Clare Luiten

For this very first entry, I was delighted to talk with Clare Luiten of Fluid and Bones in Auckland, Aotearoa (New Zealand). Clare is a Somatic Integration and Craniosacral Therapist who has a rich and extensive movement career both as a dancer and teacher of Somatics; and recovery processes. As part of my study I have had the opportunity to witness Clare's practice, and following this couldn't wait to learn more about her work. Here she shared with me some of the questions that arise within, and shape, her work.

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As a starting place, I asked Clare to take us back to where it all started, by telling us a bit about her childhood…

I grew up in Kaitāia which is right at the top of the North Island, in the middle of nowhere and I had quite elderly parents. I was the youngest of 13 children, two died, so they already had 14 children before me.

My dad probably had me when he was 50 and my mum when she was 43, so from when I was two to four years old, they packed us all in a van and took us around the world for a couple of years.

When we came back to New Zealand, we settled in Kaitāia which is this tiny town. We were out in the sticks, and we grew up there in a little farm with 20 sheep, 10 cows, ducks and chickens. I would love to go back to rural living, but it has not worked out that way!

And, so, tell me a little bit more about when movement became an important part of your own life, did that begin in childhood?

I nagged and nagged my parents to let me go to dancing. Of course, you can imagine with so many children there probably wasn’t the money to send anyone to anything much.  But they let me go and the only thing around at the time was ballet and I did ballet all my childhood.

Then I moved to Auckland and saw a contemporary choreography by Douglas Wright, the work was called Forever. Douglas Wright is a very famous New Zealand choreographer who made pertinent works at the time, and this was all about AIDS, in the 80’s, early 90’s. I was like “WOW!! THIS is what I want to do!!”

Then I went to School of Dance for 2.5 years and then to London Contemporary Dance for 6 months until I ran out of money. I then started freelancing as a dancer over there for about 7 years and then I came back and was sick of being broke (laugh)... So, I took Pilatestraining, but it never sat that well with me.

There are aspects of Pilates I still use and there are aspects of it that do sit well, but it was more my delving into the questions of, "What does this feel like for me? When I roll on the floor how does it feel? I need way more time. I need way more spaciousness around this movement.”

I was also working out how to teach things to people that had no movement or dance background, stuff that I took for granted. I really worked out out that I had to wind back the clock loads, in terms of the language I was using. I realised I needed to give them images, explain to them really slowly how they are doing it; what they are trying to feel, why it’s important. That is what I became really interested in.

I could also see in people what wasn’t functioning in them without necessarily having the training yet. It was really obvious to me “you just really need to go here” or “you really need to feel this bit”.  It was visceral for me, and I knew it in my body. Now I know it on a cognitive, logical, anatomical level, but I knew it before I had that cognitive knowledge.

That has been some of the journey – understanding on an intellectual level, what I already knew on a bodily level.

How did you transition that journey? You seem to have such a vast knowledge of anatomy and you use that in your movement practice. Did that happen through the study of craniosacral therapy?

The craniosacral therapy is quite new, I only qualified at the end of last year. It has been a real widener as well, because before, it was much more on a musculoskeletal level, and now it has just dropped me into everything else; the links between the emotional and mental places and how that all syncs up with the physiology. That [knowledge] changed my practice radically again.

I have this dance practitioner I team up with on a regular basis and we both work with contact improv and have been delving into the form of deep listening. What it is we are interested in is being with the fluidity of the body and how can you be with someone else’s fluidity. 

Craniosacral therapy works a lot with resonance and vibration - being in resonance with people. So that all moulds together.

It’s just questions that continually arise for me, within my own practice.

Even teaching the therapy work in the diploma, I don’t want to just teach stuff. I question, how do we make it more interactive? How do we work with stuff that one or two of you is actually dealing with? As a group, how do we resonate with that?

How do we be with what someone else is struggling with and experience what they might be going through, so you can empathetically resonate with that person and work to solve it? 

It is an ongoing inquiry … How to be more with people, not just in language.

How did you get introduced to Craniosacral Therapy, or when did it become an interest for you?

It was before I had my first child. I went to a cranial osteo, and I remember coming out of one of the sessions going “I thought this was osteopathy, not exorcism!” (laughs). I was running a Pilates studio at the time and we were doing swaps: two of the Osteos came for Pilates lessons and we would have osteo treatments. Then I had a friend who said, “I have just trained in this Craniosacral Therapy, would you like to have a try” and I was like “Yep!”

That first session was like, "Wow, that is different again, that has muchmore of a sense of being held." With the Osteo it was half an hour, in-out, and you didn’t feel particularly held, whereas with the cranial it I felt like I could relax deeply. I still didn’t grasp it fully at that time. I was young, immature, mid-thirties and I was not totally with it. I sensed it on some levels but not on others. Again, I was just really curious.

I almost went to do the training about 10 years ago, but it didn’t feel right at the time – I couldn’t find the right teacher. I put it off for a while and when I did get into the training, it really forced me to deal with my own trauma on a whole new level.

One of my good friends is studying Craniosacral Therapy and she switches between being confident one moment and becoming really frazzled about trying to articulate it at other times. She’s in the learning phase (first year), so I guess she’s trying to sit in the discomfort of not having the language or words…

That comes… I’m now doing sessions and when I know something is happening and I just have faith. It works because we are resonantbeings. It the most incredibly beautiful practice, I love it.

I think also because it has profound healing capacity, which I never managed to achieve just through movement practices. I love that capacity; that you can make fundamental lifechanging things happen for people.

When you talked before about dance, you talked about your resonance with the slowness of pace and again in Craniosacral Therapy you talked about how that pace felt right for you. Has that driven some of your choices and where might that come from?

I used to be the wham bam super physical dancer and it just came from that process of really delving into movement. Recognising that the more interior that you go, the larger you become. There are almost infinite amounts of space inside you; compared to whatever you can do externally. 

It probably came with age as well – I had several injuries which probably prevented me from wanting to keep pushing myself in a physically hard way.

There was also something about how you got treated within the dance world and the expectations – it’s a hard world.  It’s not like people are holding you as your human self as you are moving through the world as a performer. It’s hard to get work, it’s hard to earn money and you get these highs in it.

Once I had been working for the Opera in Convent Garden in London, it was fantastic – 3000 people in the audience, doing these amazing shows. And then it finished. The next week I had this shitty job for 6 pound an hour as a telemarketer and I was like, “this is too hard!”

Whereas, within this work, there is always people who need it and there is always more to delve into. The learning never stops.

You must have a wide range of clients, but if you had to describe your client base…

I’m starting to realise that I enjoying working with people that are on their own journey and who are connected to their health practices; who are honest with where they are at and have already dealt with a lot of their trauma or know that it exists. Then they are really there for themselves. They are not expecting you to fix them, you just facilitate their journey and they are taking full responsibility for themselves. I really appreciate that.

They are using your support and they are not dropping themselves off and expecting you to do all the work somehow. They are really invested in themselves and that’s quite a beautiful thing.

I have a preference for working with women and for that reason. A lot of the time [clients] are coming later, coming towards 40-50 where the wheels are starting to fall off—usually the women recognise that the wheels are falling off much earlier and are taking steps towards it. 

I really want to work with people that are aligned with the work; I don’t want to fight it, I don’t want to have to sell it. The people that are doing the work and the ones that really benefit from it. 

I’m really fascinated when I do classes with you of your deep knowledge of anatomy, because it’s an extra layer to any of your meditations and exercises. You give us, the class, this visceral experience of bones and blood and muscle. How did you develop that knowledge? 

Yeah, it happened over time and different experiences and working with different people. I spent two years working with a woman who did her PhD on fascia. We did an entire performance on a mega piece of land all based on fascia!

Another woman that I work with is really into Chinese Medicine so just over time that knowledge has developed. I do also have anatomy books lying around all the time and am constantly re-reading them.

I connected with Gill Hedley, who is an anatomist and dissector, and he has a website where you pay and you see the live bodies in 3D, not a 2D picture. You see the kidneys and they are surrounded in this big fat ball and the adrenal gland that sits on top of the kidneys. The kidneys are often painted on as a little nub on a 2D drawing, but, you see it meshes in and is continuous with all the fat. You start to get a real visceral sense of what is inside your own body.

If you move your body with that awareness you question, “where is the blood supply?” And you start to build up an internal picture.  If you start to cross reference that with Chinese Medicine and meridian pathways, you start to think, “what are kidneys for?” Kidneys are ancestral and are about rest and rejuvenation. Then you go, “well people die when they have kidney disease because they don’t have the rest and rejuvenation.”  

So, you're just picking bits of information from all different modalities and sensing, "how does sits within me as a collective whole, not necessarily following one modality?" As a mover I ask, “how does it sit?” and “how do I feel?” and “how do I translate it?” Then if I move with all the information I ask, “what’s the effect on my body?”

You can work with all the cranial nerves and their relationship with the vagus by playing with the tongue and the eyes and the jaw. Then you realise “I’m feeling really relaxed”, just because you’re paying attention to these parts. When you really focus in and you have this awareness, you don’t always have to move that much to become deeply self-connected.

I also did a Zen Thai Shiatsu training, which I forgot to say…

Can you tell everyone a bit about what you offer at the moment?

Mostly I work one-on-one. Either movement therapy, which I call Somatic Integration, or Craniosacral. 

I also run Whānui Moves which is a collaboration with my colleague Rachael [Ruckstuhl-Mann]. We do one-day contact improv workshops or somatic weekend camps. These are more movement based than therapy based. It’s a family friendly event, with a community of between 30-50 people. It would be good to do little workshops in the future, but I’m pretty full at the moment!