Therapeutic Applications of Contact Improvisation by Aaron Brandes LICSW, M.Ed

An excerpt from my chapter in Resistance and Support: Contact Improvisation @ 50 on touch, mindfulness, agency, and embodied relational support.

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Body&Being brings together my work as a somatic psychotherapist and movement educator. It explores what it means to become more fully human through embodiment, relationship, imagination, and the practices that help us find ourselves again.

Here, I’ll share reflections that come from working with clients, teaching workshops, and developing the structures I use in somatic practice. Some pieces will explore the tools I use within movement scores and embodied experiments. Others will trace the frameworks I draw from and blend, including Authentic Movement, Drama Therapy, Contact Improvisation, IFS, and mindfulness. I’ll also use this space to articulate the values that shape the work: radical humanism, play, creativity, agency, and the body as a source of wisdom.

This Substack is a way to gather these threads and make the practice more visible, one reflection at a time.

The Container That Makes Play Possible by Aaron Brandes LICSW, M.Ed

On vulnerability, resistance, and the balance of freedom and safety

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Play as a Clinical Way of Reclaiming Range by Aaron Brandes LICSW, M.Ed

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What the Moving Body Knows by Aaron Brandes LICSW, M.Ed

On Ezra Klein’s conversation with Michael Pollan, and the missing place of movement in how we think about consciousness.

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