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What was thaaat? OK, I did join a family constellation therapy group online last year; it was my first experience and it was crazy how I embodied a grandmother and said exactly the things her grandchild needed to hear. Then supervisions with Fabian also had elements of drama therapy or psychodrama. So I knew how surprising things happened there. In this workshop, I ''spilled the beans'', so to say. There was a dramatic scene happening in front of our eyes, and I was drawn to jump in at a specific moment, saying exactly what was hidden in the scenario. The person who had her scene playing out started crying... It was a turning point, a plot twist. Suddenly she was being honest to a lost friend, saying what she kept to herself for ages... At one point, I realized how I perceived the perception my brother had about me, just because of a friction we had the last time we saw each other. And how that was not needed anymore. Something shifted in me quietly. I freed myself, because I saw what he did not feel ready to admit. The next times we met, there was no trace of that anymore. After this experience and many others throughout this M.A., I really started to see the psycho-dynamics of relationships. And family systems. Not just involving family members, but people who surround us. How dynamics are repeated, or replayed over and over until one person changes. Then everyone around also changes. That is a profound life lesson. I'd have been able to consider this theoretically, but not in this very embodied way until having these experiences.

And what happened next? I got on the train to visit my cousin in Munich, because I got the news that my brother was going her on a business trip, and visiting her and her family in the meantime. Right after that workshop... You know what happened on the way? I sat on the train, and Dr. Maria Soledad Manrique (the facilitator of this workshop) came and sat next to me! We were both surprised, took a photo and sent to our DMT group :) We talked about many things, all the way to Munich. I remember one thing vividly: How she pointed out a concern I had in me regarding psychodrama. The fact that it can make people re-live an upsetting event and get them regressed. Sometimes, feelings get stirred up, and may not resolve there and then completely, opening up a wound and not closing it safely and fully. This is how I felt about it too. One session, one group, all those reflections... It's really important to ground clients after these interventions, and I feel that is lacking in the field. Orienting and grounding. Being able to close a scene fully so that the clients don't leave completely overwhelmed.

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Brand Storytellers | Characters people identify with. (n.d.). Tarot card archetype wheel [Illustration]. Pinterest. Retrieved from https://www.pinterest.com/pin/144044888053972432/

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I already have interest in Jungian psychology and archetypes. Büsra brought big, printed tarot cards to the session. I was suprized that she thought of connecting 12 Jungian archetypes with these tarot cards. I am not sure if it helped or hindered my process but I also know all tarot cards and their stories, meanings. So I believe it was a little hard for me to focus on the symbolism of the cards alone, while Jungian archetypes and those stories did not completely match in my memory. This double meaning situation also showed itself whenever we were invited to pick a card for our ego, superego, etc. I ended up picking two; one just wasn't enough to me! It also revealed to me how scared I was to be locked in one archetype, to be static, to define my psyche with one mode of being and operating! I needed more nuance, more diversity, more freedom to exist in different ways. Then my somatic experience happened to connect to the story of a long-long ancestor (now, I have no idea if this was just my imagination or a real epigenetic body memory - no way to tell now in 2025). This feeling was amplified after a short drawing exercise in the end.

My mind was making connections here and there, and just seemed to activate a lot. I felt emotions and sensations, so wasn't just in the mind. But somehow, something made me over-analyze. I think this may be a tendency because of my prior knowledge of all these symbolisms... I love engaging my mind with symbolism, also studied astrology years ago just because of that. But this experience also made me question how much of this really belongs in somatics? It can be hard to ground this knowledge in the body when you are analyzing and seeing connections everywhere you look. Busra is also trained in family system constellation; so that may also opened up this ancestral theme in me subconsciously. Who knows; it is just a great mystery... Jung would have said, it could also be an image from collective subconscious.

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Ah, T.R.E…. I know the importance of shaking, although it can be hard when it happens in public. I experienced in my personal history how shaking was such an immediate reflex of the body to come back to balance, to regulate. I wish I knew about it when I experienced it intensely back in 2020 - I wouldn’t be so scared of it then. Funny how it can feel like you have completely lost control of your body, while it is actually an attempt of the body to regulate the whole system.

It still blows my mind how I had that sudden shaking episode on a ferry, thinking I was having a deadly condition, then 2 days later a huge earthquake happened under that very sea. The shaking reflex is kind of an earthquake of the human (or animals) to come back to a homoestatis, just as the Earth doing the same - releasing pent-up energy through an earthquake. So by now, I have already befriended the wisdom of shaking. I had a-ha moments about it when I joined a TRE group and learnt about its history, mechanism, application etc. That was an earthquake support group after the deadly earthquakes in the South-East Turkey (years after the one in Izmir). I happened to be in Istanbul visiting a beloved friend from uni, her being an assistant of TRE then. Finally, I understood what I instinctively knew all along. Now, I remember feeling a bit dissociated afterwards then (those sessions were LONG…), which I didn’t experience this time around with the sessions at SRH.

It was interesting to see how our bodies activate and contain the shakings so uniquely different from each other. For me, I get it more sustainable / continuous once I close my legs much more closer towards each other, and open and close in that small range of motion. One session I can’t forget is when I suddenly got a very intense, sharp pain on my stomach. It was super random, I didn’t have anything like it ever. I let myself stay there, since I felt it was probably psychosomatic. No memory or anything, just this incredible pain, my hands holding and caressing my belly… Coming out of the session, the pain didn’t persist that day. Then it came up in waves in the following weeks. Still don’t know what it was all about, but I trust that it was a release of some sort.

I have to say that it wasn't super comfortable for me to have my eyes open and see people around me shaking, making random sounds. Somehow I needed more space to just be by myself and with my process, and it felt like all of us together was bit too much to hold in a room, especially others made noises/sounds. I'd have appreciated a darker atmosphere too. In the end, these sessions helped me integrate TRE into my routine. My body got used to it and I even got belly shakes when practicing at home. It just seems important to know when to stop; one can get carried away by shaking, losing the sense of time and intensify the experience unnecessarily, needing to orient and ground more in the end...

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Now, this was a wish I shared with Fabian at the end of last year, when he was collecting our wishes for this year. I wanted to connect with other DMTs from other countries. We are such a small bunch in a still-niche profession. I wanted to know how they were doing in their trainings, where other countries were at in the DMT field. Our shared experiences, differences... These meetings served for exactly that and I am very grateful for them. I also realized how our needs and wishes for the field had a lot in common. In the 2nd meeting, feeling this community and seeing videos of others campuses, them talking about their programs felt heartwarming and personal.

In fact, something out of the ordinary happened in the first meeting when were put in separate group rooms randomly. We shortly introduced ourselves, discussed about our wishes for the future of DMT. Asked each other questions. As soon as the students studying in Barcelona saw my name, there said: ''Wait!!! We have a classmate whose name is İdil too. She is from Turkey. You should meet.'' In that short moment, they sent me her number. Then we started talking over phone. She was also from İzmir. Also did a master's in Germany before moving to Spain for the DMT master's. Just as I was planning to move to Spain afterwards. Had questions about it. (No, I am not doing a second master's, haha) She was the perfect person to talk to. We had so much in common that we even joked about living parallel lives :D Soon, we will meet in İzmir when we each visit our families there. We are excited to implement future projects together. I love how these meetings got me in contact with her. She also has two classmates who live in the area where I plan to move, so I really feel happy about these connections. Sharing our DMT master's experiences also gave us both new perspectives and insights. I am also happy that we have whatsapp groups with other colleagues now; I hope it will help us stay connected over the globe. Moreover, I joined another group of Turkish graduates of DMT and MT, who moved back to Turkey. It feels supporting to have all these contacts. Thanks to present day technology, it's easier to stay in contact.

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Music was absolutely central. Of course, it's the whole cultural package. The way it created sync between us added something vibrant to the whole experience. Still, I must say… after a while, something about the music started to feel forced to me; like a cheerfulness imposed by the rhythm. Perhaps, it was just too long of a workshop, but the constant “bounce and smile” drained me at some points. Not smiling but bouncing felt strange, because the music and people around were screaming a norm to stay joyful. And yet, something surprising happened: I felt grounded at the end. Like, VERY grounded. I used to think this kind of movement (bouncing) was all about lightness and air, but that day it rooted me deeply. Just as the name suggested, yet I didn't expect much from it going in. That contrast really stayed with me. Kind of whispered in my ear: Ground deep, so that you bounce higher! With momentum. Still though, I didn't feel like smiling anymore, my face muscles needed rest. :)

I did feel rooted after the session, more than I expected. Later, I started wondering whether this feeling had something to do with the roots of jazz itself.

Jazz was born out of the African American experience; people who were violently uprooted, displaced and dehumanized. And yet, they created an entire music and movement culture that reclaims joy, rhythm and connection. Could this form of dance be a way to find roots again, through the body and rhythm? A kind of re-rooting by repeatedly pushing on the ground? I was reminded of flamenco too, where many dancers come from historically marginalized groups like gypsies, who traditionally did not settle down.

There, the stomping and powerful footwork feels like a claim to space as if saying ''I exist, I take up space, I make sound. Deal with it''. In jazz, it’s more subtle, more fluid. For me, it feels more airy. It often feels joyful; yet perhaps, even that joy is a form of resistance. I now wonder if some of that grounding I felt was a resonance with this deeper cultural memory. Even if I didn’t consciously think about it in the moment, maybe my body was resonating with it. After all, all of my grandparents have a more recent immigration history, and even we Turkic people in general were nomadic for most of history. So I think there is a part of me which still resonates with that. That goes deep in our epigenetics, most probably.

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The part about shape was definitely my favorite (geometry has always been my favorite subject, maybe that’s why!). It sparked a lot of creativity and gave me new tools to improvise and expand my movement repertoire. Working with space was also super inspiring. I could totally see the therapeutic potential in this structure; it invites openness without prescribing anything. Even the names of the View Points are already like movement invitations. Then we tied everything together, practicing and embodying how these improvisations can be applied in DMT. That really helped us translate the earlier physical explorations into actual DMT interventions. I remember leaving the room thinking: “I’m so glad I didn’t miss this.” I had a sense that this knowledge was going to be essential down the road.

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Nervous System Repair Foundation Course Seminars

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Nervous System Repair Foundation Course Seminars

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This has been a long and transformative journey. Not just personally but also very much professionally.

I don't remember being explained the mechanism behind some orientation instructions we have been using in warm ups in DMT sessions. For example the 5-4-3-2-1 technique. How many times we have used this in mock-up sessions, while no one knows why exactly this works, and it seems like the only way to do it, like I don't remember any other orienting instruction we learnt. In this course though, I learnt the mechanism behind it - proprioception helps orient and ground us in the present. Now I can make up tens of different exercises for this purpose. I have put them in practice in various sessions as well, especially on our DMT practice group and one-on-one intervision sessions. For example, ''With a slow gaze, start counting white objects and surfaces around you in the room''. ''You may move your head very slowly to look around too''. Or... ''With a slow gaze, count objects around you which have a texture. ...now, which was your favorite object? Why is that? Did it get sunlight, did it look soft? Was it in your favorite corner of the room?'' All these kinds of instructions I've experienced myself and seen how they helped clients in DMT sessions I led.

Throughout this course, I was also able to listen to other participants' experiences with pendulation exercises, identifying and working with internal and external resources, how to integrate movement into pendulation and how important it was to titrate back to the resource as soon as the system shows more-than-wanted activations. I literally learnt a new language and very valuable tools with this course. Two topics stood out to me where I had big a-ha moments:

1- Feelings are not only the generic ones like happiness, sadness, anger, grief, ... that we are used to hearing. When we ask how someone feels, they tend to respond with these generic ones. However, body sensations give us much more nuanced answers filled with body memory, associations of former memories etc. It is so vast, there is no end to it. So, the trainer told us again and again: Sensations are ALSO feelings. Do not think your feelings are limited to those words and categories alone. Free yourself from needing to categorize. Some feelings do not have a word, they have a sensation worth exploring. This was a big shift for my understanding. In DMT, we do listen to the bodies, notice small shifts and movements. But still, communicating this to clients, especially in 1:1 settings can be really helpful. In Turkish, in particular, when we ask how someone feels, it doesn't quite make room for them to express body sensation in response. When the client tries to find an emotion, they literally get their mind involved in the process of feeling. That is not something we want, unless it is needed to make sense of a feeling more cognitively, when they already processed and expressed the emotion through the body.

2- Listening to participants' experiences of S.E. exercises, how they tend to express and describe... I realized that most people have a learnt tendency to try to make sense of bodily experience with the mind. The mind wants to analyze endlessly, feels like the body experience has to obey a rule, ''be normal'', ''be as expected'', so that the mind feels safe about being able to control it. How sad is that... I noticed how this learnt tendency causes so much suffering, disconnects us from the wisdom of the body. Sometimes, it may also serve as a protective system, when it would be too overwhelming to sense the body and let it take lead. Also, I learnt how to work with bodily pain and other psychosomatic symptoms. How to release emotions through the body in a safe and slow way.

All in all, this training made a huge shift in my understanding of working with the body and the wide range of ways that people experience working with the body. Body, mind, feelings, movement, sensations, releasing tension, being compassionate and slow, proprioception, interception, vestibular system, evoking imagery and body memory... There are so many topics which have been explored in an experiential and scientific way in this training that I am very grateful to have joined it before starting my DMT practice.

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For the first time, I experienced how humming ''freed'' my voice, so to say. I was singing one day. Then added my humming exercise spontaneously after it. Went back to singing; something shifted. My vocal cords were activated, all my chest and throat were vibrating and my voice got so beautiful, so soothing, so effortless, so from the heart, just pure angelic. This is how I felt. I like singing by myself from time to time, but never felt this kind of activation and ''sureness'' in it. From that day on, I understood how it really related to impathy.

Funny enough, that same week, just a few days later, we had an inter therapy meeting. One MT student was playing the patient, joining a DMT session. In that, she mentioned feeling like her voice wasn't coming directly from the chest/heart area, like it was getting stuck in the throat by an invisible line. I was about to cry from joy in that moment, as I just experienced something so profound about this very connection. Now, I still continue this humming exercise from time to time. Sometimes I close my ears, sometimes not. Depending on how much I want to orient towards my internal landscape versus outside experience and environment. It is so beautiful to sing afterwards, my voice feels more and more rooted and heart-centered.

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Tuning into the language of my spine, then another's spine... That was a unique experience. How does my spine talk? What does it want to convey to another? How can two spines talk? It was interesting to me that I chose to partner up with two people and the two experiences were the very opposite. The first girl was someone I felt drawn to, felt like my body wanted to be close to her. The experience confirmed my intuition about her; we were in synch, it was easy to let her listen to my body. I almost felt like she was doing reiki on me, seeing purple flames while I was lying down. She knew exactly where I wanted to be touched and how. Touching her was also comfortable and grounding.

Now, the interesting thing is that I chose the second girl because I felt annoyed by her without even knowing her, or ever talking to her one on one. I knew I was put off by her in some way. But somehow I felt like partnering up with her just because of that strong reaction in me. Just to see, why? Needless to say, it was super uncomfortable even when she was holding space, listening to my spine. My spine just got crazy, was not comfortable at all and it showed! Listening to her was also not easy afterwards, like I just wished all of that to be done. Such a profoundly different experience; it almost felt like we were not communicating to understand, but more like fighting with the discomfort we both felt. It taught me to listen to my body, not push myself to the point of crisis. We just don't vibe with some people, and it's OK. Now, if I needed to see her more, it would be better to slowly push our limits and listen closely. Not in a short workshop though...

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These sessions really made me contemplate on leadership styles and group dynamics. Coming together and separating. Being in the group, of the group vs. going into one's own space and tuning into the internal experience. How the group dynamic affects individuals, and even directs it. Who am I in this dynamic? How much should I validate and follow individual impulses vs. group impulses? It can get quite complex when 4 people feel like being in their own space and movement, while 3 others really want to connect with others in a more intimate way. I also observed how all these change from day to day, moment to moment. There appears a need to somehow accompany differing needs and still keep a group session wholesome. This year, I had experiences of leading more from a directive space, and a non-directive space. I have been trying to find a balance between these, while also reading the room at the same time. I saw that some of my peers are more comfortable with more rules, direction and order; otherwise they feel unsafe and even try to ''get away with it'', start to play with boundaries. While others feel more comfortable with more personal agency, less hierarchy. So, this was really interesting to observe and experience throughout our sessions.

In a patient role, I tend to be more comfortable when I feel free to explore, not be met with many rules by the therapist. Because then the therapist starts to feel like a teacher to me, which may be fine at times if the therapeutic aim and client needs require that. But once I go in a session to lead with a directive attitude, I can't help but feel like a teacher. Perhaps that is my own dilemma. In our discussions after sessions, these themes have come forefront for me.

I know that some of us have a background in teaching. Now that I look back at my background in teaching yoga; it also shifted a lot over years. At first, I was trained to be more directive (ashtanga yoga, of course...), leaving less room for personal needs, even though posture variations were welcomed. At the time, that style served me as a student and teacher. It was somehow easier to follow order and contain a rule-based role. However, as I got more involved with somatics, Feldenkrais, then trauma-informed yoga; the whole role of a student and teacher shifted in me. Now, I couldn't fit everyone in the same box. There was more room for personal needs and exploration. The student was their own best teacher, not me teaching. So, now I see how this background and the shift I experiencing even within the teacher role carried over to DMT. Also, how my peers arrived with a more directive, rule-based approach to teaching, therefore carrying that over to DMT. So I have been contamplating on these approaches and finding a sweet spot, a balance. Overall, these sessions have been highly teaching for me.

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Entrepeunership Workshop for MT and DMTs

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Entrepeunership Workshop for MT and DMTs

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It is certainly important to consider and design a business from A to Z. Have the right vision, mission, tools, planning, support system, logistics, etc. Learning this kind of a systematic planning of a business was valuable for me. It definitely helps ease the process and make details easier to manage when you can see the bigger picture. It also helps keep you vision oriented towards clients, not lose touch with how a business shows up in the world, not just to yourself. Because we can get a tunnel vision after a while once we are involved in our own projects. Lose sight of the bigger picture or the outside perceptions.

But... it seemed quite unreasonable and unpractical to me when Dr. Wasner made a monthly income calculation. She literally assumed that we would work full time (40 hours a week) with 1:1 and groups, almost all of these hours spent conducting sessions with clients. Then she ended up with around 8000 euros a month. That seemed like a very hypothetical calculation to me. As if we have no session preparation, planning, advertising, social media management, logistics, making agreements with clinics and studios, tech tools, finding clients yourself, taking breaks etc. I almost laughed at this kind of mindset. Then realized that she is trained as a physiotherapist, not a CAT. Perhaps that is why she had a different idea.

I told myself: Don't work harder, work smarter. I truly believe this is the mindset needed for today's entrepreneurship. We live in a technological world now, cannot trade all our time for money and work the old way. It doesn't help our clients either if we fill all our time of day and don't have free time to rest and have a life outside our work. We can only care for others if we have the capacity to care for ourselves first. I imagine this with an image: adding water in a glass, glass being our fuel, the more we add, it spills over to the others naturally.

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OK, I have to admit: I realized that I missed the aftermath of contemporary dance classes: that glow-up, that lightness of being. Sure, it is much more structured and there was a pressure to perform, to do the movements right as soon as possible. My knee was hurting, swollen from an old injury, trying to get my attention. I wish I had a knee band with me, but found ways to lessen its direct contact with the floor. The thing is, I thought there was something to dance classes, the feeling of having choreography and repeating it all together, mastering it. Your focus has to be there, with every move, every slight nuances of movement. Be aware of your space, dimensions, etc.

I realized again looking from a nervous system point of view; the focus got more on proprioception rather than interception. And that may be effective for certain populations. So my take away from this experience was great for my development as a DMT. But I have to express that the stress level questionnaire did not feel appropriate; because our stress levels at the time got highly affected by our workload at uni. Couldn't properly measure the effect of the sessions we participated in. At least that was what I observed from myself and other participants, while we were filling the questionnaires.

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Imagine Forest. (n.d.). The Hero’s Journey: 12 stages explained [Illustration]. Imagine Forest. Retrieved from https://www.imagineforest.com/blog/heros-journey/ 

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I first heard about this analogy in a screenwriting class I joined in my bachelor's. It helps write beautiful stories, and see our life journeys from a new lens. I felt called to name this padlet with it, not questioning the why and how. Funny, I didn't even remember every detail of it; it came out of a distant memory, just in time for this work. The link on the reference has a nice text on this analogy too. Just dropping this here to come back later and see how it resonates with my journey of becoming a DMT.