Aquapoetics blog: In the Flow

Holding loving space: Diane Feingold talks about aquatic bodywork

2013-02-15T14:18:16-06:00

Aquapoetics is delighted to share with you a special audio recording (approx. 2 h) of a recent (2.9.13) in-depth conversation between Sara Firman of Aquapoetics and Diane Feingold creator of WRT Water Release Therapy®.

Diane is a licensed Watsu®, WaterDance, and WRT Water Release Therapist® (her own modality) based in Santa Barbara, California. She also teaches Basic Watsu® and her WRT Water Release Therapy®. In addition, she is a Human Energy Design Life Coach and a Yoga teacher. Aside from her credentials, Diane has a wisdom born of her heritage and life experience which she brings whole-heartedly to her aquatic practice and her teaching.

WRT Water Release Therapy® came into being at the start of the new millenium. Diane describes it as 'an Aquatic Art with origins from the Stillness Base of Watsu®, the joyful bliss of WaterDance, Deep Presence, Breath work and Yoga'. The conversation you will hear explores the background to Diane's love of this work and dives deep into the heart of the experience of sharing this healing modality.

Diane emphasizes 'the inward journey' and 'the unique inquiry and unfolding design for each person, for each session from moment to moment'. Her approach is oriented towards supporting and encouraging each person's experience whatever that might be, rather than seeking to change or fix them. Topics covered include: what it takes to be truly present for someone, the significance of willingness on the part of a receiver, the nature of bodywaves, and much more.

Course details for WRT Water Release Therapy® are discussed in the second hour of the audio recording: you will also find a brief outline below. Later in the post is contact information for Diane, including links to her websites and networks where you can keep in touch with what she is doing. Perhaps you'll be lucky enough to have the opportunity to experience a session or train with her.

Download the conversation to listen to later here:

Diane Feingold talks to Sara Firman

Or listen now by clicking on the play arrow below:

The pre-requisite for WRT Water Release Therapy® is Basic Watsu® (an 18 h class eligible for the Worldwide Aquatic Bodywork Registry). In most US states, there is also a pre-requisite of training leading to a licence-to-touch before someone can offer aquatic bodywork professionally. Students of WRT Water Release Therapy® who complete the 38 h Level 1 and specified requirements (including supervisions, practice sessions, professional sessions received, Human Energy Design reading and individual areas of focus), are eligible to receive certification as a WRT Water Release Therapy® Provider under the WRT Board. For further training in WRT, many choose to audit the initial course and continue on to Levels 2 and 3, often taking additional audits, with Diane Feingold who is currently the sole instructor for this work. More information:

Water Release Therapy® website
Water Release Therapy® blog
Diane on Aqua4Balance
Diane on Facebook
Water Release Therapy® on Facebook
Water Release Therapy® on Twitter

In the above audio, Diane mentions Inika Sati Spence who featured in a previous interview on the Aquapoetics blog: Reflecting & mirroring: Inika Sati talks about aquatic bodywork

Also mentioned in the conversation with Diane were:

Harold Dull (creator of Watsu®
Richard Bock (aquatic bodywork, meditation, breathwork)
and WRT Water Release Therapy® Providers
    Michelle Shandy
    Jakub Omsky-Trawkowski (cellist)
    Shaun Oster (musician)

There are many others Diane would like to acknowledge for all she has learned and shared with them.

Watsu® is a registered trademark of Harold Dull
WRT Water Release Therapy® is a trademark of Diane Feingold

If you enjoy this blog, Aquapoetics welcomes your support.

The year 2013 on Aquapoetics

2013-01-01T08:42:39-06:00

I look Westward

into the end of day

The Last Frontier

still made of Water

[L. Ferlinghetti, 'At Kenneth Rexroth's' in Open Eye, Open Heart, 1961]

What do the three important elements (see below) of our professional practice as aquatic bodyworkers most need from us, if we are to serve as creative artists, maestros of change and transformation, healers who can hold a vast oceanic space for life? Can we focus on the whole, putting aside our own ambition? Can we make a difference? Read on. Share your thoughts.

The above stanza from Ferlinghetti's poem delighted me when I came across it yesterday, as it describes how I feel as the new year begins ... still made of water. Despite the truth that last year I was more often dreaming of it from the last frontier than floating in it.

However, the little mermaid you see above came back to me towards the end of 2012, and I see her as a good omen. She used to dance from the rear-view mirror of a second-hand car I once owned, though that car has long since been recycled (into useful parts I hope).

Consider my much appreciated car (mode of transport) a metaphor for the education and credentials that take us places along well-made roads of professional practice. The modes that once served us well eventually become outmoded, second-hand, ready to be recycled.

Meanwhile, the mermaid ~ arguably a dangerous distraction dancing in the periphery of our view of the recommended road ~ is a metaphor for the creative inspiration, the healing heart at the center of any true love of water as a medium for therapeutic transformation.

If the mermaid could speak she might sound like avant-gard therapists Bradford and Hillary Keeney singing an improvised healing song: 'Wake up and re-invent your practice and do so as often as possible. Do so to save your life.'

The Keeneys call their approach to healing 'circular poetics' or more formally 'circular therapeutics'. This powerful duo see psychotherapy as a 'performing art, informed and enlivened by helpful doses of heart-inspired interaction and spirit'.*

While most aquatic bodywork practitioners are not trained as psychotherapists, ours is a practice that can easily become a performing art in the way described above. It's also increasingly subject, as popular healing arts eventually are, to the rigors of regulation and calls for scientific evidence of efficacy.

I once wrote of aquatic bodywork as 'exquisite touch and movement performed in a warm-water pool'. It is now part of spa leisure and alternative health services, in addition to its physical therapy applications. In these different settings, it is often afforded different purposes and values.

Since 2007, I've called my own practice AquaPoetics. 'An aquatic art form designed to encourage creative inspiration and personal transformation, it draws on Watsu® and its derivatives, and focuses on encouraging each person to dance the body poetic, to listen to their own body's poetry.'

I describe what I do this way in order to emphasize an interactive and experiential approach rather than a scientifically structured or routinely executed method. I concede that science and sequencing might help a person in their initial studies but, like the Keeney's, I find that:

'…therapy is no more a replicable science than a poem is a computer program.' *

[See also: Healing or Therapy? Faith and Facts in Aquatics]

In a brilliant contemplation of 'Whether To Be a Professional or Not' [Part I and Part II], herbalist Jesse Wolf Hardin looks at the advantages and disadvantages of jumping through the hoops that apply these days to many recognized healing arts, including aquatic bodywork.

It's an issue I've struggled with over the years and 2012 provided some interesting opportunities to revisit where I stand on the question of what constitutes professional practice. I'm bemused by the apparent lack of serious dialog and organization around this topic in our profession.

[See for example: How to find people who are authorized to offer Watsu® sessions and Floating in sunlight and shadows: Watsu® in practice ]

As other professions, like massage (a common umbrella for aquatic bodywork), become increasingly regulated and the drive for evidence-based practices floods into the elite halls of the spa industry, there are likely some challenges ahead for our aquatic healing art.

Some readers of this blog might get the impression that I'm all for regulation and science ~ if so, they are misunderstanding my message. What concerns me are those who are tempted to use pseudoscience and confusing credentials to give an appearance of professionalism.

As someone who started out a scientist and pursued the professional path, walked on the wilder side for a while, and then took the trouble to get all my 'ducks in a row' again, I can see both sides of the dilemma that Jesse Wolf Hardin (a self-described amateur herbalist) addresses in her article.

I agree with Jesse that not all professionals are effective healers; it's also true to say that not all renegade practitioners are true healers. Jesse suggests the term 'adept' (meaning achiever) for healers 'who are focused and devoted, wise, experienced and consistently excel at what they do'.

Adepts are not always formally trained but are ideally tested by reputation. 'Calling someone (or ourselves) an adept', Jesse adds, 'says only that they are profoundly wise and extraordinarily proficient and effective, while allowing that there is always room for further learning and improving.'

'Calling someone a "Master" herbalist or master anything else seems absurd, since nobody ever completely masters (controls, knows everything about) any darn thing!' I agree. There is a humility in practice that the Keeneys also emphasize when they say:

'The way to help change a client is to change yourself.'*

This new years post is my call to all us long-time practitioners and teachers of this wondrous healing art to use the coming year as an opportunity to notice what we have been: pretending to be in ourselves, ignoring in the wider world of our profession, and failing to nurture in our healing hearts.

Notice what is really happening to our training schools (fragmentation?), our warm-water pools (unsustainable?), and our students and clients (confusion? fear?) as human hubris hurtles us on towards heartless destruction of each other and of the planet on which we depend.

What do these three important elements of our professional practice as aquatic bodyworkers most need from us, if we are to serve as creative artists, maestros of change and transformation, healers who can hold a vast oceanic space for life? Can we focus on the whole, putting aside our own ambition? Can we make a difference? What do you think?

New Year Blessings to all! I'm off to swim with my mermaid.

End note: I highly recommend exploring the work of Bradford and Hillary Keeney which runs much deeper than I have given justice to here. Also, please read both parts of Jesse Wolf Hardin's article. I'd love to hear your thoughts and comments, which can be emailed to me or added below.

*Reimagining psychotherapy: An interview with Hillary and Bradford Keeney, by Paul Gibney.

***

My annual disclosure : who is behind aquapoetics?

For those of you who do not know me and have not had time to explore the pages on this website (see links in the left-hand column) or my profiles elsewhere on the web (also in the left-hand column), I share some brief background here.

My name is Sara Firman (aka Sulis). My interest in massage and aquatic bodywork began in 1989 when my dear friend Sally Bryant introduced me to Watsu® in the remedial pool at the sports centre in Bath, UK. At that time I was a freelance editor of scientific publications.

Almost 10 years later, having trained in massage and practiced in a variety of clinical and spa settings, I had the opportunity to learn Watsu® and other related aquatic bodywork modalities at Harbin Hot Spring in California.

I introduced Watsu® to Bath, where it is now a signature treatment at the luxury hotel spa I managed and at the city mineral spa (where I worked during summer 2007). On moving to California in 2000, I co-created an aquatic bodywork practice called WaterJourneys.

From 2002 to 2007, I co-owned and operated a private spa-retreat specializing in aquatic bodywork in the Missouri Ozarks. When the partnership dissolved in 2007, Aquapoetics emerged as my own practice and approach to this transformational aquatic healing art.

Below is a summary of some of my current offerings. If you know of anyone else who may be interested in these, please share. For those who do want to follow this up, here is a link to an inquiry form. To ensure a speedy response you may also like to Email me.

Watsu® is a registered service mark of Harold Dull

Current offerings from Aquapoetics/ Sara Firman

Contracts at warm-water facilities as a versatile and experienced practitioner of aquatic bodywork, including assistance in setting up customized aquatic programs.

Mentorship for aquatic bodywork practitioners seeking to deepen their own practice and create a path of right-livelihood and service that is suited to their own nature.

Workshops for practitioners emphasizing intuitive skills in the practice of aquatic bodywork and encouraging documentation of the benefits of this water-based modality.

Writing services - commissions or collaboration on projects related to aquatic bodywork, including website creation and content.

Speaker for conferences or meetings, healing centers or training schools on topics related to aquatic healing practices.

AquaPoetics: Creative Aquatic Bodywork: experienced and professional services that demonstrate commitment to high ethical and environmental standards, while promoting creative and innovative approaches that contribute to the evolution and recognition of aquatic bodywork for health and wellbeing.

Reflecting & mirroring: Inika Sati talks about aquatic bodywork

2012-12-07T06:00:00-06:00

Inika in motion

Continuing the blog series highlighting people involved in the aquatic healing arts, Aquapoetics presents a special audio recording (approx. 1 h) of a recent (11.20.12) wide-ranging conversation between Sara Firman of Aquapoetics and Inika Sati Spence. Apologies in advance for some slight variations in sound quality.

Inika is one of the most skilled and well-loved practitioners and teachers of aquatic bodywork and has travelled all over the world sharing this healing art. Here she talks about her passion for aquatic bodywork - how it came about, what she most loves about it - and where she'd like to see it going in the future both in the US and overseas.

Particular mention is made of the modality Healing Dance® developed by Alexander George with creative input from Inika, long-time instructor in this method. You will hear why it is Inika's favorite modality, more about its applications, and how it can be effectively integrated with other therapeutic skills. See the official Healing Dance® website for further information: www.healingdance.org

Reference is made during the discussion to the following two videos both of which are embedded at the end of this post for your convenience and enjoyment:

Waters of Life: a documentary on aquatic bodywork produced by Hans Olaf Dietze (2007). The interview with Inika can be found at approx. 7 minutes in.

Watsu + Healing Dance: an exquisite session in which Inika is seen floating Claudio Silva who also produced this film (2010).

As you will hear, Inika has collaborated with Diane Tegtmeier to develop an aquatic method for helping those suffering from trauma. More on this (including case studies and a video) can be found in an article linked on Diane's website here. See also Aquatic bodywork and trauma healing (on Aquapoetics).

Also included in the audio discussion are: the healing power of water, concerns about water quality and the long-term effects of immersion in water, the importance of bringing the whole setting of a session into the healing arena, some favorite places and experiences in Inika's long-career sharing this healing art, and much more.

Below is an inline player for the audio: hover your mouse over the start arrow and click to play, or right-click to open the mp3 in a new tab.

Aquapoetics talks to Inika Sati Spence Nov. 2012

Inika practices bodywork at Harbin Hot Springs in Northern California, which is also her home. You can see more about this special place, also the creative home of the Watsu® modality, here: www.harbin.org .

More about Inika can be found on the Healing Dance® website: Profile of Inika . And on the Worldwide Aquatic Bodywork Registry (search under Practitioners, California): www.waba.edu . Find Inika on LinkedIn .

Any comments added below about this conversation, will also be relayed to Inika, who will be pleased to respond.

Links to other topics mentioned in the audio:

Waters of Life from Hans Olaf Dietze on Vimeo.

watsu + healing dance from Claudio Silva on Vimeo.