29:13.046 --> 00:29:19.375
And I was just very stiff and that just didn't align, but I really wanted to learn.

00:29:19.486 --> 00:29:22.486
And it was just that progress of just learning the basics.

00:29:22.935 --> 00:29:23.435
And.

00:29:23.776 --> 00:29:25.935
Experience it, experiencing it.

00:29:26.006 --> 00:29:36.316
And then part of it is, um, sometimes you can do a routine that you memorize from other people, and then you create a routine.

00:29:36.346 --> 00:29:45.165
And then that other part where I remember you were talking about the five different steps before, where it's freestyle and it's just, you flow with it.

00:29:45.195 --> 00:29:59.326
And, and in the progress of everything that we do, that's, I see that, that The flow of life where you're, you're going through life and you're learning about the world around you, you're adapting to it, and then you're like, Hmm, I don't like this.

00:29:59.326 --> 00:29:59.996
I like that.

00:29:59.996 --> 00:30:01.596
So you're making those decisions.

00:30:02.026 --> 00:30:02.705
And then.

00:30:03.486 --> 00:30:11.736
It, you're, you're problem aware, and now you're self aware and then you're consciously aware of the things and you trust yourself enough.

00:30:11.736 --> 00:31:07.800
And I feel like very few people get to the place where they trust themselves enough to make those decisions that are really important or you're unconsciously I see that as, as that dance where I would get to a point where you would just freestyle and you know, um, As far as dance moves, how do I'm not gonna go too hard now because I injured myself or I'm gonna go a little bit more Aggressive because I want to do better than that person or whatever and you have the like this Really cool dynamic going on so I really appreciated um you sharing that I do have a question though When you do your groups when you now do it your way it seems like you're allowing people to like you said be where they're at now and Allowing their I guess subconscious their body to I guess identify where they're at and express that.

00:31:08.651 --> 00:31:09.570
Is that what you're doing?

00:31:09.580 --> 00:31:13.711
And then the second part is if you're doing it in a group, everybody's coming from different places.

00:31:13.711 --> 00:31:15.721
So is there a different rhythm?

00:31:15.931 --> 00:31:18.611
Does it just look like chaos?

00:31:18.641 --> 00:31:20.211
Like, like, what does that look like?

00:31:22.131 --> 00:31:29.911
This is why you have to train properly before you do this kind of work, because otherwise you could just create a sort of sorry mess that no one gets anything out of it.

00:31:30.520 --> 00:31:49.026
Um, something I learned through the humanistic psychology work is that when somebody really opens up to what they're actually experiencing in the present moment fully, fully receives it and lets it in.

00:31:50.236 --> 00:31:54.665
It always, always, always transforms into something else.

00:31:56.740 --> 00:31:58.070
So the key is opening up.

00:31:58.631 --> 00:31:59.381
It's a total.

00:31:59.401 --> 00:31:59.621
Yeah.

00:31:59.681 --> 00:32:04.141
It's a bit like when you digest something, it doesn't just go partway through your body.

00:32:04.171 --> 00:32:05.580
It goes all the way through.

00:32:06.351 --> 00:32:07.931
And then a bit later you're hungry again.

00:32:08.020 --> 00:32:09.490
You know, it's a natural process.

00:32:09.490 --> 00:32:15.641
And one of the things with the dance is the dance helps us to process our experience.

00:32:16.971 --> 00:32:23.971
And when we get stuck in life, getting stuck in life is, is almost the same thing as saying we're not allowing our experience.

00:32:24.135 --> 00:32:32.215
We're, we're attaching to our experience and we're keeping it stuck and then it's not digested.

00:32:32.215 --> 00:32:36.346
We get, we get emotional indigestion or psychological indigestion.

00:32:36.996 --> 00:32:47.796
So when I'm running the, when I'm holding the groups, um, I always have a kind of a grounding point at the beginning, which creates a sense of oneness in the group.

00:32:47.965 --> 00:32:49.175
So we're all there together.

00:32:49.175 --> 00:32:52.925
We're, we've got some connection and I use a number of techniques for that.

00:32:52.935 --> 00:32:56.546
Like one technique is everybody has to book by a specific.

00:32:57.270 --> 00:33:00.121

# 98 Exploring The Dance of Transformation | Catherine Llewellyn

Catherine Llewellyn

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