The introduction “Step by Step, Movement by Movement”, from the book "Open Circle", in the editing of Shantam Zohar, describes the personal path of the group that practices Authentic Movement and its development within the field of Authentic Movement, beginning from a personal experience that gradually unfolds into a collective journey and a shared space of embodied listening and witnessing.  Through encounters with teachers, communities, and diverse cultural contexts, the body emerges not merely as a moving entity but as a source of knowledge, presence, and testimony. 

This article, published in the journal "Dance Today", presents Portal to the Pelvis, a movement-based method developed by Orly Portal over nearly three decades of choreographic, somatic, and experiential research. Drawing on a personal and artistic journey, the text traces a shift from ascetic Western dance disciplines toward an in-depth exploration of the pelvis as an energetic, sensory, and emotional center—an embodied site of vitality, pleasure, memory, and healing.

Flyers and information about workshops from the past

This article, published in the journal "Dance Today", presents a collaborative research–practice project between choreographer and performer Anat Danieli and Dr. Shinar Pinkas-Samet, examining the solo as a ritual of change—a choreographic practice conceptualized as a bodily, psychic, and relational transitional space. The article is grounded in a shared working process that moves between studio practice, performance, reflection, and therapeutic thinking, and explores how solo movement work can function as a site of processing, holding, and transformation.

This chapter explores the developmental primacy of aesthetic openness as a foundational dimension of primal psycho-physical existence. Critiquing classical psychoanalytic conceptions of aesthetic experience, it proposes a developmental–aesthetic perspective that understands sensory openness to the physical environment as a constitutive condition for the emergence of transitional space, vitality, and a sense of being.

The article was published in November 2023 on BeTipulNet and was written at the beginning of the war in response to the urgent need for immediate trauma interventions. It emerged from clinical work conducted within an emergency hub established at the School of Psychology at Reichman University, in which members of the Body-Oriented Psychotherapy group participated under the supervision of Dr. Shinar Pinkas-Samet. The article offers clear, practical principles for sensory regulation in trauma treatment under crisis conditions.

The chapter “The Unspoken of Sharing”, published in the book "Falling Up: Contemporary Writings on Bodies in Psychotherapy", edited by Dr. Shina Pinkas-Samet, traces an ongoing dialogue between Yasmeen Godder and Dr. Shinar Pinkas-Samet, exploring how choreographic and performative inquiry evolves into a shared embodied mode of knowing with clinical implications. Through the creative process of Shared Emotion, the body emerges as a site of resonance, transmission, and transformation, where the boundaries between dancer, spectator, and participant become fluid, and embodied experience turns intersubjective.

This article, published in the journal "Dance Today", presents an in-depth conversation between choreographer Galit Liss and Bella Rubin, focusing on Liss’s unique choreographic methodology developed through long-term work with mature women who are non-professional dancers. Through biographical, artistic, and social reflection, Liss describes her transition from working with professional dancers to an ongoing exploration of the ageing body, and the emergence of the “Gila Language”—a movement and performance methodology grounded in presence, sensory awareness, imagery, breath, imagination, and the creative use of bodily limitations.

This chapter explores the intricate relationship between body, language, and form within relational body psychotherapy, proposing the body as an active agent that generates meaning rather than merely carrying psychic content. Drawing on relational psychoanalysis, philosophy of language, and theories of bodily becoming, the chapter argues that therapeutic change emerges through bodily inscription, sensory resonance, and the absorption of pre-symbolic “residual” material that cannot always be articulated verbally yet becomes embedded in the body.

The article will describe two ways of using the body as an integral part of psychoanalytic psychotherapy, in order to find additional possibilities of healing in the therapeutic work.

We will present two case studies that combine the psychoanalytic perspective with that of body psychotherapy and with the practice of yoga in the spirit of non-duality.

This paper explores somatic aspects of disorganised attachment organisation from a relational body psychotherapy perspective. Through a detailed clinical vignette and theoretical discussion, it examines ways of working through the bodies of both therapist and client with fragmented body perception, dissociation, and disrupted self-experience. The paper focuses particularly on eating disorders and attention deficit disorders, conceptualising them through an attachment-based and embodied lens.

This paper explores the body as subjectivity, dialectically constructed through cultural, ethnological, and political contexts. It introduces the concept of uber-bodyness, an internalised cultural ideal of the body with which individuals are in constant dialogue. The paper argues that bodily movement and body-to-body communication cannot be reduced to verbal exchange, but constitute an unmediated somatic language in their own right.

Body-oriented psychotherapy can offer practical clinical tools, alongside theoretical conceptualisations, for working with transitional states of consciousness, both individual and dyadic. This paper examines sleep as a transformative space, which for the other is largely uncharted territory, and through a development of Bion’s concept of reverie (further informed by the work of Meltzer and Klein), proposes ways of joining the other—in and through our body—into spaces of sleep and awakening.

Written from a relational body psychotherapy perspective, this article examines the concept of bodily reverie as a theoretical and clinical extension of psychoanalytic reverie. Tracing the development of reverie in the works of Winnicott, Bion, and Ogden, and integrating Arnold Mindell’s process-oriented and shamanic-inspired approaches, the article proposes a somatic–relational understanding of reverie as an embodied state of shared consciousness.

The paper delineates three somatic dimensions of bodily reverie.

Drawing on the body-container model, the body is conceptualized as a multidimensional space in which perception, movement, and intersubjective processes converge in the formation of selfhood. Through an early mother–infant vignette and clinical material from work with children on the autistic spectrum and with profound regulatory difficulties, the chapter examines the dynamic interplay between mother–environment and environment–mother modes of relating. It highlights the role of aesthetic ambiguity and pre-symbolic openness in supporting the capacity to dwell in transitional space and to move toward creativity and relational engagement.