FULL BODIED STORIES
-body oriented story telling
FBS is a somatic practice based on John’s experiences over the past 30 years. It interweaves improvisational sound, movement, and personal story. It emphasizes creative expression, communication, and healing. FBS combines elements of dance, movement, theater, meditation, psychotherapy, and the expressive arts.
FBS facilitates coming home to your body and your senses. Using movement, sound and language, participants explore and share personal and cultural stories. The stories that emerge represent a full spectrum of experience: they can be tender or hilarious, inspiring or illuminating.
“You could ask me how I am, and I could talk for hours. But using one of John’s techniques, in 5 minutes a whole world of feelings and emotions opened up. Until now, I didn’t have a way to access this emotional landscape.”
Cecily Hutchison, Long Beach New York
One participant might express the frustration of teaching kids who could care less. Another might share about the death of his father. Others could be dealing with relationships, work issues, or aging. The sky’s the limit. The most important aspect of the work is to stay present in your body and let the story emerge. When we allow the story to emerge from our body’s awareness, rather than a random thought, the material has a deeper resonance.
Emphasis is placed on the organic unfolding of each participant’s personal stories. There’s no criticism; it’s all about your own personal unfolding. The power of being seen, of listening to one another, of supporting one another, are some of the fundamentals.
“John’s talent lies in being able to track the group and provide exercises that allow people to go deep and feel safe.”
Gale Penhall, Vancouver, B.C.
Benefits:
- Experience moving, sounding and speaking — with safety and sanctity
- Practice vital skills for self-care and stress management
- Develop expressiveness and artistry
- Be part of a respectful creative community
- Receive support for addressing personal hopes and needs
- Gain authenticity and authority
- Cultivate healthy body awareness and body image
- Discover somatic resources for navigating and healing from injury, loss, illness, trauma
- Cultivate helpful and appropriate intimacy and receptivity
- Time for spontaneity, inner life and soul repair
- Reclaim the body as central to your spiritual and meditative practices
Elements of Full Bodied Stories
The following elements of Body Oriented Story Telling support inner exploration, shared expression, and body and earth communion:
- Moving, Sounding & Speaking
- Witnessing
- Remembering
- Grounding
- Thanking
Moving, Sounding & Speaking
Participants practice coming home, listening and giving attention to their body; engaging with inner-directed movement, sound, and their own sensate experience and intelligence. Movement, speaking and embodied stories are woven into the stories, which explore and share real experience, sensation, thought, emotion, memory. Clear instruction and ground rules help maintain a safe and respectful creative environment.
“Moving, telling stories and making noise are powerful medicine. The playfulness and creativity of Body Tales makes them sweet medicine.”
— Damon Miller, M.D.
Witnessing
Witnessing is the practice of giving full attention and support to the person moving, sounding and speaking, while staying grounded and present. One person shares, while their partner witnesses them — seeing and listening in an attentive, non-judgmental way, without interruption or commentary. Partners exchange roles as mover and witness, and each person also has opportunities to be witnessed by the whole group.
Remembering
Partners help one another remember each BT piece by re-speaking specific words, phrases, and movement — without evaluation, interpretation or commentary. Like writing down dreams, this process supports reflection and integration, and helps lift the content, insights, personal values and resources from each piece into our conscious awareness and our community wisdom. This “remembering” gives the piece back to the mover, strengthens trust and confidence, and supports reflection and integration.
“I hear my unconscious talk, often the primitive, passionate, strong part of my unconscious.”
— Bobbi Ausubel, drama therapist, theater writer & director
Grounding
Participants receive frequent reminders to connect with the ground and the air, and with their body and breath. This helps maintain inner balance and capacity for healthy engagement, integration and good witnessing. Participants are encouraged to stay present and respectful to themselves and to the group; to notice and appreciate the support of belonging with the natural world; and to actively release energy and emotions that are no longer helpful.
Thanking
Guided thanking, blessing and conscious touch (touch is always optional) offer simple, effective and ritualized ways to respect and appreciate one another. In this way, we acknowledge each person’s contribution with gratitude and without interrupting her or his creative or healing process with advice, praise or criticism.
“Body Oriented Story Telling is a living, present, in-the-moment spiritual and physical practice that has a very sophisticated form to it. People learn how to care for and support one another and how to have empathy for each other.”
— Story Telling participant
It is our nature to be free—and to express that freedom spontaneously and without hesitation through song and dance, poetry and play. Moreover, we each have the ability to wake up to who we already know ourselves to be: people dedicated to a sane and just world made up of individuals who celebrate their common humanity and this planet of indescribable beauty through singing, dancing, playing, and caring for all sentient beings.
This improvisation workshop allows the creativity that resides within us to have a voice. “Everyone has a story to tell,” says John, “and stories reside as much in the body as in the mind. So we begin with movement—slow stretches to open the body. We open the voice with playful exercises. We meditate to calm the heart, dance to free the spirit, find a way to effortlessly compose with language. This journey leads to giving voice and physicality to the private characters and inner realities that live in the subconscious mind and the cells of our bodies.”
This workshop is like dreaming on your feet. Expect to surprise yourself and to become more playful and at ease before an audience. You might even find that the sense of well-being achieved during the workshop not only expands your creative abilities but also enhances your experience of daily life. And while it is not therapy, John’s work can be surprisingly, delightfully, holistically healing.
John William Johnson has a long and varied history in the story telling world. He was a member of Alec Rubin’s well known “Primal Theater” (John Lennon was a big fan) in New York City.
Moving to the West Coast, John’s creative world expanded into Afro Cuban dance, Contact Improvisation, Continuum, Modern and Post Modern Dance.
He did a lot of Ritual and Site Specific work.
Then he moved up to the NorthWest. Here he began more performance art, and practicing Butoh as a form of self expressionism.
He wrote, directed and starred in “Waking Up: Confessions of a Narcoleptic Episcopalian”.
“Waking Up is not only entertaining, it is enlightening. I not only learned about narcolepsy from the patient’s viewpoint. I learned about the strength and creativity of humans in the face of adversity. John’s account is an excellent teaching tool for healthcare providers, and those struggling to creatively embrace illness.”
At: Oasis Healing Arts, 537 SE Ash, #42B, Portland OR 97214
Vinn Marti of Soul Motion will be teaching a Soul Motion workshop on September 12, 2009 at the Oasis Healing Arts Center. The event will last from 11:00AM to 3:00PM. Doors will open at 10:30AM.Come and join Vinn as we step away from the usual and together let’s create an Oasis of inquiry and invention through movement, stillness, music, and silence.
Tammy is a Yoga Instructor in the T. Krishnamacharya yoga tradition. She has been studying and practicing yoga since 1999 and teaching since 2003. She completed 450 hours of teacher training including an apprenticeship with Sarahjoy Marsh.
Starting at 7PM, John W. Johnson will lead a medicine bowl meditation to ground us and bring you home to your body.
