Catharsis Through Movement, Performance, and Storytelling

Photo by Michaela Pospíšilová Král

Recently, I spent a weekend at a rehearsal creative retreat with an inspiring group of women from the collective Mothers Artlovers. I joined this collective a few months ago, and we are currently preparing a performance that we will present in Poland at the end of June.

What unfolded during those days in nature became much more than rehearsal. It became a space of remembrance, and release.

Stories Women Carry Inside Their Bodies

Our rehearsals moved between conversation, movement, improvisation, singing lullabies, storytelling, and experimenting with large fabrics that transformed into symbolic extensions of our bodies. As often happens in creative processes, something magical slowly began to emerge.

Without forcing it, we entered cathartic experiences that opened for me new ways of seeing ourselves, motherhood, womanhood, and one another.

A central part of our work involved sharing stories with each other. Long conversations stretched into the evenings and slowly translated themselves into movement and performance.

One recurring theme that surfaced again and again was social conditioning, especially around anger, shame, and the ways women are often taught from a young age not to fully express certain emotions.

Shame, in particular, revealed itself as a powerful undercurrent.

One of the stories I shared touched deeply on this feeling. Out of respect for the privacy of my son and my partner, I will not share the details publicly. But I can say that it was connected to motherhood, partnership, sexuality, and the invisible weight many women carry after growing up in patriarchal societies shaped by misogyny and gender-based violence.

It was not the story itself, but rather what the story revealed. I hold it here more as a metaphor, a doorway into questioning why shame can still live so deeply inside some of us.

What stayed with me after sharing was not the event itself, but the emotional residue surrounding it. The inherited feeling of shame that can emerge from our experiences, our bodies, our desires, our motherhood, and the ways society has taught many women to perceive themselves. It made me wonder how deeply these emotions become internalized over generations. How even when we consciously reject certain narratives, traces of them can still echo somewhere within us.

And perhaps healing begins exactly in that noticing.

Not in judging ourselves for still carrying shame, but in asking where it came from, whose voice it once belonged to, and whether it still deserves space inside our bodies.

Healing Through Collective Storytelling

For me, healing often comes through listening.

Listening to the stories of other mothers, other women, other humans moving through their own complexities and wounds. Hearing how others navigate shame, intimacy, identity, desire, and societal expectations reminds me that none of us carry these burdens alone.

There was something profoundly healing about being witnessed in nature while also witnessing others.

During our rehearsal, I felt invited to meet my own stories with more gentleness and honesty. To listen not only to the pain inside them, but also to the messages hidden beneath the shame, the places where healing still longs to happen.

Catharsis Through Movement and Performance

As our bodies moved together through fabric, sound, and improvisation, the experience became increasingly visceral and cathartic.

At one point, we circled with long umbilical-cord-like fabrics swinging powerfully above our heads. It felt ancient, and raw. A collective scream without words.

In that movement, I felt grief, rage, liberation, tenderness, and strength intertwining.

It felt like an embodied refusal of patriarchal narratives. A releasing of inherited shame. A reclaiming of voice, body, and instinct.

Like a storm that had needed to arrive for a very long time.

And sometimes, somewhere between lullabies, tears, shared stories, and bodies moving freely beneath open skies, I slowly find my way back to forgotten parts of myself.