Body Poem™ is a practice in which one person listens to the communications of another person's body and dreams, and gives what they find back as an original piece of art — a poem, a movement, a sound, an image — that embodies the witnessed experience.

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What it offers you

What your body, inner thoughts and your dreams are already communicating, in and out of your awareness, when received with radical acceptance, offers you reflections of yourself that have come from you, transformed into poetry that I have witnessed facilitating your multi-layered decision-making being informed.

It's easier to receive ourselves when we experience the beauty of our truth rather than the rejection of it — rather than being driven purely by emotions or your mind, which may not be on the same page and may even be at odds with each other. Body Poem brings these different voices together, offering congruent attunement and the opportunity to make informed decisions and update patterns you inhabit that no longer represent all your wants and needs.

Because your poem comes from your source, it's more likely to do the work for you than another's advice or prescription. We might not need to get better at living in other people's versions of us. This might be the time for you to learn, step by step, to trust your authentic creation rather than be created. This is like growing from the inside out rather than from just the outside in.

This process supports my intention for you to inhabit the beauty of your gifts, transforming where you have been lonely or suffering into inspiration for others, and quietly and reliably growing and maintaining stability while confidently participating in this one and precious life.

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The two roles

Body Poem is held within a session structure where there are two roles — you, the Dreamer (client), and the Body Poet (practitioner) — writing the Dreamer's exact words as they arrive and reading them back as poetry.

The Body Poet is the one who is the scribe for the waking and sleeping dreams of the Dreamer. The word poet is chosen carefully, because a poet does not invent the material. A poet attends to what is already there and finds the form in which it can be seen.

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Why a poem, and not a summary

I invite you to notice what happens when we describe an experience in rationalised language — what happened, why, what it probably means. The account is accurate, and something has left it.

A rationalised version of a person's experience is like moss when the water has gone. When the words come alive through someone receiving them into their heart, the feeling states come alive again — like water soaking into moss that has stayed dried for years.

What the Dreamer brings is rarely tidy. It arrives as fragments, images, sensations, and things that make no sense at all. Body Poem does not treat that as noise to be corrected. It treats it as harvest — the harvesting of projections into digestible poetry, taking what is indigestible and giving it a form that can be taken in.

We might understand the differentiating as happening in the making itself. When the Dreamer hears their own material come back, shaped as something outside them, they can see it. It has a body. It is no longer only inside, where nothing can be looked at.

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Where it came from

Body Poem grew out of the Dream Form ritual in Playback Theatre, woven together with Body Focusing and Clean Language. Playback gave it the understanding that a story told can be given back as an enacted form. Body Focusing gave it the body as the place the story is told from. Clean Language gave it the discipline of not putting our own words into someone else's mouth.

The roles are not only for erotic work. The Dreamer and the Body Poet are the roles for any Body Poem — a dream, a grief, a decision, a room in a house.

Body Poem™ is also taught as a certificated training through the Relational Harmony Institute, for practitioners who want to work in the Body Poet role. Details are on the Institute site.