M-Bodied: Mindful Movement as Mothering Medicine®
M-Bodied® blends talk therapy with body awareness and attachment-based relational practices as a container for exploration, a womb for self-discovery, nourishment and growth. Sometimes we talk, sometimes we explore myths and stories, sometimes we explore developmental shapes or movement patterns, and sometimes we do all three. You set the pace.
M-Bodied: Mindful Movement as Mothering Medicine is a trauma-sensitive psychotherapeutic approach informed by nervous system science, attachment theory and specific early relational Chi for Two® co-regulation practices in an effort to provide relational nourishment and healing. The M-Bodied approach is appropriate for individuals, parents/caregivers, couples and families.
Having a body that is like a musical instrument, open enough to be able to resonate, literally resonate with what is coming both from the inside and from the outside, so that one is able to surrender to powers greater than oneself. -Marion Woodman
What is M-Bodied: Mindful Movement as Mothering Medicine®?
M-Bodied: Mindful Movement as Mothering Medicine offers body-based psychotherapy for:
Individuals and families who want a more sustainable relationship with food, eating, drinking and other substances, exercise and body-image
Trauma-Informed Parenting, perinatal, and motherhood support from womb-to-walking journeys
People who feel overwhelmed or stuck with anxious or depressive patterns, moods, reactions and who crave a quality of living that is more fulfilling, steady, playful and hopeful
Families who want help with finding a new way to communicate and lovingly connect.
For all those listed above, M-Bodied explores soothing and satisfying deeper hungers through a relational approach using both somatic and cognitive co-regulation techniques.
In order to connect the dots with deeper hungers, M-Bodied offers:
Nervous-system informed psycho-education
Attachment-based psychotherapy
Body-based co-regulation practices.
Using this three-pronged approach, M-Bodied slowly invites coming home to the body-mind to offer reconnection in a sustainable way.
M-Bodied® as a Mothering Metaphor
M-Bodied is offered through psychotherapy in the state of Georgia or embodiment coaching worldwide, and is influenced by developmental movement and relational patterns as a way to help connect the dots and symbolically redo body-mind areas of focus that need re-patterning for healthy functioning. Ultimately, the integrative, therapeutic “holding environments”, or Circles of Support, serve as mothering metaphors for symbolic redos, a pathway to birth one’s nurturing inner parent, one’s ability to self-handle, to self-regulate.
*When “Mother” is referenced in this practice, we are inviting the “mothering quality of oxytocin,” which plays a major role in signaling safety within our Social Engagement system functioning as related to nervous system science. Therefore, those who identify as female, male, or non-binary may offer and embody that “Mother” quality.
M-Bodied® as Relational, Process-Based Mindful Movement
While some M-Bodied work often looks like shapes commonly recognized as yoga postures, it draws from shapes, patterns and movement we all once embodied, needed and crave for healthy brain development, security, connection, love and survival. Performative “pretzel poses”, while sometimes fun and playful, are not the goal or even used.
The key in using this mindful movement is to apply practices in a relational, process-based way dependent upon the developmental stage needing extra support. In combination with nervous system psychoeducation, having a conscious awareness of how and why shapes, patterns and movement might be used in a newly supported way can help the development of a self-supported individual from the inside-out.
The M-Bodied approach helps to increase inner and outer body awareness and helps clients make unique meaning of their nonverbal messaging like common gestures, stances, postures, breath patterns, tension, openings, numbness, etc. These messages often inform about boundaries, hungers, needs, fears and communication. M-Bodied encourages the client to become curious about the stories their body holds within relationship to self and others.
The M-Bodied approach draws from a multigenerational trauma healing method called Chi for Two®—the Energetic Dance of Healthy Relationship. To learn more about the psychological, somatic, meditative, attachment-based and trauma-sensitive foundations of M-Bodied, check out the synthesis of Chi for Two.
How M-Bodied® Relational Practices Help Body-Mind Integration
In addition to appreciating the value of “using our words,” like in talk therapy, M-Bodied uses somatic techniques through the lens of developmental movement and relational patterns that offer parallels of psychological and social development. Using the Chi for Two® trauma healing method that draws upon nervous system science and the polyvagal-informed framework, M-Bodied helps one to explore relational ways of using the body as a resource for body-mind integration. This approach helps to explore satisfying and nurturing shapes, postures and movement someone might find beneficial not only for physical support and empowerment but also as a path toward body-mind integration and nervous system re-patterning.
The conscious re-patterning of one’s infant developmental dances from womb-to-walking helps to strengthen one’s own attunement, self awareness and expanded capacity toward an Embodied Cognition. By merging somatic and cognitive techniques from a trauma-sensitive and attachment-based approach, we practice mothering ourselves through mindful movement.
The Birthing of M-Bodied
For 20+ years, Caroline Gebhardt, LPC, RYT, creator of M-Bodied, helped people mindfully reconnect with their body in a trauma-sensitive way—from group exercise classes, to private in-home training, to parent-baby movement, to yoga groups for eating disorders and addictions, and to individual psychotherapy. During Caroline’s time as a movement educator full-time, she began case consultation, co-developing Chi for Two® and then training as a certified Chi for Two® coach and trainer under the direction of dance-movement therapist Dee Wagner, BC-DMT, LPC.
Chi for Two® - The Energetic Dance of Healthy Relationship is a polyvagal-informed, multi-generational trauma healing method to help manage trauma for therapists/clients, parents/children, romantic partners and 12-Step enthusiasts. In addition to co-creating Chi for Two, Caroline created M-Bodied as a way to use mindful movement as mothering medicine—a deeper sense of early relational nourishment from the inside-out.