ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the innate wisdom of the body, explains how the body and brain adjust to environmental conditions and relational dynamics, and illustrates how physical action can become a viable target for psychotherapeutic intervention. A powerful indication of the wisdom of the body is that its movement, posture, and physiology will adapt without conscious intent in order to assure survival and maximise available resources. In a therapy hour, the therapist attends both to following the client’s narrative or “story”, and tracking present-moment internal experience—emotions, thoughts, five-sense perception, movements, and body sensations—that emerge spontaneously. As John Bowlby states, the therapist “is striving jointly with the patient, to understand how the models on which the forecasts are based may have come into being”. It takes intention, experience and practice for the therapist to “know” which non-verbal cues are indicators and which are not. Therapists may be baffled by the paradoxical responses of their patients to relational contact.
