WORKSHOP

Writing From the Body: Somatic Awareness through Movement and Language
With Cheryl Pallant, PhD 

May 8, 2026 • 12-3pm Eastern U.S. time 
Find your local time here. 

The registration deadline is May 1, 2026. 

Live participation is strongly encouraged. However, if you are unable to attend, the recording will be available to all who have registered for the course. 

In this experiential workshop, participants cultivate embodied awareness as a generative source for language, insight, creative expression, and healing. Through somatic movement, subtle sensing, and improvisational exploration, we attune to the rhythms of breath, image, and sensation, allowing movement to open pathways to writing and writing to awaken new movement, each deepening the articulation of the other. We will practice presence and listening in both body and word. Writing arises not from the analytic mind but from felt experience, revealing embodied intelligence, intuition, and emotional truth. Participants discover how movement liberates language and how language, in turn, anchors embodiment. 

This workshop supports professional development by offering somatic practitioners, educators, and therapistsaccessible pathways to integrate writing as a practice of embodied inquiry, reflection, and communication. Participants learn to translate movement and sensation into language that illuminates somatic intelligence, enhances interoceptive awareness, and deepens somatic literacy. Writing becomes a tool for articulating subtle experience, clarifying perception, and documenting transformation, skills essential in teaching, client work, and research across somatic movement and complementary fields. By linking embodied awareness with expressive process, participants strengthen their ability to name and convey the nuances of somatic experience. This approach cultivates presence, authenticity, and creative articulation, enriching their professional practice and contributing to the wider field of somatic movement education. 

Participants will: 

1. Explore the integration of movement and writing as complementary practices for somatic inquiry, reflection, and expression.
2. Cultivate somatic literacy and interoceptive awareness by translating felt experience into embodied language.
3. Deepen creative process by allowing movement and writing to inform each other, expanding expressive range and embodied imagination.

Cheryl Pallant, PhD, is a dancer, author, energy healer, and professor whose work bridges movement and language as interwoven practices of inquiry, healing, and transformation. For more than four decades, she has explored dance and writing as embodied pathways to expanded consciousness. 

She is the author of Writing and the Body in Motion: Awakening Voice Through Somatic Practice and Contact Improvisation: An Introduction to a Vitalizing Dance, along with additional works on ecosomatics, embodiment, and shamanism. Her recent books include Ecosomatics: Embodied Practices for a World in Search of Healingand collections of poetry. Her scholarship appears in Journal of Dance and Somatic Practices and elsewhere. 

Cheryl teaches in the dance department at the University of Richmond and offers workshops internationally. Her approach invites participants to experience writing not as a purely cognitive act, but as a cellular process, emerging from movement and breath. Drawing on decades of contact improvisation and practices like Authentic Movement and Dream Body Work, she cultivates a deep commitment to relational intelligence, improvisation, and embodied listening, informed by her longstanding practice as a meditation teacher and Reiki and Healing Touch practitioner. 

Course Information

Cancellation Policy:
If a participant cancels their registration to any paid offering in the Professional Development Center, they will receive the following refund:
Full refund minus the PayPal fees, more than 4 weeks before the event begins
75% refund from 1 - 4 weeks before the event begins
50% refund from 1 - 6 days before the event begins
No refund on the day that the event begins or while it is in progress ISMETA reserves the right to cancel any offering in the Professional Development Center before the course begins due to unforeseen circumstances. In this case, a full refund will be given.