Healing Dance Origins

Healing Dance founder Alexander George came to develop the form in the 1990’s while a resident at Harbin Hotsprings. After studying with Watsu’s originator Harold Dull in 1990, Alexander began experimenting and improvising in the Harbin warm pool, influenced by his background as a dancer and choreographer, by his experience with Trager bodywork, and by the qualities of water itself. After studying WaterDance from Arjana Brunschwiler, the underwater form brought a new spaciousness and 3-dimensionality to his experimental moves. By 1993, Alexander had created a new branch of Watsu, a dynamic yet nuanced approach with both surface and underwater moves— the Healing Dance.

The Healing Power of Movement & Stillness

Healing Dance departs from the static origins of Watsu with new movement and dimensionality. The therapist travels and glides through the water, dancing the receiver through space, tracing waves, spirals, and figure eights. Such movements offer receivers physical freedom and ease, as well as the experience of beauty and grace.
Healing Dance’s wide variety of original techniques reflect how water and the body naturally move together. Blocked energies are opened up by hydrodynamic waves and spirals, as well as spatial mandalas in the form of spins, figure 8’s and releases, freeing and re-animating the body.

Healing Dance elegantly waves the receiver’s body through the water, offering new mobility in the spine and joints throughout the body. Famously good for spinal problems, receivers report that their backs feel much better following a session. The Healing Dance approach of waving the body  is also excellent for releasing holding of a psychological origin, often leading to a deeper emotional release beyond the physical freedom. 

Healing Dance takes advantage of the full 3 dimensionality of the water with broad dynamic movements. A variety of advanced body mechanics such as moving by example, creative imbalance and traveling through the pool help to create not only bigger movements, but also subtler and more sensitive ones. The essence of Healing Dance is flow, freedom, and lightness.

As receivers soon discover, there is also much of stillness and nurture in Healing Dance.

Movement, like a medicine, is carefully dosed, is intermixed with restful pauses in quiet positional sanctuaries to allow for integration of its effects. In stillness, the receiver feels the psychological reverberations of the movement in their being, a moment to expand into oneself while being safely held.

Intuitive Movement

Also characteristic of Healing Dance is the emphasis upon relating and mirroring, where the practitioner establishes an empathic connection with the receiver,  ready to meet and and mirror any emerging movements. 
Rather than a static sequence of moves, the range of vocabulary of movements in Healing Dance allows therapists to improvise in response to the needs of the receiver.  Each session unfolds as a co-created dance.

For the athlete, martial artist, swimmer, diver, dancer and would-be-dancer, the movements of Healing Dance are a delight and an invitation to playfully participate by allowing the expression of their bodies natural impulses towards movement. 

On a subtle level, what has slowed down or ceased in the psyche of the receiver is inspired to awaken into playful participation.  This invitation to the whole of the person to be present with total acceptance is an invitation to wholeness and self-love.