Can flying with a friend help you heal? Results from our pilot study.

This article highlights empirical evidence for the effectiveness of Acroyoga, as studied in an 8-week Dance Movement Therapy (DMT)-infused Acroyoga program conducted by Skylar Ong Si Qi, a registered Dance Movement Therapist and Certified Acroyoga Instructor.

The research is a collaborative effort between Skylar Ong¹ and two other esteemed practitioners and researchers: Paula Lebre² and Simea Schoenenberger-Howie³.

¹ BA Psychology, National University of Singapore; Certified Dance Therapist, Dance Therapy New Zealand

² Instituto de Etnomusicologia, Centro de Estudos em Música e Dança (INET-md), Faculdade de Motricidade Humana, Universidade de Lisboa, Portugal

³ MA Dance Movement Therapy; MA Music Therapy, Scotland

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At Move & Mend, we've always believed that connection — to your own body, and to the people around you — is something you can build through movement. This year, that belief got put to the test.

Together with Dr. Paula Lebre (Professor at Universidade de Lisboa) and Simea Schoenenberger-Howie (Dance/Movement & Music Therapist), we ran a pilot study on Mindful Movement, an 8-week program that weaves Acroyoga into a Dance Movement Therapy (DMT) framework. The participants were adolescent girls and young women, aged 15–21, living in residential care due to a variety of adverse childhood experiences — many of them navigating their own histories of anxiety, disrupted trust, or difficulty feeling at home in their bodies.

Our main curiosity was this - Can an approach built on trust, partner support, and playful physical challenge move the needle on how these young people feel — about their bodies, their lives, and each other? This was particularly a controversial topic given the 'touch taboo' in Singapore - where touch between participants are regarded as highly sensitive, difficult to control, with potentially detrimental impact on youths, especially those with trauma history. Most schools and welfare organisation, even youths themselves, shy away from touch-based interventions to avoid any potential re-traumatisation.

Nonetheless, given our trauma-informed lens, we understood how touch can play a central role in healing relationships, even with strangers. We hence tested our approach by leaning into the therapeutic lens of dance movement therapy (DMT), borrowing its elements of containment into an acroyoga-focused program.

The Intervention

We termed the program 'Mindful Movement', which runs for eight weekly one-hour sessions. We are conducting its 6th run currently, but we collected data for 2 runs back in 2024. The key elements of this program include:

1. Dance Movement Therapy — mirroring, rhythm-based warm-ups, body awareness exercises, and psychoeducation that build safety and self-understanding.

2. Acroyoga-informed partner work — structured drills building toward a "peak pose" in each session, built around three rotating roles: the base (who supports), the flyer (who is supported), and the spotter (who watches over both). Everyone moves through all three roles over the course of the program, practicing what it feels like to hold someone up, to be held, and to watch out for others.

Every session ends with a short written reflection, where participants draw and write about what they felt, learned, and want to carry into the week ahead.

We measured change using a mixed-method approach: A standard quality-of-life questionnaire (KIDSCREEN-10) completed before and after the program, and session-by-session self-ratings on four things the program was designed to build — physical strength, enjoyment, coping with challenges, and give-and-take in relationships. We also thematically analyzed everyone's reflection logs.

Promising Results

Given the small sample size, our study had little power to achieve signficance. Nonetheless, we put it to the test to see how it matches up empirically. To our surprise, the results were very promising.

1. Quality of life improved, and energy jumped the most. Across the group, overall quality-of-life scores rose significantly from before to after the program — a large effect for an eight-week intervention. The single biggest gain was in perceived energy: participants reported feeling noticeably more energized by the end. They also reported doing more of what they wanted in their free time, and getting on better at school — suggesting the benefits didn't stay in the studio.

2. Enjoyment and coping with challenges rose too. In the first cohort we ran, participants' own ratings of "fun/pleasure/enjoyment" and "capacity to cope with challenges" both showed statistically meaningful increases from session 1 to session 8.

3. The written reflections told a fuller story. A few threads came up again and again:

   1. Enjoyment and play — by far the most common theme, participants described the sessions as fun, social, and something to look forward to.

   2. Physical mastery — pride in becoming a strong base, a confident flyer, or an attentive spotter. One participant wrote, "I'm a great base. I can do it!!!"

   3. Trust and communication — many linked trusting a partner mid-pose to trusting people in daily life: "Trust is important and is two-way. I will trust myself and my teachers that I can do well in school."

   4. Courage, persistence, and calm — participants wrote about pushing through fear, using breath to steady themselves, and not giving up: "You never try, you never know… applicable in our daily lives."

4. Taking a deeper look into the reflections over time, two individual stories were almost inspiring. One participant's drawings shifted over the weeks from a crying, tense face to a calmer one, alongside growing notes about knowing her own limits ("I can identify when my body is weak to base"). Another began the program frightened of flying and finished it drawing herself with wings, writing, "If you don't try, you never know. Don't hold back, be yourself."

Practical Implications

None of this proves that Acroyoga-infused DMT causes these changes; this was only a small pilot with no control group, so we're careful not to overstate it. But the pattern across the numbers and the reflections were consistent: when young people practice literally holding each other up, in a structured and emotionally safe container, something shifts — in how much energy they feel, how they handle setbacks, and how much they trust the people around them. Despite non-significant findings in some scales, the mean scores improved from post test across all measures; supporting further investigation pof the program with larger sample sizes and a more robust design.

There's also a quieter finding here worth naming: This study offers early evidence that safe, structured touch — often treated cautiously in institutional care settings — can be a meaningful part of emotional healing, rather than something to avoid.

Future Directions

We're continuing to refine Mindful Movement and are planning further research with larger groups, follow-up assessments, and more rigorous designs. If you're part of an organization working with youth, clinical populations, or anyone who could benefit from embodied, relationship-centered movement work, we'd love to talk about how this approach might fit into your setting.

The full paper, "Embodied Support and Relational Challenge: A Preliminary Study of an Acroyoga-Infused Dance Movement Therapy Approach," is in publication and will be available on request — reach out to us at sqasity@gmail.com.