THE SYNCREATE PODCAST: EMPOWERING CREATIVITY
HOSTED BY MELINDA ROTHOUSE, PHD
WELCOME TO SYNCREATE, WHERE WE EXPLORE THE INTERSECTIONS BETWEEN CREATIVITY,
PSYCHOLOGY,AND SPIRITUALITY. OUR GOAL IS TO DEMYSTIFY THE CREATIVE PROCESS,
AND EXPAND THE BOUNDARIES OF WHAT IT MEANS TO BE CREATIVE.
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EPISODE 2: EMBODIMENT AND CREATIVITY WITH THAIS BICALHO SILVA, PT, GCFP
CLICK ON THE EMBEDDED PLAYER BELOW TO LISTEN:
Melinda & Thais
We often talk about the mind-body connection, but how does this relate to creativity? Embodiment refers to the state of fully inhabiting our physical selves, as well as to our experience of life as a physical being. Many of us have complicated relationships with our bodies, especially those of us who have experienced trauma in some form or another (which is most of us). Yet, the body is also a fundamental source of creativity, as we will explore in this episode with physical therapist, dancer, and Felderkrais practitioner Thais Bicalho Silva. Our conversation explores the healing power of movement and touch, as well as what comes alive for us when we allow ourselves to experience ourselves from the inside out, as opposed to self-objectifying, and what’s possible when we create from that place.
episode 2 video clips
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full audio episode on youtube:
EPISODE LINKS
Thais’ Website: mayolimovement.com
Psychiatrist and Trauma Researcher Bessel van der Kolk
Book: The Body Keeps the Score
Psychologist Wilhelm Reich
Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio
Book: Descartes’ Error
Psychiatrist and Trauma Researcher Bessel van der Kolk
Book: The Body Keeps the Score
Psychologist Wilhelm Reich
Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio
Book: Descartes’ Error
episode transcript
Melinda: Welcome to Syncreate, a show where we explore the intersections between creativity, psychology, and spirituality. We view creativity broadly, and one of our primary goals is to demystify the creative process. I'm Melinda Rothouse, and I help individuals and organizations bring their creative dreams and visions to life.
Today on the show, Thais Bicalho Silva. A recurring theme of this show is exploring the mind-body connection as it relates to creativity. Creativity is not just an intellectual or even an emotional process at its best. Creativity is a mind, body, and spirit experience. Thais is a physical therapist and so much more than that.
She's trained in the Feldenkrais method, which if you've never heard of it, the idea is to expand physical flexibility and range of motion by challenging awareness and self-perception. Feldenkrais practitioners sometimes say, we move according to our perceived self. Therefore, the work is about developing a different form of self-perception.
Thais herself is originally from Brazil and she first came to New York to pursue a dance career. Around that time, she began to also take an interest in healing and somatic work, asking herself questions about what opportunities beyond dance might also be available to her.
Thais: I was like, I like movement and I also love touch. How can I work with touch and movement? And then I found the Feldenkrais Institute as I was walking through Manhattan. I had read the book before, years before in Brazil, awareness movement, and I was like, oh, it's that thing, that thing again. I'm very glad that I tried a class and then I stayed for the whole training. I think the key and maybe the, the difference from the traditional approach, it's really to give the client, the student, a chance to feel their bodies, to sense their bodies. and. I think culturally we approach the body from a performance. Perspective, right? There's something to be conquered or something to be tamed. So I think my work is really just give a chance for the student or the client or the patient to feel themselves right. To close that loop.
Melinda: Yeah. So I've, I've taken some Feldenkrais classes as well before I met you. And my sense of it is that the movements are very, very slow. So it's about slowing down and really sensing into the body and, something we were talking about the other day is, kind of, feeling the body from the inside out rather than as an object or looking at it from the outside in.
Thais: Yes, and I think we take that for granted. For example, sometimes I see, I go to yoga class (and I love yoga), but you see that that it can become very informatic.
Melinda: Yes, like you're trying to make a certain shape.
Thais: Yes, and become very external. So it's coming from the left side of your brain. Like you, you’re still executing something, so you have to shift, to go to the right side, and then it's beautiful because you feel connected, you feel connected with yourself, with others, with the environment. So for me it was really a gift that I could get there spontaneously using movement as a portal.
Melinda: And that's great because you've also said to me that, if imagination is your superpower, your tool is movement. So what's that connection between imagination and movement for you?
Thais: So for me, organic movement, spontaneous movement, takes a lot of freedom. You need to be free. You need to be confident. And I do think those skills are also part of creativity. Because you're seeing something that's not there, or you want to bring to life something that doesn't exist yet. So you need to be confident, you need to explore. So all those qualities, they're also there. And it's also more of a listening state; you explore and you listen and you feel, and then you bring something to life. So I think so many of the skills of creativity and movement, they're in the same realm for me, they belong.
Melinda: That's great. I'm actually just making this kind of new connection right now as we're talking about it, because, just to kind of rephrase what you said, I view creativity as this process of using our imagination to visualize something and then to bring it into being, so in some way it’s magical in the sense that we're creating something out of nothing, but you just filled in, I think, a gap for me that how do we manifest that? It starts with movement with the body, in many cases.
Thais: Because the, the mind and body are not really separated. Right? So if you're free in your body, if your movements are free and you're spontaneous, probably you are a very creative person. You have that portal open and coming from, all the training that I had wasn't so easy to allow my creativity to flow and, and I call it like, developing my handwriting. Because I had wonderful teachers, but there was a moment that I felt that I was almost like an extension of my teachers and I started to get lost. And, not feeling connected with the work anymore, feeling bored and just tired of like, I was repeating myself over and over again. So I had to leave this place that I loved so much and I had to integrate and I some people saying this is not Feldenkrais, or this is not physical therapy, or this is not dance. What are you doing? And I'm like, I don't know what I'm doing. I'm just doing it.
Melinda: And yet it's so powerful and I can attest to that personally. You know, there's so much research coming out these days about somatic intelligence and how we hold trauma in the body, right? People like Bessel van der Kolk, the book, The Body Keeps the Score. And even going back to people like Wilhelm Reich, the psychologist who talked about character armoring and how we kind of bolster ourselves and hold ourselves in certain ways, to armor against the world and just how we chronically hold tension, traumas, we hold our breath when we're stressed, and I'll give a specific example.
So I came to see you; I remember one particular day I was in a lot of pain and I got on the table and we did some hands-on work. And the work you do is very subtle. It's not like any kind of physical therapy I've experienced before. You know, I sprained my ankle some years ago and I went to a physical therapist and he just like mashed on me, you know, and I was like, screaming in pain or another time, they gave me some exercises to do, but what you do, it's hands-on, but it's so subtle, it almost feels like, what are you even doing? And then I remember, I, you had me get up and walk around the studio afterwards, and it was like, I feel like I'm walking for the first time. It was so profound. And I'm wondering, how does that work? How would you describe that?
Thais: So, as you are sensing, I'm giving a chance to sense and feel yourself, but I'm doing the same. So I'm sensing your body at the same time, which, in truth, it's such a beautiful experience because I have to be very available, because if my body's creating a lot of noise, the only thing that I can feel is my own noise.
Melinda: Yes.
Thais: So it makes me raise the bar in my own organization. I have to be in the state in which I can be sensitive and present. And as you, as you notice, I'm never wearing shoes, right? I'm always sitting on the stool, very firm, but not a lot of support so I can move. So the same is almost like I have to create for myself the experience that I want you to have. And when I'm teaching group, I have to do the lesson before, so it keeps me in the process. I'm not an outsider, I'm not the specialist. We are all doing the same work. I'm communicating, because I don't want you to feel my touch; I want you to feel your body, your movement. So it's almost like I'm there, but I don't want to be there at the same time. I'm just guiding. We practice a lot and it was described to me, it's like you're holding a baby. You’re firm, you're present, but you're not holding, you just want them to feel safe with you and feel the touch, that's something that they would go towards and not withdraw from you, because like I said before, you can trigger all the trauma again, so even the way that we are gonna bring the hand, right? You're not gonna come to someone's neck like that. You have to kind of find a way that your non-verbal communication is also say, “Hey, I'm here, we are together.” We are co-creating.
Melinda: And what a beautiful thing that is and what a gift, you know, to go somewhere and even for an hour to be able to lay down and feel safe. I always come out of the sessions feeling so relaxed and I kind of almost spacey. But you know, I've been to other healing practitioners before where they did use too much force or they actually hurt me worse than I was already hurting. Not on purpose, but just a lack of skillfulness.
Thais: Yeah, because we don't practice; in PT school, you practice how to do things. You get the angle and you get this and you get that, but you are not listening to your own body. It's not a communication. Again, it's a performance. You learn to execute a maneuver. And Feldenkrais is about connection. You feel the ease in my body and then I feel yours and I feel when your body changes and you feel it too. So and then in the end you just feel the difference. We create a gradient, just like that's how your body was before, and that's how it is. It is now. And when you feel that difference. That's where learning happens. It's like, oh, because you create a little contrast and you like that. Right? So it's like, what is this? Now, this is you, without those layers that you're talking before, without your armor.
And for people, sometimes they're carrying that armor for so long they don't even realize it, and then it's like, who is this person? Well, it’s you? It has been you the whole time. It just, it was hidden somewhere underneath all of that. But one thing important for us to know is that the armor is not bad.
Melinda: Right. And you're always saying that to me, like, oh, there's a certain intelligence to that.
Thais: Yes, it was necessary. Yeah. The only reason why it sticks to you, it because it was probably linked to survival, emotional, psychological, physical, but we developed that for protection. And then there is an intelligence saying, I'm not gonna let this go, this serves me. So in one hand, you relax but on the other hand you offer support. It's like “you don't need this.” “Look, you can use this.” And then you offer a more skillful, flexible, a more dynamic way to deal with the demands,
Melinda: And from that place new things are possible.
Thais: And again, it opens that portal, right? Because you know that when you feel your body free, there is a sense of confidence, that you feel strong because you become whole. And then, you know how many new things you can bring to life now that you are incorporating all of that into your being.
Melinda: Yeah, so that kind of leads beautifully to what I wanted to talk about next, which is that we're planning a workshop together around the idea of finding your voice and embodying creativity, and we were talking the other day, and you touched on this kind of in the beginning of the conversation about how we can go into the body nonjudgmentally, which is of course contrary to how we usually approach ourselves from this very superficial, we're constantly judging our appearance and all this, but the ability to just go into the body, putting all that other stuff aside and then, anything is possible from that space. And so I'm curious to hear more of your thoughts on, how can we awaken creativity by tuning into our internal somatic and sensory experience?
Thais: I think when we go in, in this case, we are using movement, but there's different ways to do that, but you create a safe space because when you can't, those two, those states cannot coexist. You can't be in your critical mind and your sensing mind at the same time. They're kind of two different operational modes, so I think what stops creativity is the inner critic, right? That criticism that probably it didn't start internally, it started from the outside. Maybe it was the way we were brought up. Maybe it was a teacher at school, but for some reason that inner critic grew.
Melinda: Like we're walking around with this internal censor all the time.
Thais: And you can't, that's not a safe place to create. How can you bring anything new? So when you go to this sensing, when you create that space for you, it's safe. You can have silly thoughts. You can say feeling, move in a silly way. It brings that childhood, that freedom.
Melinda: The playfulness.
Thais: The playfulness and the joy. So that's what I, feel like my dream will be that we all would be experts. And going in without that dissociation, but on purpose. You open that portal, you go in, you create beautiful things, you bring them to life, because it's yours. And that's what I felt when I started doing this work, I kind of freed myself from wrong or right, it just feel real. That's my essence.
Melinda: And it's coming from an authentic place.
Thais: Exactly, so what can you say, you know, with someone and just being themselves? You can't, there's no, you can't say anything about it. You deny because then you deny them an expression which is their right. So I think it's, for me again, that this place, this beautiful place, things can come to life. It's very safe. It's very nurturing.
Melinda: And I think it's so important for anyone who's exploring their creativity in whatever way that might be, whatever medium or context that to do some kind of somatic work, whether it's breathing or movement related or whatever it might be, that that's a tool for accessing.
Thais: And like you said, there are so many research now, how the body informs the mind. I think it's Antonio Damasio in his book, I think Descartes’ Error, and he talks about your sense of self, and how that feeds on your posture, your tone, so it's a tool that you can use to unlock, and really we have this wonderful, beautiful body and we are just approaching from a different place and instead of coming from a place in which like, teach me, tell me.
Melinda: And there’s so much we can learn from that. The mind can learn from the body, even though of course they're not separate, but we tend to think of them sometimes as separate. So one thing that I want to touch into, we've had so many conversations about this somatic work and, you know, how people experience it differently, the sensual aspects of tuning into the body and how, you've mentioned to me that a lot of your clients tend to be women, and we were speculating, you know, why is that? Is there some sense that women, or women-identifying people, are more comfortable being in their body or expressing or exploring that sensuality? And yet I think we both agree that that men or men-identifying people, you know, that's so important that healing work really needs to be done, especially in this time when we're talking about, #MeToo and toxic masculinity and, we all need healing, the men just as much as women.
Thais: Yeah. That it's, very necessary because I think this relation with power, right? Men approach power, not everyone, but from an aggressive sometimes, maybe even violent. So, like we said before, the power of being, integrated, right? You integrate your emotions. especially boys, right? I, I don't think anymore, maybe not this generation, but you know, I'm in my forties and, you know, boys don't cry, so we teach our boys to dissociate from their emotions. And then you are in that, building, right? That is the mind, and now there is a floor missing, right, you, you are lacking a very important source of information, right? So it is through integration, and then with that, the rigidity in the body right? And again, that sense of self, right?
Usually when I work with men, they have a very poor differentiation in their pelvis. The perception of the pelvis is very poor compared to women and it's nothing linked to their, it's not a physical incapacity. It's just that that is a way of walk, and there is a way of shake the hand and, so it's almost like being rewarded for being strong. And I think it's just that invitation, right? It's not an attack, it's just an invitation to, well, strength has many angles.
Melinda: It can look different ways.
Thais: And the more you know, the more you integrate all your abilities and capacity, the stronger you become, you know, because we also have aggressive, you know, we can also be very aggressive and violent, women. Of course, there's also this biological, our cycles call us to the body mm-hmm. So we feel that more strongly than men. Um, but I do think that is so much room for improvement.
Melinda: Yeah. And it strikes me that, men, women, people of any gender or orientation, that there could be a real healing by connecting more and sensing into the body.
Thais: Yeah. Own your body; it’s amazing for a reason. We have all this capacity, right. We talk about using lessof our mental capacity. The same is true for the body. And who knows if that's not linked.
Melinda: And how are we limiting the full spectrum of our capabilities when we're not fully inhabiting our bodies? Yeah, beautiful. Well, I think we are about to the end of our time. Anything else you just want to add or, or share before we close?
Thais: No, I think it, it's just leaving this invitation, right? You have this body; own it, explore it, you know, become your best friend. Become intimate with it. And see what happens.
Melinda: And, and see what creative possibilities flow from that. Great. So if people want find out more about your work, how can they find you?
Thais: My website, mayolimovement.com. Also on Instagram, mayoli movement.
Melinda: And the spelling of that: M A Y O L I M O V E M E N T.com Okay. Thank you so much, Thais.
Thais: Thank you for having me. It was great. Thank you.
Melinda: Thanks again to Thais Bicalho Silva for our conversation. You can find out more about her at mayolimovement.com.
This episode was produced by Mike Osborne with Production Assistance by Brandon Burke. Follow us on Instagram and LinkedIn where you can also find out more about Syncreate. Thanks for listening and see you next time.
Today on the show, Thais Bicalho Silva. A recurring theme of this show is exploring the mind-body connection as it relates to creativity. Creativity is not just an intellectual or even an emotional process at its best. Creativity is a mind, body, and spirit experience. Thais is a physical therapist and so much more than that.
She's trained in the Feldenkrais method, which if you've never heard of it, the idea is to expand physical flexibility and range of motion by challenging awareness and self-perception. Feldenkrais practitioners sometimes say, we move according to our perceived self. Therefore, the work is about developing a different form of self-perception.
Thais herself is originally from Brazil and she first came to New York to pursue a dance career. Around that time, she began to also take an interest in healing and somatic work, asking herself questions about what opportunities beyond dance might also be available to her.
Thais: I was like, I like movement and I also love touch. How can I work with touch and movement? And then I found the Feldenkrais Institute as I was walking through Manhattan. I had read the book before, years before in Brazil, awareness movement, and I was like, oh, it's that thing, that thing again. I'm very glad that I tried a class and then I stayed for the whole training. I think the key and maybe the, the difference from the traditional approach, it's really to give the client, the student, a chance to feel their bodies, to sense their bodies. and. I think culturally we approach the body from a performance. Perspective, right? There's something to be conquered or something to be tamed. So I think my work is really just give a chance for the student or the client or the patient to feel themselves right. To close that loop.
Melinda: Yeah. So I've, I've taken some Feldenkrais classes as well before I met you. And my sense of it is that the movements are very, very slow. So it's about slowing down and really sensing into the body and, something we were talking about the other day is, kind of, feeling the body from the inside out rather than as an object or looking at it from the outside in.
Thais: Yes, and I think we take that for granted. For example, sometimes I see, I go to yoga class (and I love yoga), but you see that that it can become very informatic.
Melinda: Yes, like you're trying to make a certain shape.
Thais: Yes, and become very external. So it's coming from the left side of your brain. Like you, you’re still executing something, so you have to shift, to go to the right side, and then it's beautiful because you feel connected, you feel connected with yourself, with others, with the environment. So for me it was really a gift that I could get there spontaneously using movement as a portal.
Melinda: And that's great because you've also said to me that, if imagination is your superpower, your tool is movement. So what's that connection between imagination and movement for you?
Thais: So for me, organic movement, spontaneous movement, takes a lot of freedom. You need to be free. You need to be confident. And I do think those skills are also part of creativity. Because you're seeing something that's not there, or you want to bring to life something that doesn't exist yet. So you need to be confident, you need to explore. So all those qualities, they're also there. And it's also more of a listening state; you explore and you listen and you feel, and then you bring something to life. So I think so many of the skills of creativity and movement, they're in the same realm for me, they belong.
Melinda: That's great. I'm actually just making this kind of new connection right now as we're talking about it, because, just to kind of rephrase what you said, I view creativity as this process of using our imagination to visualize something and then to bring it into being, so in some way it’s magical in the sense that we're creating something out of nothing, but you just filled in, I think, a gap for me that how do we manifest that? It starts with movement with the body, in many cases.
Thais: Because the, the mind and body are not really separated. Right? So if you're free in your body, if your movements are free and you're spontaneous, probably you are a very creative person. You have that portal open and coming from, all the training that I had wasn't so easy to allow my creativity to flow and, and I call it like, developing my handwriting. Because I had wonderful teachers, but there was a moment that I felt that I was almost like an extension of my teachers and I started to get lost. And, not feeling connected with the work anymore, feeling bored and just tired of like, I was repeating myself over and over again. So I had to leave this place that I loved so much and I had to integrate and I some people saying this is not Feldenkrais, or this is not physical therapy, or this is not dance. What are you doing? And I'm like, I don't know what I'm doing. I'm just doing it.
Melinda: And yet it's so powerful and I can attest to that personally. You know, there's so much research coming out these days about somatic intelligence and how we hold trauma in the body, right? People like Bessel van der Kolk, the book, The Body Keeps the Score. And even going back to people like Wilhelm Reich, the psychologist who talked about character armoring and how we kind of bolster ourselves and hold ourselves in certain ways, to armor against the world and just how we chronically hold tension, traumas, we hold our breath when we're stressed, and I'll give a specific example.
So I came to see you; I remember one particular day I was in a lot of pain and I got on the table and we did some hands-on work. And the work you do is very subtle. It's not like any kind of physical therapy I've experienced before. You know, I sprained my ankle some years ago and I went to a physical therapist and he just like mashed on me, you know, and I was like, screaming in pain or another time, they gave me some exercises to do, but what you do, it's hands-on, but it's so subtle, it almost feels like, what are you even doing? And then I remember, I, you had me get up and walk around the studio afterwards, and it was like, I feel like I'm walking for the first time. It was so profound. And I'm wondering, how does that work? How would you describe that?
Thais: So, as you are sensing, I'm giving a chance to sense and feel yourself, but I'm doing the same. So I'm sensing your body at the same time, which, in truth, it's such a beautiful experience because I have to be very available, because if my body's creating a lot of noise, the only thing that I can feel is my own noise.
Melinda: Yes.
Thais: So it makes me raise the bar in my own organization. I have to be in the state in which I can be sensitive and present. And as you, as you notice, I'm never wearing shoes, right? I'm always sitting on the stool, very firm, but not a lot of support so I can move. So the same is almost like I have to create for myself the experience that I want you to have. And when I'm teaching group, I have to do the lesson before, so it keeps me in the process. I'm not an outsider, I'm not the specialist. We are all doing the same work. I'm communicating, because I don't want you to feel my touch; I want you to feel your body, your movement. So it's almost like I'm there, but I don't want to be there at the same time. I'm just guiding. We practice a lot and it was described to me, it's like you're holding a baby. You’re firm, you're present, but you're not holding, you just want them to feel safe with you and feel the touch, that's something that they would go towards and not withdraw from you, because like I said before, you can trigger all the trauma again, so even the way that we are gonna bring the hand, right? You're not gonna come to someone's neck like that. You have to kind of find a way that your non-verbal communication is also say, “Hey, I'm here, we are together.” We are co-creating.
Melinda: And what a beautiful thing that is and what a gift, you know, to go somewhere and even for an hour to be able to lay down and feel safe. I always come out of the sessions feeling so relaxed and I kind of almost spacey. But you know, I've been to other healing practitioners before where they did use too much force or they actually hurt me worse than I was already hurting. Not on purpose, but just a lack of skillfulness.
Thais: Yeah, because we don't practice; in PT school, you practice how to do things. You get the angle and you get this and you get that, but you are not listening to your own body. It's not a communication. Again, it's a performance. You learn to execute a maneuver. And Feldenkrais is about connection. You feel the ease in my body and then I feel yours and I feel when your body changes and you feel it too. So and then in the end you just feel the difference. We create a gradient, just like that's how your body was before, and that's how it is. It is now. And when you feel that difference. That's where learning happens. It's like, oh, because you create a little contrast and you like that. Right? So it's like, what is this? Now, this is you, without those layers that you're talking before, without your armor.
And for people, sometimes they're carrying that armor for so long they don't even realize it, and then it's like, who is this person? Well, it’s you? It has been you the whole time. It just, it was hidden somewhere underneath all of that. But one thing important for us to know is that the armor is not bad.
Melinda: Right. And you're always saying that to me, like, oh, there's a certain intelligence to that.
Thais: Yes, it was necessary. Yeah. The only reason why it sticks to you, it because it was probably linked to survival, emotional, psychological, physical, but we developed that for protection. And then there is an intelligence saying, I'm not gonna let this go, this serves me. So in one hand, you relax but on the other hand you offer support. It's like “you don't need this.” “Look, you can use this.” And then you offer a more skillful, flexible, a more dynamic way to deal with the demands,
Melinda: And from that place new things are possible.
Thais: And again, it opens that portal, right? Because you know that when you feel your body free, there is a sense of confidence, that you feel strong because you become whole. And then, you know how many new things you can bring to life now that you are incorporating all of that into your being.
Melinda: Yeah, so that kind of leads beautifully to what I wanted to talk about next, which is that we're planning a workshop together around the idea of finding your voice and embodying creativity, and we were talking the other day, and you touched on this kind of in the beginning of the conversation about how we can go into the body nonjudgmentally, which is of course contrary to how we usually approach ourselves from this very superficial, we're constantly judging our appearance and all this, but the ability to just go into the body, putting all that other stuff aside and then, anything is possible from that space. And so I'm curious to hear more of your thoughts on, how can we awaken creativity by tuning into our internal somatic and sensory experience?
Thais: I think when we go in, in this case, we are using movement, but there's different ways to do that, but you create a safe space because when you can't, those two, those states cannot coexist. You can't be in your critical mind and your sensing mind at the same time. They're kind of two different operational modes, so I think what stops creativity is the inner critic, right? That criticism that probably it didn't start internally, it started from the outside. Maybe it was the way we were brought up. Maybe it was a teacher at school, but for some reason that inner critic grew.
Melinda: Like we're walking around with this internal censor all the time.
Thais: And you can't, that's not a safe place to create. How can you bring anything new? So when you go to this sensing, when you create that space for you, it's safe. You can have silly thoughts. You can say feeling, move in a silly way. It brings that childhood, that freedom.
Melinda: The playfulness.
Thais: The playfulness and the joy. So that's what I, feel like my dream will be that we all would be experts. And going in without that dissociation, but on purpose. You open that portal, you go in, you create beautiful things, you bring them to life, because it's yours. And that's what I felt when I started doing this work, I kind of freed myself from wrong or right, it just feel real. That's my essence.
Melinda: And it's coming from an authentic place.
Thais: Exactly, so what can you say, you know, with someone and just being themselves? You can't, there's no, you can't say anything about it. You deny because then you deny them an expression which is their right. So I think it's, for me again, that this place, this beautiful place, things can come to life. It's very safe. It's very nurturing.
Melinda: And I think it's so important for anyone who's exploring their creativity in whatever way that might be, whatever medium or context that to do some kind of somatic work, whether it's breathing or movement related or whatever it might be, that that's a tool for accessing.
Thais: And like you said, there are so many research now, how the body informs the mind. I think it's Antonio Damasio in his book, I think Descartes’ Error, and he talks about your sense of self, and how that feeds on your posture, your tone, so it's a tool that you can use to unlock, and really we have this wonderful, beautiful body and we are just approaching from a different place and instead of coming from a place in which like, teach me, tell me.
Melinda: And there’s so much we can learn from that. The mind can learn from the body, even though of course they're not separate, but we tend to think of them sometimes as separate. So one thing that I want to touch into, we've had so many conversations about this somatic work and, you know, how people experience it differently, the sensual aspects of tuning into the body and how, you've mentioned to me that a lot of your clients tend to be women, and we were speculating, you know, why is that? Is there some sense that women, or women-identifying people, are more comfortable being in their body or expressing or exploring that sensuality? And yet I think we both agree that that men or men-identifying people, you know, that's so important that healing work really needs to be done, especially in this time when we're talking about, #MeToo and toxic masculinity and, we all need healing, the men just as much as women.
Thais: Yeah. That it's, very necessary because I think this relation with power, right? Men approach power, not everyone, but from an aggressive sometimes, maybe even violent. So, like we said before, the power of being, integrated, right? You integrate your emotions. especially boys, right? I, I don't think anymore, maybe not this generation, but you know, I'm in my forties and, you know, boys don't cry, so we teach our boys to dissociate from their emotions. And then you are in that, building, right? That is the mind, and now there is a floor missing, right, you, you are lacking a very important source of information, right? So it is through integration, and then with that, the rigidity in the body right? And again, that sense of self, right?
Usually when I work with men, they have a very poor differentiation in their pelvis. The perception of the pelvis is very poor compared to women and it's nothing linked to their, it's not a physical incapacity. It's just that that is a way of walk, and there is a way of shake the hand and, so it's almost like being rewarded for being strong. And I think it's just that invitation, right? It's not an attack, it's just an invitation to, well, strength has many angles.
Melinda: It can look different ways.
Thais: And the more you know, the more you integrate all your abilities and capacity, the stronger you become, you know, because we also have aggressive, you know, we can also be very aggressive and violent, women. Of course, there's also this biological, our cycles call us to the body mm-hmm. So we feel that more strongly than men. Um, but I do think that is so much room for improvement.
Melinda: Yeah. And it strikes me that, men, women, people of any gender or orientation, that there could be a real healing by connecting more and sensing into the body.
Thais: Yeah. Own your body; it’s amazing for a reason. We have all this capacity, right. We talk about using lessof our mental capacity. The same is true for the body. And who knows if that's not linked.
Melinda: And how are we limiting the full spectrum of our capabilities when we're not fully inhabiting our bodies? Yeah, beautiful. Well, I think we are about to the end of our time. Anything else you just want to add or, or share before we close?
Thais: No, I think it, it's just leaving this invitation, right? You have this body; own it, explore it, you know, become your best friend. Become intimate with it. And see what happens.
Melinda: And, and see what creative possibilities flow from that. Great. So if people want find out more about your work, how can they find you?
Thais: My website, mayolimovement.com. Also on Instagram, mayoli movement.
Melinda: And the spelling of that: M A Y O L I M O V E M E N T.com Okay. Thank you so much, Thais.
Thais: Thank you for having me. It was great. Thank you.
Melinda: Thanks again to Thais Bicalho Silva for our conversation. You can find out more about her at mayolimovement.com.
This episode was produced by Mike Osborne with Production Assistance by Brandon Burke. Follow us on Instagram and LinkedIn where you can also find out more about Syncreate. Thanks for listening and see you next time.
