AQUATIC THERAPY 

In the water all my skills come together….

presence, attuned touch, deep listening, prenatal awareness.

Allowing your nervous system to calm,

your body to relax,

your mind to empty,

your soul to emerge and dance more freely

Steph Hodgson is one of Liquid Listening’s experienced team of Aquatic Practitioners. Together with our music specialists, they deliver our Musical Hydrotherapy programmes to disabled children and adults, working with special needs and swimming teachers training them to understand deliver the practice.

Steph’s own pathway into Musical Hydrotherapy illustrates how the practice brings together elements of the different therapies she offers, creating an experience that is rooted in science, but also profoundly intuitive, each session evolving individually using the instinct of both practitioner and participant. Steph’s early career in A&E as a Nurse Practitioner ignited an interest in what she describes as “how we learn to survive experiences that are overwhelming, how we hold these experiences in our bodies.” Working in hospital with people experiencing trama taught her “how to be calm and grounded and present with people in distress.” Training in Craniosacral Therapy followed, together with elements of trauma training and Mindfulness-Based Psychotherapy, confirming Steph’s belief that practices that calm the nervous system can have a powerful and restorative impact that extends beyond the practitioner and participant into their wider environments. Steph continues her explorations in how we hold trauma in our bodies, how we might access this and begin to process it and recover and heal.

“We learn how to hold someone so that the holding doesn’t intrude upon them - so that they are not having to defend themselves from our touch”

After being inspired by watching a video of an Aquatic Therapist in action, Steph began to bring all the elements of her different trainings together into the water, and then she connected with Liquid Listening - helping to develop and teach trainings in Musical Hydrotherapy. Many trainings in aquatic work are more geared to what you “do” in the water, Watsu, physiotherapy. “The work we offer is very different to that, it is more about just “being” in the water with the person - with no agenda, meeting them where they are and holding them. When you are met in that way your nervous system can begin to relax deeply.” When Steph works with trainees to teach Musical Hydrotherapy, the foundations of the work are about teaching them how to be present and grounded with another person. Participants learn to hold, and to be held in the water, to experience the feeling of “being” and releasing tensions in their bodies. Having the experience of this first is important, before they offer sessions to the children or adults in the water.

“Water is miraculous for these children… this work is about finding that place where they can relax into you, where their system can relax into your holding”

This is particularly relevant to the children with complex disabilities, those with limited mobility outside the water, who much of Liquid Listening’s work focused on. “There are very few times of the day when the children are not being required to “do” something” Every moment, every movement, every interaction in their lives requires intervention, that they are essentially having to brace themselves for. This experience in the water is one place where they are not being asked to do anything. Steph notes that the children often arrive in the water “chair-shaped” and full of tensions, constrictions in their bodies. Being in the warm water in a hydrotherapy pool is a huge release and a freedom for them in itself, but we have found there is huge benefit in being “met” and held in this way. The practitioners feel the children’s nervous systems letting go, and entering a place of deep relaxation, which allows their bodies to release muscle spasms, deeply held tensions, emotions, overwhelm or trauma. It helps to reduce agitation, and the children often enter a state of deep calm.

“something amazing happens, every time, in every school”

Liquid Listening’s Musical Hydrotherapy training courses and residencies in special needs schools take place over 3-4 days, and typically involve a significant proportion of the schools teachers and pupils. The purpose of the training - and the practice - is to embed regular Musical Hydrotherapy sessions into the school curriculum, and to enable children with PMLD and autism to access its benefits on a regular (hopefully at least weekly) basis. Steph also feels the experience of being in residence over a few days, for teachers and children to experience sessions also has a profound impact. “ I am steeped in this work, in this world, but many teachers we work with will never have experienced anything like this before. So we are coming in and giving them a taste of it, an experience. The experiencing of the work is the important thing, and often, almost every time, something profound happens…. These teachers never stop, and this work is a deep ‘stopping,’ a deep learning….”

And Musical Hydrotherapy as a practice ? Steph puts it very simply:

“This is my favourite work, it is transformational.”

Gratitude to my teachers in this work

Hilary Austin (AquaticTherapy.co.uk)

and

Steve Karle (Poetry in Water)

for training and inspiration in this work.