Episode 30: Tending to Ourselves Through Movement with Jennifer Sterling
“If we are tending to our mental health in the same way that a lot of us tend to our physical health, I think we'd all be in a much better place than where we are.”
-Jennifer Sterling, The Everything Belongs Podcast
Today on the Everything Belongs Podcast, Madison is in conversation with Jennifer Sterling. Jennifer uses movement to help women heal from the inside out. She's a Registered Dance/Movement Psychotherapist and a Holistic Nutritionist and host of the podcast, The Bodyful Black Girl Podcast. Jennifer believes that addressing depression in a holistic manner is the most effective route to healing. Holistic (meaning WHOLE PERSON) and body centered (BODYFUL) — food, movement, supplements and medication (when needed), and therapy. Jennifer is the creator of The BodyFul Healing Project, which provides safe space for open conversations about mental health, helps people understand their emotions safely using body-based interventions, and offers resources to help nourish your body physically, mentally and emotionally so you can have a sense of what it feels like to be well. In this episode, Madison and Jennifer discuss what dance movement psychotherapy is, how our unconscious patterns show up in how we hold and move our bodies, and the ways we can tend to and support ourselves through a relationship with our movement. Listen in…
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In this episode we have a conversation about:
What dance movement psychotherapy is and how our unconscious patterns show up in how we hold and move our bodies
How we nourish ourselves and the ways we can tend to and support ourselves
Looking at how our fight and flight can exhaust us and, in particular, in our current systems
Working as a coach who personally understands and experiences depression and how she begins to work with this bodily shut down in her clients
How much our judgement plays a part in doing small daily actions to build capacity for more movement and self-leadership
Jennifer's explanation of The Anatomy of Feeling and getting curious about how our movements feel to us and help us work through our emotional experiences
Madison's own experiences of beginning to relate and notice her movement in 2020
