THERAPY

Ilene is trained to help people facing the stress of changing life situations such as serious illness, challenging relationships, and career changes.

Ilene offers ongoing healing circle support groups for:

• Illness
• Loss
• Cancer
• Surgery
• Body Image
• Verbal and Nonverbal Support

Dance Therapy
The healing arts are especially useful to us today because they provide a cost-effective complement to traditional medicine. The creative force awakened in the healing arts is a powerful medicine when used in service of healing. With this force, people are better equipped to face life with energy, flexibility, improvisational skills, an enriched inner life, and stronger resources. Through the arts, people can express their experience and meaning of having an illness, explore their own imagery and resources for healing, and decrease loneliness by deeply sharing rhythmic and non-verbal connections with others.

Rituals can help each woman prepare for surgery or a medical intervention, express and find ways to cope with fear and often overwhelming emotions, learn to grieve, and go on to live each day fully. For group members, who support each other by participating in, and helping each other create rituals, this is an intense lesson in sharing and showing love.

Dance as medicine is not one technique, nor even one theoretical perspective. Rather, it combines both modern and ancient images of healing practices. These images are of sacred dance, which linked the physical world and the world of spirits, using sounds and bodies as instruments to create group connections through rhythm and space. In healing dances, all members participated. Connecting the individual to the greater context of community and the gods, sacred dance helped restore a sick person’s harmony with tradition, social order, and the cosmos. The rituals of sacred dance named divine powers, marking cycles of generation and cosmic creation. Patterns which emerged in the dance celebrated cosmic patterns such as circles, lines, and actions of planting, gathering, rising and falling. The dance therapist as shaman is a community healer who uses sacred sources of healing to combine art, ritual, diagnosis and treatment for revitalizing individuals’ lifeforce within the context of community. Re-awakening and re-imagining these root images of dance therapy practices can provide insight and perspective to the ancient and modern art of dance medicine.