Movement as Medicine with Gwen Williams: Episode 87 of the Feel Better Every Day Podcast
Soles to Soul Care for Trauma and AuDHD with Eve Menezes CunninghamShow Notes
Get your free weekly journal prompts and more here Watch here or listen here or wherever you get your podcasts Dance movement psychotherapist Gwen Williams joins me (trauma therapist, AuDHDer, senior accredited supervisor, coach, author and columnist etc, Eve) to discuss how she combines yoga therapy, dance, art, and psychotherapy to help people reconnect with their bodies and heal. Gwen shares her journey from yoga therapy training (while pregnant!) to completing her MA in dance movement psychotherapy, plus her exhibition “Reclaiming the Wild Body.” She offers practical insights on movement practices for ADHD and neurodivergent brains, explaining why gentle, slow practices work best when your mind moves at a million miles an hour. Perfect for anyone interested in somatic healing, trauma recovery, creative therapy, or finding movement practices that actually work for neurodivergent nervous systems. Find Gwen: Website: gwen-williams.com Instagram: @movement_art_therapy Topics covered: ADHD, dance movement psychotherapy, yoga therapy, somatic practices, neurodiversity, creative healing, embodiment le grá (with love), Eve Chapters (0:00) Introduction to Gwen Williams (0:53) Reconnecting after yoga therapy training 14 years ago (2:09) Gwen’s evolving body-based and creative work (3:57) Reclaiming the Wild Body exhibition (5:12) Neurodiversity, ADHD and creative practice (7:14) Where to find Gwen online (7:48) Exploring Eve’s Feel. Love. Heal. framework (9:22) Gwen’s essential Feel self-care (11:05) Ideal and essential Love Self care (14:49) Designing life around slower somatic practice (16:22) Heal collective care: community, dance and co-regulation (18:03) Reclaiming the Wild Body workshops (19:20) Earth body, social body and transpersonal body (21:02) Vegan chat and episode planning (22:57) Where to find Gwen (recap) (23:23) Closing credits and resources FULL TRANSCRIPT Welcome to episode 87 of the Feel Better Every Day Podcast. Today’s guest is the delightful Gwen Williams. We trained together as yoga therapists for mental health and it was so lovely to catch up with her for this episode and reconnect. She’s since become a psychotherapist and she is combining art and her psychotherapy and yoga and movement and just all around delightfulness. If you’re in Bristol check her out and online obviously also you can gain a lot from her amazing presence in the world. I hope you enjoy the episode and let me know how you get on. Welcome Gwen, thank you so much for joining me. Thank you for having me Eve, it’s really nice to be here. It’s so funny because I met you like we used to sit together a lot in the yoga therapy training we did with the Minded Institute and you were pregnant at the time and you like I couldn’t believe that I was struggling because it was a lot. It was amazing but it was a lot and there you were and now finding out how old your son your first son is it’s like wow like you say it’s a huge mark of time but yeah it’s gorgeous seeing what you’ve been doing with the work and how it’s evolved for you and it looks so beautiful in the video. Do you want to say a little bit more about how it has evolved for you, where people can find you? Yeah thank you, yeah so it’s lovely to reconnect with you and yeah it was it was about it was like 13 or 14 years ago that we were doing that training together. So yeah so that training in yoga therapy with the Minded Institute, yeah so I suppose that’s been part of an ongoing process for me of exploring, training, sharing different body and movement based work. So after that I did some training in Focusing so we’re kind of bodied, lovely, gorgeous, embodied, practised and in women’s health and then in dance I trained as a dance movement psychotherapist so I did an MA in that which I completed about a year and a bit ago. Congratulations. Yeah thank you and that was a very big big chunky training to do so all these things I kind of bring together now in a way of working with people that’s v
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