On Wednesday, I had a class at a women's shelter to remain anonymous. I have taught there for almost two years. I hadn't been there in a while, due to scheduling issues. The director is amazing. I love watching her teach mothers how to take care of their infants and toddlers. Many of the children attend this class with their moms, and we find creative ways to incorporate them, but it's a challenge.

It's the second time I have been able to get them to lie on the floor. Sometimes a homeless women won't lie down, because it frightens them to lie down on the ground; it reminds them of a horrible memory. Sometimes it's because they are so weary, and are in a level of pain where they feel like they cannot get up off of the ground; they don't want to put themselves there and then feel embarrassed because they cannot get up. Usually I am teaching this movement therapy class with the homeless women seated in chairs, around a table, with kids swaddled in blankets being passed around the circle.

But then, I have worked with businessmen, scientists, secretaries, that cannot feel the ground underneath them. And I cannot say they were any saner, but I can say they had health insurance, a gym membership, and weren't too worried about where they were going to sleep. I have actually found that clients in recovery take to the work like a duck to water, much more so that someone who is a low-level, functional addict. Their recovery rate is ten times faster, they are much more open to accept neuromuscular changes in their bodies, and the relief they feel is most welcome and nonthreatening. They also are like sponges when it comes to absorbing information about their bodies, asking many questions of me.

Shelters kick people out as a form of punishment, even those that help teenagers. If they find a homeless person being too unruly, the shelters also punish them in varying levels of severity; indoor confinement, single-day suspensions, and suspensions that can last months. This is for the protection of the other clients, and I don't blame them for feeling like doing it, but it makes our work so much more important and necessary. There isn't a home anywhere for them. A major factor in the recuperation of an addict is re-assimilation, re-acculturation into the world. There is a whole societal indoctrination in the world of drugs and prostitution that needs to be unraveled, and the physical relationship to the drugs and the life as it relates to identity needs to be confronted and identitified, as a single gesture has the power to set of a memory association to the drug, and encourage a relapse even years after recovery. The homeless, whether or not they are addicts, need to re-learn how to function in order to join us in a different function.

In the case of many homeless teenagers, they just need to learn how to function period, on the most rudimentary level. They sometimes need to learn how to bathe themselves, because nobody bothered to teach them. Nobody cared. They went from foster home to group home without anybody noticing them. This knowledge has made me look differently at an unkept homeless person on the street. It is quite possible that nobody ever taught him how to take care of himself.

All of this is why our work is really, REALLY important. Nurturing the shelter community is just as important as the physical healing element of the movement therapy, the knowledge and training through the discussions about their bodies, their eating habits, and how to take care of themselves, or the individual expressivity and communication elements with the musical instruments and the dance. It's all about interrelating the body to the self in the world, and it's all important. Our work, I think, is most powerful when the different elements are joined together so that they relate to each other.