Body Dynamics

About This Approach

Coquelicot Gilland's work through Body Dynamics draws from a comprehensive set of approaches and methods. The skills you will learn through this integrated approach provide support when confronting difficult circumstances, working through emotions, and exploring shadowy sides of self. You will develop curiosity, healthy maturity, self-possession and self-authority and a restored and deepened individual dignity, leading to a more creative, autonomous and fulfilling life.

About This Approach

Sessions are guided by the healing power of Spirit that presences through dialogue and touch. Listening through this "Third Force" awareness supports the refinement of soul substance.

Recurring elements in Coquelicot's approach include:

The Compassion Matrix™: A system of five meta-skills that facilitate fully embodied learning
The Bodynamic Developmental Model: Identifying interruptions in developmental stages, missing milestones, and themes related to specific phases of life, and building or rebuilding missing life skills

Sensing the Body: Specific learning environments that promote psychological and somatic (body-based) awareness and growth
Resting Into Not Knowing: Learning how to tolerate the unknown, as well as the sensations of un-clarity, anxiety, complexity, imperfection, shadow, and other "edge conditions"
Exploring the Biology of Meaning: Each muscle has a specific psychological function. Over- and under-expressed emotions lay down meaning in the tissues, shaping the physical body and our range of gestural expressions
"Growing up" into functional autonomy: Living life and coping with its challenges as an adult
Resolution of shock and trauma patterns held in the layers of the body, emotions, and mind
Precision restorative "clothes-on" touch work: Engagement with, and release of, chronic limiting stress and tension patterns embedded in our muscles, bones, tissues, and organs
Brain Gym® exercises and Reflex Integration work: Improve cognitive processing, physical functioning, and coordination

Coquelicot utilizes several methods to bring about desired changes, depending on client's needs including:

Life Transition Counseling
Somatic Learning Principles
Muscle Psychology
Restorative Yoga Coaching
Development Dance
Pastoral Counseling

These learning environments provide Coquelicot's clients with tools and skills to self-regulate leaving them more self-possessed with embodied levels of self-esteem and self-worth coupled with a humbled mind.

Biology of Meaning

Our emotions, expressed and unexpressed, lay down meaning in our tissues. As the reinforcing layers of meaning accumulate, the shapes of our bodies begin to reflect our over and under-expressed emotions and life skills. Our organs, digestive function, and immune system are similarly influenced. This phenomenon is succinctly expressed by Caroline Myss when she says: "Your biography is your biology."

"The activity of 'trying to do something about it' is the avoidance of feeling."
- Satya'Ama Adyota

"One must first have a place before leaving it. One can abandon only what one has got. One can give up only what one has received. There is a radical opposition between 'being denied' a thing, and 'leaving' it. Being denied a thing means being prevented from having it before one has known what it is to have it, and so one has a longing for it which is all the greater for one's not having had it. More than anything else it is a piece of bad luck which one cannot do anything about. On the other hand, leaving a thing is a free act."
- Paul Tournier, A Place for You

"If thou couldst empty all thy self of self, like to a shell dishabited, then might He find thee on the ocean shelf, and say -- 'This is not dead,' -- and fill thee with Himself instead. But thou art all replete with very thou, and hast such shrewd activity, that, when He comes, He says -- 'This is enow unto itself -- 'Twere better let it be: it is so small and full, there is no room for me.'"
- Sir Thomas Browne

"Attitude is everything."
- Charles Swindell

""Your biology is your biography."
- Caroline Myss

Inspirations

"I am going somewhere and that somewhere is everywhere, and it is important to be exactly on time at every instant. Because if I am not on time here, I shall never be on time anywhere."
- Satprem, By The Body Of The Earth
"The most visible creators I know are those artists whose medium is life itself. The ones who express the inexpressible -- without brush, hammer, clay or guitar. They neither paint nor sculpt -- their medium is Being. Whatever their presence touches has increased life. They see and don't have to draw. They are the artists of being alive."
- Jay Scott
"If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite."
- William Blake
"And bit by bit I was overcome by a strange impression that was almost an emotion. Did it emanate from those high walls or the sand carpeting the street? No, it was subtler than that: it was linked to something in the air, a familiar resonance, almost an odor. Then I closed my eyes; feeling the small warm hand in mine, and searched, prodded that wall of memory, groping my way through an obscure fragrance peopled by presences; it was there, just on the other side; I could feel it, smell it still--a rare emotion which I had known many times in many different lands."
- Satprem, By the Body of the Earth
"With great love, sensitivity, and a profound capacity to elicit and model intimacy, Coquelicot provides a safe and conscious environment for me to explore and practice open-hearted communion."
- U.F., artist
"By finding pathways to 'rewrite the body script,' we can -- with kindness, mindfulness, perseverance, and patience -- learn to embrace and embody more of our potential as human beings."
Coquelicot
"The clear bead at the center changes everything. There are no edges to my loving now."
- Rumi
"The direct route is the sum of a million indirections."
- Satprem, By The Body Of The Earth
"I will not live an unfulfilled life. I will not live in fear of falling or catching fire. I choose to inhabit my days, to allow my living to open me, to make me less afraid, more accessible, to loosen my heart until it becomes a wing, a torch, a promise. I choose to risk my significance; to live so that which came to me as seed goes to the next as blossom, and that which came to me as blosson goes on as fruit."
- Dawna Markova, The Open Mind
"It is possible I am pushing through solid rock, as the ore lies alone. I am such a long way in. I can see no way through and no space. Everything is close to my face, and everything close to my face is stone. I don't have much knowledge yet in grief, so this darkness makes me feel small. You be the master. Make yourself fierce, break in. Then your great transforming will happen to me, and my great grief cry will happen to you."
- R.M. Rilke
"I enormously appreciate your integrity. I benefit a lot from the importance you place on slowing down, or walking (experience) in small steps/increments, and on identifying the most subtle beginnings of experience, sensation, and emotional reaction."
- M.S., obstetrical nurse in San Francisco
"But you are something very old.... Listen, my child, destiny is not an enemy, there are no 'enemies' in the world. Everything is here to help us find the way. There is no 'misfortune,' everything leads us exactly where we must go, by all the necessary detours. When one opens one's heart, every moment is a miracle...."
- Satprem, By the Body of the Earth
"All sickness is homesickness."
- Rumi
Coquelicot teaches didactically, experientially and by example. She brings to each session a lifetime's worth of tools, exercises and practices that I use at home to further my own development. Her genius combines intuition, sensing and a comprehensive knowledge of human emotional and biological development. What I've learned from her has not only given me a deeper understanding of my own patterns, dynamics and behaviors, it's also enhanced my understanding of others. I am a far more compassionate person thanks Coquelicot. In fact to the degree that I am a more evolved being in any regard, Coquelicot was instrumental in my transformation.
-L. M. Artist and wellness ally