Melissa Meade: Healing for Body and Soul … Remotely
Many of us may be feeling trauma lately. As pandemic tumbled into protest (but didn’t go away), we may be suffering from the effects of job loss, illness, racism, and uncertainty. Talk therapy is not always enough to release trauma lodged in the body; for that, many people are turning to dance/movement therapy.
Melissa Meade, R-DMT, LPC/MHSP-T, owner of Moving Through Life, a counseling and dance/movement therapy practice, describes dance/movement therapy as less about dance (in the sense of performing) and more about body language.
“The emotions have been described as the link between the brain and body,” she says. “You can go about counseling or therapy from a brain base or you can go about it from a body base. The brain base depends on higher-level functioning, which is hard to reach with trauma or difficult events. Going about it from the body makes it easier to access and less painful.”
She adds that verbal language makes up only about 10 percent of communication; the rest is body language and tone of voice. In dance/movement therapy, the counselor can both read clients’ body language and use body language in an effective way to communicate.
“You add the creative part of dance and you can get into things really easily or effectively,” Meade concludes.
While Meade offers paid, one-on-one counseling sessions, she also has an online group class called Moving Through Stress. It’s not a therapy group; instead, it’s an open circle where people can relax and relieve stress. If you’re curious about dance/movement therapy or if you just want to listen to your body and work out some tension, this is a great opportunity.
“Stress is so body based,” Meade says. “There is tension in your jaw, in your neck, in your raised shoulders. All of the tension that we hold in our body often reflects stress. [The class is about] getting your body moving in order to release some of that stress and have fun.”
You don’t have to be a client of Meade’s to join. You can take the class standing or seated; Meade has even worked with clients who were in bed and could only move a little bit. And you certainly don’t need formal dance training. Meade observes that to her, dance is “any way of moving with the creativity part; the creativity part is innate, something we all have, even if we don’t think we do.”
Meade came to dance/movement therapy through a roundabout path; she’s a mechanical engineer who’s also worked in organizational development and software design. But dance has always been a part of her life. She recalls becoming interested in dance/movement therapy after participating in Ballet Tennessee’s work “Gahalet” or “Embers,” depicting the powerful spirit of the Jewish people through the Holocaust.
“My husband died by drowning,” she says. “I always was concerned that was a bad way to die. I was dwelling on it. They cast me as a Jew dying in a gas chamber. I was able to dance drowning. It didn’t have the power over me anymore. It freed me from pain. A year later, I felt I wasn’t where I still needed to be in my inner life. I discovered dance/movement therapy, and in three months I had enrolled in a dance/movement therapy program. It changed my life.”
The pandemic has been difficult for Meade, as for many of us, but she’s found her training in dance/movement therapy has helped her deepen her practice of meditation.
“I become aware of what’s going on in my body,” she says. “That gives me a lot of clues about what might challenge me during the day.”
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Find Melissa Meade at facebook.com/MovingThroughLifeChatt or movingthroughlifechatt.com. Moving Through Stress is held every Wednesday at noon and is open to the public, though a $25 donation is suggested. The Zoom link is posted on the Facebook page.