Podcast Single #3 is from a newer podcast, Tina Foster’s, Body & Culture Convos
Host Tina Foster is in conversation and exchange with Weena Pauly-Tarr, somatic therapist, dancer, and creator of SE+AM, a synergistic blending of Somatic Experiencing with Authentic Movement. Weena shares in her writing on SE+AM that it is about "reverence for impulse." It's intelligence in keeping us alive, and its creative force for becoming more than just living.
In this single episode, titled, “Reverence for Impulse: SE+AM, Somatic Experiencing + Authentic Movement”, Weena unpacks how she began seeing SE naturally emerge within her collective movement group, Duvet, when practicing Authentic Movement. She then began applying the psychological framework of SE with individuals and groups and later creating SE+AM. Their conversation carries us from individual trauma to the collective, in recognition of the change and transformation potential that exists in bodies of culture, and toward fostering space, time, and stillness in response to impulse. Weena holds a container for the emergent process of SE+AM, which she views as a petri dish with fertile conditions for emerging new cultures.
This conversation was recorded as part of Tina Foster's series in August 2021. I hope you enjoy it ~ Linda00:00 Introduction
3:20 Weena provides an introduction to each modality separately, the origin of each and the history of her development of SE+AM
sources: Somatic Experiencing: Dr. Peter Levine and Authentic Movement: Mary Stark Whitehouse
10:30 Discussion around the “Reverence of Impulse” as the heartbeat of this work
12:25 Trauma and its relationship to body movements, motor pathways, and movement patterns
13:00 Following how impulse shows up
19:21 Possibilities of new cultures arising, discussion of the work of Báyò Akómoláfé
22:43 How strategies we are currently engaged with are failing us. The Authentic Movement frame provides a point of departure for a non-hierarchical emergent process
26:30 Seeking curiosity over conviction; replacing systems with new systems out of the same impulse raises the question ~ How else can we do this?
32:40 Trusting emergent processes of building culture, witnessing biodiversity as the natural and inherent explosion happening independent of our controlling
35:34 Inherent knowledge within nature regardless of human interaction and looking into what it means to live in a culture of trust
42:00 Buiding culture, referencing Resmaa Menakem’s work
45:00 Exploring with the tuning fork of Authentic Movement if how we show up when we are liberated from old movement patterns and create a new way of being
46:54 Gravitational pull of using the language of trauma holds a charge that Weena is resisting using that language because she does not want that word as the sun at the center of the work
50:00 What are gifts of trauma? How do we explore it without having rejections/reactions to it? Reverence for impulse is brilliant at keeping us alive.
55:15 Culture in to support the movement to metabolize retention so that we are resilient
57:47 End of Conversation
Link to their contributor bios to learn more about Tina Foster and Weena Pauly-Tarr.
