Good Moves

How Dance Movement Therapy Helped Riddhi Doshi Douse Her Fiery Rage

An angry text from my boss or absentee house help used to be enough to throw off my mood—and my day. Mornings were usually a predictable blur of frenzied cleaning, cooking and dropping things. I would pack my lunch with so much aggression, you’d think I was attacking it. By the end of the day, it was almost a given that I would pick a fight with an unsuspecting person on the train or yell at my husband when I got home.

Then two months ago, it all changed when I enrolled in a diploma course in Dance Movement Therapy (DMT) at Mumbai’s Tata Institute of Social Sciences (Tiss.edu). I signed up with the aim to learn a new skill that would aid the voluntary work I did with slum kids. They conduct workshops in association with Kolkata Sanved (Kolkatasanved. org), a non-profit organisation that uses DMT as an alternative approach to counselling, empowering and rehabilitating victims of trafficking and abuse. Little did I know that it would change my life as well.

A typical group DMT session begins with an opening ritual, where the therapist turns on the music and invites everyone into a wide circle. This is followed by a warm-up. Sometimes, based on the group’s energy, the therapist will lead them to improvise movement. Other times, participants are asked to embody a physical gesture or emotional expression (like clenching your fists to show anger or simply swaying your arms) and pay attention to how they feel in that moment. The session winds up with relaxation and a closing ritual. DMT is geared towards helping you access your emotions and unearth troublesome behavioural patterns and their causes. Thereafter begins the empowerment, in which a therapist works with you towards shifting these patterns. DMT can be tailored to heal people across age groups, and physical and mental abilities.