The Dance of Critical Pedagogy & Expressive Arts
by Vivian Chávez, DrPH
San Francisco State University

It was my first day back to work after a yearlong sabbatical to study “Innovative
Teaching Methods in Public Health” and I was asked to present my scholarship to faculty and students at San Francisco State University. Heart beating, breath quickening, my body alerted me to the challenge: I could not simply present my research; I would have to embody it. Artfully paused –feet, legs and hips firmly grounded– connecting with everyone in the room through purposeful eye contact, I slowed my breathing. Standing with knees slightly bent, in a relaxed confident “stance,” I read from my personal mission statement:

I am a courageous compassionate woman concerned about the general disconnection within and between ourselves, the natural world and each other. I value relationships, creative expression, health and social justice. Culture matters to me. I belong to a global community in dignity and human rights. My service is education ~ my work, to facilitate peace through innovative teaching methods that bring the whole body into the classroom. My calling is movement ~ the goal, to unleash the transformative power of critical pedagogy and expressive arts in public health.

Innovative teaching methods in public health means advocating for a sensual
language and a practice of education that makes the classroom model the global community we want to be a part of. Thus, the voice and gestures accompanying this spoken word presentation intended to show, not just talk about, “embodied leadership.” I wanted my colleagues to see my values creatively connecting with the academic environment and in this way demonstrate how I have expanded my scholarship from critical pedagogy (Chavez et al 2005; Chavez & Soep, 2006) to movement based expressive arts. I wanted them to experience what happens when we move our bodies together, in community, for our own health and that of the planet.

Critical pedagogy emerges from a historical legacy of radical social thought and
progressive educational movement that links teaching to democratic principles and
transformative social action in the interest of oppressed communities (Darder, 2002, 2003; Shor and Freire,1993). It is the application of teaching strategies to change hierarchical relationships and establish a healthy setting that fosters open exchange of ideas in the classroom (Giroux, 1983, 1992; McLaren, 1989; hooks, 1994). Complimenting critical pedagogy with expressive arts is appealing because it can create a positive and productive learning experience for the future public health workforce. On a more personal note, movement based expressive arts keeps me healthy and happy as it engages with others, with myself and the environment.

Where is the body in the curriculum?
The seed for my sabbatical topic came a few years back when I taught Women’s
Health. In addition to adding a multicultural flavor to the course, I offered a 15 minute
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This article was published in the Newsletter of the International Expressive Arts Therappy Association,
Edition No.2, December 2009.
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“stretching” segment and required students to keep a “physical activity journal.” The response was phenomenal! Not surprisingly, SF State students appreciated a class with cultural relevancy; after all, our campus is one of the most diverse and progressive in the
nation. What impressed, however, was how quickly students embraced integrating in-class movement. Students commented that sadly, sometimes the only exercise done all week was the 15-minute stretch in class! This experience prompted me to revitalize a course titled, “Promoting Positive Health” with a kinesthetic awareness component. The course focused on college student’s health concerns: mental health, diet, body image, sexual relationships, smoking, alcohol, other drugs and violence. Further, given students tendency towards a sedentary lifestyle my class would have students learn about health beyond the textbook, through their bodies. In this way answering the question: “Where’s the body in the curriculum?” (Shapiro, 1990) and creating embodied health consciousness, an entirely new form of practice-based academics.

As a registered yoga teacher, my first impulse was to add a hatha yoga component to the existing curriculum. Yoga asanas (stretching poses) help develop awareness of the inner body and work towards balancing the body’s energy to create more physical and mental ease. Yoga is a complimentary alternative health method and ancient spiritual art/science, that integrates body, breath and mind. A national survey estimates that over 15 million Americans use yoga for both wellness and specific health conditions. (Saper et al, 2004). According to a nationwide government survey released December 2008, approximately 38% of U.S. adults aged 18 years and over use some form of Complimentary Alternative Medicine practices (Barnes et al 2008) and yoga is one of the approaches with significant increases between 2002 and 2007. Given yoga’s popularity and health relevance, I was inspired to build a curriculum around it, that is, until the room I was assigned to teach was the DANCE studio.

Learning I would be teaching in a dance studio awakened my cellular memory; I am a dancer and love the creative environment and potential of teaching health in a dance space. It was an opportunity to give students more movement choices, to introduce creativity and include world music in the curriculum. Remembering my passion for dance and the mixed feelings of joy and inadequacy that came from learning dance as performance I looked to Anna Halprin’s vision of dance as a healing and transformative practice. In turn, her work introduced me to the “psychokinetic process” connecting movement, drawing and writing to self-study. A. Halprin asks educators, “in trying to understand the messages our body is giving us, rather than analyzing or interpreting in a cognitive way participants make drawings of the images … connect these images to movements and feelings/emotions through dance.” (Halprin, 2000 p.26) Further, Anna emphasizes the multicultural element. Dance as a healing art is customary in most cultures worldwide where it is used in community building, ritual and celebration. Dance has a highly integrative nature as it engages all the senses through movement, and expression. Anna Halprin is a master teacher who views somatic movement-based education as a political act. As such, she has been a major contributor to the empowerment of people from all walks of life. She and her daughter, Daria Halprin founded the Tamalpa Institute, a non-profit internationally recognized school for movement-based expressive arts education and therapy the 70’s. Tamalpa calls their approach the life/art process; an approach that integrates movement/dance, visual arts, performance techniques and therapeutic practices. Tamalpa’s pedagogy is interactive, with a focus on “three levels of awareness:” (1) the body in movement offering sensation, (2) the mind brings imagination, and (3) the emotional level with feelings and connections to stories 3 hidden even from ourselves. Reading Anna and Daria Halprin’s books, taking classes and experiencing two weekend workshops, I was now ready to teach an embodied course in college health.

Promoting Positive Health

The intention of “Promoting Personal Health” is to introduce students to global perspectives on personal and community health as well as health inequality. Students identify effective strategies for wellness, including: the use of creative arts, physical activity, community building and healthy eating/drinking/consuming, etc. They critically analyze health through three levels of awareness (physical, emotional and mental), discuss sexual health, interpersonal boundaries, communication and relationship issues as well as learn to use expressive arts to heal conflicts and sickness born of oppressive attitudes and behaviors in us and among us. Students study violence as a public health issue and participate in nonviolence training. They practice effective cross-cultural communication skills and develop introductory level proficiency in the use of movement, drawing, collage, and creative writing. During the first 4 weeks of the semester students are introduced to broad health topics as well as creative tools for wellness. The next 8 weeks they explore specific personal health topics through body maps, collage, and community events. The last 3 weeks are organized around creativity and sustainability. Students work as teams to develop a showcase for promoting positive health. On average, this three-hour class follows the following sequence:
• somatic check-in ~ to become aware of the overall mood of the group.
• sensory awareness ~ to enter the body through personal and group movement.
• topic of the day ~ to explore health from a knowledge base.
• experiential learning ~ to make personal and global connections with the topic.
• embodied closure ~ yoga poses that integrate the material and bring self-reflection.

After teaching the course for three semesters I complied student’s thoughts, feelings and insights. Students say they have a better understanding of themselves and what it means to be healthy. “I’ve gained a lot of knowledge on health, stress managements skills and relationships. Most importantly reflecting on my own personal health is rewarding.” They point out the complexity involved in developing the “discipline to build my self-esteem, to practice yoga, creativity and focus on my health. I want to stay strong, I want to live.” It is rewarding to learn about the community building aspect of the course, “I think it feels more like a community here because of the way class discussions are, the way we sit in a circle facing each other. We also tend to share very personal stories within our group. I like that we have the opportunity to participate, or not, depending on how we are feeling. We are not forced to do anything that we do not want to do.” Furthermore, students commented on feeling safe: “Because of an acceptance towards each other, there is a willingness to listen and share.” “I feel that it is somewhat of an autonomous zone and safe place to be. I don’t feel judged here and I care about the other students in the class.” “Many people seem comfortable just moving and dancing, talking about relationships or body image and getting to know each other. There are so many friendly people here and I think these components create a stronger class bond.”

Embodied Pedagogy
Given the unprecedented success of the course Promoting Positive Health, when I learned that Tamalpa offered an extensive movement-based expressive arts training, I built my sabbatical around it and from April 2008-May 2009 I completed Levels 1 and 2 training.4 Tamalpa faculty and students provided a participatory learning environment that integrated theory and practice, honored diversity, and fostered embodied leadership, collaboration, critical thinking, and communication skills. Tamalpa’s philosophy that, “connecting with creativity what is inherent in each of us becomes possible” resonates strongly with Paolo Freire’s (1970, 1973) theory of emancipatory education, engaging students in identifying themes that elicit social and emotional involvement and therefore high-level motivation to participate. Freire insisted in education where students are working together and finding meaning about the range of subjects in their lives. He advocated against ‘banking education’ where the teacher makes 'deposits' in the student and opted for pedagogy infused in the arts and culture. In a similar way, Tamalpa training guides participants to access old understandings of health and the body with new innovative ways of relating to ourselves and each other that can increase community participation, personal transformation and social action.

In her book, The Expressive Body in Life, Art and Therapy, Daria Halprin (2003) underscores the relationship between the Life/Art process, community health and social justice. “We live in a world challenged by a widening gap between those with great resources and those with few. Conflict over economic education, racial and religious differences threaten our shared earth and humanity. With technological forms of communication and information increasing exponentially, and the ever-growing ecological waste of our precious national resources, we must ask ourselves how can we live differently(?)” (p. 230) D. Halprin suggests the interface of art and healing as a clue. “ When so much of our communication and learning occurs through computer technologies, disembodied living seems ever more inevitable. As our technological capacities grow, we are looking for ways to reconnect with our bodies, our creativity and our spirits.” (p.230) Echoing African American feminist health activist and writer Audre Lorde’s 1984 essay, “Poetry is Not a Luxury,” Daria affirms: “Art is as essential to our survival as food, shelter, medicine and the natural environment.” (p.230) The integration of body, movement, art and healing are part of an ethical criteria for a sustainable life.

Understanding the body’s intelligence to resist and mirror the social body makes embodied pedagogy the next frontier of education. Hui Wilcox(2009), a dancer, woman of color and professor of sociology, has written about embodied pedagogy, drawing attention to bodies as agents of knowledge production. She is developing a theoretical framework that connects embodied knowledge to lived experiences, performance, and bodily intelligence. Her research demonstrates qualitative evidence that embodied pedagogies foster a sense of
community and challenge Eurocentric and male-centered systems of knowledge production predicated upon the body/mind binary. She notes that in the civic arena, activists use embodied pedagogies to provide emotional access to science-based information, and to
mobilize for social change (Wilcox, 2009).

After my sabbatical year studying movement-based expressive arts, I bring to the classroom not only a set of tools for expanding the creative potential of each of my students, I bring cultural humility – through my own personal experience with the process. My role as a social activist comes most alive when I am teaching in the classroom and Tamalpa helped me to see the body as it intersects with questions of pedagogy, art and social change. The program taught me see my own body as a dancer and a teacher for who “teaching a subject is not the priority, the priority is to bring out the truth and beauty of each person, as well as in myself” (Otter, 2009). I learned to see Life as Art and art in the everyday and this perspective5 shapes a vision of myself in critical, creative and productive ways. Through this vision I can offer my colleagues and students in public health a bridge to an international network of inspired people bringing the arts into the world for growth, healing, communication and collaborative learning.

Post-script
January 2010, I started Level 3 training, a 9-month supervision course conducted online where Tamalpa alumni deepen the embodiment of the Halprin Life/Art Process professionally and personally. A central theme is the transition and translation of this work into life at home and specific professional environments. Looking forward to more and grateful for all the gifts. Please contact me with artful suggestions, tips and questions on the journey vchavez@sfsu.edu.

References
Barnes PM, Bloom B, Nahin R. CDC National Health Statistics Report #12. (2008).
Complementary and Alternative Medicine Use Among Adults and Children.
Chávez, V., Turalba R., and Malik, S. (2006) “Teaching Public Health Through a Pedagogy of Collegiality,” American Journal of Public Health, July 2006, Vol. 96, No.7.
Chávez, V. and Soep, L. (2005) “Youth Media and The Pedagogy of Collegiality,” Harvard Educational Review, Vol. 75 No.4.
Darder, A. (2002). Reinventing Paulo Freire. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
Darder, A., Baltodano, M., & Torres, R. (2003). The critical pedagogy reader. New York: Routledge Falmer.
Halprin, D. (2006) The Expressive Body in Life, Art and Therapy, Jessica Kingsley Publishers.
Halprin, A. (2000) Returning to Health with Dance, Movement and Imagery, LifeRhythm Press.
Freire P. (1970). Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York: Seabury Press.
Freire, P. (1973). Education for critical consciousness. New York: Seabury Press.
Giroux, H. A. (1992). Border crossings. New York: Routledge.
hooks, b. (1994). Teaching to transgress, New York: Routledge.
Saper, R., Eisenberg D., Davis R., Culpepper L., Phillips R,. (2004) Prevalence and patterns of adult yoga use in the United States: results of a national survey, Alternative Therapies in
Health and Medicine, Mar-April 10 (2) 20-21.
Shapiro, S. (1998) Pedagogy and the Politics of the Body, New York: Routledge.
McLaren, P. (2002). Life in schools: An introduction to critical pedagogy in the foundations of education. New York: Pearson Allyn & Bacon.
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Shore, I. (1993). Education is politics: Paulo Freire’s Critical Pedagogy. In P. McLaren and P.
Leonard, Paolo Freire: A Critical Encounter (25-35). New York: Routledge.
Wilcox, H. (2009) Embodied Ways of Knowing, Pedagogies, and Social Justice: Inclusive Science and
Beyond NWSA Journal - Volume 21, Number 2, pp. 104-120.
Otter, K. personal communication, February, 2009.
Lorde, A. (1984) “Poetry is Not a Luxury,” Sister Outsider, Crossing Press.

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Moving In New Ways
By Taira Restar

Samuel stands in front of his pastel drawing. He is coached, “Take a breath. Softly look at your drawing. When you are ready, begin to move your drawing. Choose a color, a shape, an image—what ever inspires you—as a starting point.” Samuel’s dance begins with concentration. His body mirrors circular shapes. He twists in place and circles the room. As he passes the seated witnesses, he lunges towards them. With a grin and direct eye contact, he interacts. Their laughter seems to fuel him. As his dance ends, he is once again with his drawing. His arms form a circle overhead.

15 people are seated for a Check-in Circle. Fiona is asked, “How are you feeling now? Would you show us with a movement, sound or words?”  Fiona scoots into the center of the circle. She relaxes into a fetal position with her face tucked out of sight. She lingers in stillness, taking her time. Suddenly she scrambles onto hands and knees and kicks her feet up into the air. She says, “My body is feeling tired and my heart is happy.”

After a somatic movement exploration of the spine, students are coached into an animal dance. Faolan transforms into a wolf. As a wolf, she is playful, fierce, fast, growling, howling and engaging with others. After the dance, Faolan draws her wolf and writes the qualities that she and her wolf share.

Bay, Mary and David are seasoned riders. On an overnight trail ride, the horses suddenly become spooked. The terrified horses cause instant chaos and potential danger. Bay yells, “Everybody take a deep breath!” All three riders center themselves through breathing. They are able to calm the horses and create safety.

What do Sam, Fiona, Faolan and Bay have in common? They are all children. They do not know the name Tamalpa Life/Art Process, but they have experienced it many times either as part of their school curriculum or in after school dance or art classes. The Tamalpa Life/Art Process is a movement-based multimodal expressive arts approach. It includes sensory awareness and somatic movement, non-stylized dance, visual art, improvisational performance, singing and sounding, creative writing and dialogue. It is equally suited for adults and children.

Fiona was only 3 ½ years old when she was able to express “How are you feeling now?” through movement and words. She was able to identify and articulate both the physical sensation of tiredness and the emotion of happiness. The daily Check-in Circle, which was facilitated in English and in Spanish, was one part of an emotional literacy program inspired by the Tamalpa approach.

Faolan, the youngest child in her family and in her dance class, discovered that she had much in common with her wolf. While she may be the youngest, she has many strengths. After identifying these qualities, she spontaneously wrote “I love me” on her drawing.

Bay was 4 years old when she led her parents and their horses into safety. She and her schoolmates had been routinely practicing breathing as a personal coping skill and as a resource during conflict resolution.

The Tamalpa Life/Art Process has intrigued, engaged and enriched me for over 25 years. As an expressive arts educator and coach, I am passionate about sharing this approach with children. It gently guides them into embodied self-understanding and self-confidence. It teaches them to think creatively and to problem solve. It offers artistic expression and greater health. It supports the development of communication and social skills. The Tamalpa Life/Art Process offers resources for the lives of individuals, families and communities. 

One of my life dances is the dance of being an educator. It is a dance of elbow grease and late-night scoring, of intuition and improvisation, of holding myself as I hold others, of relationship, of creative juices and remembering to take a deep breath when I get spooked. It is often a fulfilling dance, and always includes being a learner.

Recently, after a movement exploration, I asked my students, “What did you discover?” A child answered, “When you dance on your own, you move in the same old ways. When you dance with others, something new can happen. You can move in new ways.”  Breathing in, I take in this wisdom. Breathing out, I give thanks for my 8-year-old teacher.

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Taira Restar took her first Tamalpa Institute training in 1983 as coursework for a M.A. in Movement Education. She is now on faculty at Tamalpa. She has taught at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), San Francisco State University and Esalen Intitute. She teaches and performs with her mentor, Anna Halprin. Taira is an artist and the mother of a teenage daughter. She is currently writing a book on her expressive arts work with children. www.tairarestar.com

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Companionship with Horses
an IEATA newsletter publication
by Andree Baillargeon

Most of us have memories of a time when as children we freely conversed with nature.  As lifelong companions horses have been my primary teachers in the active re-membering of a language that communicates through gestures, rhythms, images and the symbolic.  Through the horses I reclaim a primal part of myself and feel the renewal of a deep connection and love for the world I live in. Since my training at the Tamalpa Institute, I have come to appreciate art as the process that keeps me engaged in a body to body attunement with natural cycles and of service to the earth.
It is from a place of deep gratitude for all my teachers and for the future to come that I share here a fragment of my dance with horses.

Through my back I feel a gaze from the other side of the aisle The oldest mare of the herd is staring requesting attention. So I step over to the left side of her door where we engage in this spontaneous silly head/neck dance...looking towards, looking away I feel like I am clowning around. As the space between me and you settle I put my hand behind your ear; the delicate softness that covers your sturdy bones shifts my mischievous mood and my hand flows around the contours of your face shaping a new distance between you and me

 You close your eyes       ……….        I notice I am holding my left arm stiffly against my body.
                                                      ……….                   I feel tears swelling up from deep inside
                                                      ……….                   I lean against the door sill
You open your eyes & look at me,
                                                      ……….                   with my left hand I stroke the right side of your face
You move back into your stall,
                                                      ……….                   I follow you in. Tears are streaming down my face.
                                          ……….      I reach into my pocket and pull out an old crumpled tissue
You quickly step back, raise your neck, your body is rigid your eyes wide open,
                                                      ……….                   I notice this gesture scarred you
                                                      ……….                   I know you where mistreated when you where young, so  long ago
                                                      ……….                   I imagine you think I will hit you
You look at me                         ……….                   both my arms are quiet along my body, I notice they are numb
You look away                        ……….                   I look away
You look towards me       ……….     I look towards you
You look at me                 ……….        I look away
You look at me       ……….      I am feeling playful
                  We repeat this movement a few times
You seem curious; you extend your neck and bring your head up and down
                                                      ……….                   I mirror and follow your movement
Neck down extended you look at me
                                                      ……….                   head/neck bent forward I look at you
Neck down extended you look at me
……….                   head/ neck forward draws spine into forward flexion
……….      I look at   the ground pulling myself in I get the image I am a very very sad clown
……….                   I am aware of the expression on my face like a white painted downward smile; “There is a child who plays it to small”
Neck down extended you look at me
                                                      ……….                   in forward flexion I feel my arms hanging
                                                      ……….                   I unroll slowly into hyper- extension lifting my forearms with my
                                                        palms up               
                                                      ……….                   I look up & imagine the sky through the ceiling and hear: “Help”
You look at me                         ……….                   both my arms are quiet along my body, I notice they are numb
You turn your head towards me
                                                      ……….                   I am standing straight and look at you :
                                                        “I am so so sorry this happened to you”
……….                   my hands extending towards you in offering gesture,  
……….      I stand upright relaxed
You lick your lips , chew  and start eating some hay
                                                      ……….                   I pick up some hay with my 2 hands
……….      I am looking at the hay in my hands
You take a step forward turn your head/neck towards me stretching slightly you gently take a few strands of hay, for a moment we are connected by these dried green threads that feed you
 You are eating a few strands of hay
                                                      ……….      I pick up some hay and really feel it’s texture
……….      I bring it up to my nose and strangely there is a fresh
              fragrance crackling from last fall’s dry twigs          
You do not seem interested in me anymore
                                                      ……….                   I make myself smaller and smaller, pulling myself in and folding
my lateral space inward,
……….       extending my hand with a gift of hay to you I squeeze myself
close to the door and say “ I just want to be your friend, take this, I ask for nothing more, promise I ask for nothing more”
You look at me still chewing your head is slightly above the ground
……….                   I turn my body towards the door holding my right arm out behind my back                    
……….                   I am still holding the handful of hay, “Promise, I just want to be your friend”
For some reason neither of us are moving, I lost track of time
……….                   close to the door almost facing the wall, still holding my hand out behind          my back I feel myself soften at the knees and I let myself slowly drop to the ground
You are still looking at me
……….                   I am sitting curled up on myself   the middle of your hay
You extend your neck and ever so softly take the hay out of my hand
……….                   I feel moved and blessed and as I watch you chew I feel like a stream of sparkling and tickling movement around my heart and up the right side of my sternum.
……….       I feel my weight relax into the floor
You take a small step and start eating nibbling here and there around me
                                                      ……….                   “I have not shared a meal with another in a long time, I eat alone
                                                  ……….     the streaming around my heart is moving through my chest.
……….      I close my eyes
……….                   I listen to your chewing. The space between us has become so palpable and soft almost spongy.
……….   I feel a warm breeze on my cheek
……….   I imagine the last rays of       sunlight.
……….   I notice there is a soft rhythm to the breeze curious I open my
eyes and realize you are standing there about 5 feet away your eyes half closed and through the stillness I feel your breath on my skin. It is dusk I am basking in white light and slip out the door to the other side
                                   
walking past a few other horses
 I come to the end stall
where I see 
one of the stallions  tied to the wall to cool down his supper is on the ground
just a few feet away out of reach
” He was a bad boy today”
 I am told
,”This is good for him”.

My heart
 is racing
 I am not sure
what planet I am walking on

through the rhythm
 in my legs
 I feel  You
a not so quiet clown
 moving inside out
 I hear 6 feet 2 beats
 a tail-tale behind me
a childlike tree grows
crisscrossing rock heart
 between
me looking at you looking at me
slowly curving back towards the sky
holding hands  with the invisible

Andree Baillargeon is an interdisciplinary artist, Reiki Master/Teacher and equestrian.  Her passion for horses and constant desire to learn has lead her to study various movement practices such as Feldenkrais, Authentic Movement and Spatial Dynamics. Andree is a movement based expressive arts graduate from the Tamalpa Institute and is now writing a book entitled “Horses Carry the Wounded Home”. Using the Tamalpa Life/Art process as corner stone, this book relates her journey of personal transformation and creates a map for anyone interested in the field of equine facilitated learning.  Andree can be reached through email at inspiritedconnections@gmail.com.

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Towards an Expressive Arts Practice
by Denis Macdermot

What is an Expressive Arts practice and is it possible to develop one?  I don’t mean ‘practice’ in the sense of the individual and group sessions that may be offered by an Expressive Arts practitioner but the kind of practice he or she might do at home. To some that may sound like an odd question. We would expect a Buddhist or a Yoga or a piano teacher to have a personal practice and to encourage their students to practice at home. But in my experience, psychotherapists (including EA therapists) generally don’t assign home-work at the end of a session. Nor, if they have their own personal practice (in the sense of something done regularly in their own lives), do they share this. Have they have reached a level of mastery where formal practice is no longer necessary? Or do they believe that therapy must be interactive, needing either a one-on-one relationship or a held group experience to be effective. If this is so it seems to me a limitation –  the client becomes dependent on the therapist since he or she can only progress in the therapy session. It is like taking piano lessons but having no piano or keyboard at home to practice on.  It is also, possibly, self-perpetuating: the therapist reaches qualification over a period of years through hours and hours of therapy and supervision and this then becomes the path the student or client must follow. That is all very well for people who want to make therapy their profession. But what about those who want to lead a fuller and more creative life without this degree of commitment. It seems to me that therapists in general and EA therapists in particular would be serving their clients better if they focused more on what can be done at home between sessions in the studio – both to reinforce therapeutic experience and to provide a bridge between that experience and ‘ordinary’ life.

As a Tamalpa practitioner (I graduated from Tamalpa Institute in 2005), I have been trying to develop my own personal expressive arts practice or practices. Without a model to follow, this is very much a work in progress but I feel I am getting closer to something that is effective for me and might also in time be formulated to be helpful to others with far less EA experience. I will describe one or two scores below but first I would like to take a step back and establish a context for Expressive Arts practice and consider how such a practice might sit alongside Spiritual practice.

Jung famously said he would rather be whole than good. Spiritual practice seems to be more concerned with goodness and therapy more with wholeness. James Hillman in “Peaks and Vales” and “Soul and Spirit” shows how metaphorically the thrust of spiritual practice (whether sitting on a cushion or raising the eyes in prayer) is always upward -  higher, lighter, purer, clearer.  Retreatants in search of enlightenment head for uplands, for caves in the snow, not down into the valleys – the vale of soul-making (to quote Keats).2  We need at times to climb Apollonian mountains in search of clarity and perspective but much of the action of our lives takes place lower down, in the mud, in the foul rag and bone shop of the heart. While spiritual aspiration is an essential part of our humanity, it is possible for spiritual practice to be used as a way to escape from the confusions of embodiment. In reality most of our lives are actually lived in motion, in dynamic relation to other people and the environment and spiritual practice does not always prepare us for this; there are many stories of people coming back from lengthy retreats and finding they are no better at dealing with the ‘stuff’ of ordinary life. To me the purpose of an Expressive Arts practice (and of psychotherapy) is to help us to deal with this stuff.

To me there is a close similarity between the workings of the body and the Unconscious. I experience my body as having its own autonomous life, not just in the way it carries out a million housekeeping tasks (regulating temperature, prompting me to eat, drink, excrete, sleep, wake etc) but also in the way it reacts to the outside world. I have “gut instincts”. Things (sometimes) don’t “smell” quite right. The Unconscious also works autonomously, often driving us to act and react to the outside world without our conscious selves really knowing why. There is a quality of obscurity, of muddiness, in these workings. If we are not careful, applying the conceptual mind in search of their meaning is a bit like trying to pick out the pattern of shadows by shining a bright light on them. The challenge is similar to that of remembering dreams; and once we have remembered them of sensing their meaning without stripping them of all resonance by dissection - as if they were coded messages to the intellect. Perhaps a better way to deal with mud is to soften the focus of our knowing eyes and feel it in our hands – being open to the shapes that want to emerge. The expressive arts offer a language or methodology for this kind of working with the mud.  But a kind of sidelong cunning seems to me to be necessary to avoid slipping into known and habitual thought patterns. The painter, Francis Bacon described what he did as “setting a snare for reality using artificial images”. In the same way we can use the artifice of a score to put a finger on that vague something under the radar. A score establishes intention, a defined time-space and activities, a kind of framework within which the unexpected can happen. Here’s an example.

In February, I went with a friend to Spain, to the Alpujarra. When we arrived, tired from our journey, the almond blossom was out, the sun was shining. It seemed we had stepped from winter into spring. I felt a call to expand, to go outside. I felt a contradictory desire to stay in: “too early, the air is cold”. On another level I was curious to explore the nearby town, the shops, the people. But with my rudimentary Spanish I felt afraid of engagement. So – curiosity and fear, an outward-going impulse and a closing in impulse. I set aside an hour and 20 minutes to explore this in movement and art. Here is my score, a fairly typical Tamalpa life-art score, with explanatory notes in italics:

Intention:  Explore curiosity/fear, opening/closing. I struck out “curiosity/fear” because these terms seemed too loaded and narrow, too knowing.
Activities:
20 minutes:      warm-up (using various stretches and routines to sink awareness into the body)
20 minutes:      explore “opening and closing” in movement, (using both body sense and physical location (in the warm sitting room, through the kitchen and outside onto the veranda))
15 minutes: drawing (whatever comes out of the movement experience)
15 minutes: explore drawing in movement
10 minutes: (creative) journal writing (this phase is integrative allowing a return from artistic to conceptual mind)

This is what I experienced – mostly reproduced raw from my journal:

Moving indoors, slow, warm, muted… imagining opening, arms raised and lowered, chest expands, contracts… gradually, circular movements repeating.. petals, an image of a flower coming out bravely in the sun. Then … MY FRIEND OPENED THE FRENCH DOORS!!! OUTRAGEOUS!! The warm cocoon destroyed. Triggered into a tantrum, I beat cushions then stomp downstairs to saw wood… repetitive angry movement warms body and calms outrage.

Here is my drawing:

I explored my drawing in movement (focusing on different elements of the drawing and allowing my body to respond) then wrote in my journal:

“Splattering blows aimlessly out in all directions, a tantrum without power.. and opens up the delicate round flower petals to daggers and lightnings in. Oh cold blast of wind from outside, this hothouse plant cannot sustain but galvanized to harden before its ready time, pushed out, pushed out.”

then a dialogue:

Petals: “I swell roundness out, yellow, sunny, childish pleasure. Jittering, a flimsy enthusiasm, naïve, trusting” Sky: “This is no place for babies! Go back inside. Or toughen up. Don’t be silly!”

Petals: “Pushed out, not allowed back in to the warm cocoon. But I am not very brave though I put a brave face out.”

Sky: “What do you want? Open air or closed safe space, the hollow warmth?”

Petals: “Open air seems vast and empty and cold. I want to light it up but my bright delight needs protection. My sunny rays do not go far.”

Stalk: “I am the link, a sinuous corridor for sap, my feet in the stolid lumpy ground, I hold you up, I feed you, I make earth nourishing. I am the secret alchemist, slow and patient.”

Re-reading this, I am struck by the muddled syntax  (I have to resist the desire to correct it) and by the way the metaphors overlap with each other in a most untidy way – the flower is both flower and sun, it wants to blossom in childish pleasure but also feels victimized, pushed out. There are echoes of childhood ‘stuff’. I could switch into analytical mind and say what I think it all means … but in fact it means lots of things on lots of different levels.

I am also struck by some metaphorical resonances between the drawing (spirit/sky earth/mud, the secret alchemical stalk) and the themes of this article.

The drawing is art-expression but does not claim the status of Art. Like my raw and naïve writing, I find it a little embarrassing to show it here. But my intention in this session was to explore not to communicate. Expression was at the service of exploration. Part of me goes – “ah, what is this, this pattern, this feeling, what is it like, where does it lead?” – shape is found, created in the moment of expression and becomes content. The process feels very organic; I  blossom out my own unique inner world in the patterns of my movement and in the colours and words that spill out on to the page. What I express in this way becomes a resource and a mirror. I know myself through my expression.

And here I disagree with some EAT practicioners who believe that the intensity with which a piece of artwork is created guarantees its success as art. Great art may need intensity but to communicate successfully to others (whether through artwork, poem, dance or theatrical performance) a different kind of attention and skill is needed. I have an improvisation practice which is aimed precisely at this – developing my ability to communicate my own inner world in movement sound and voice.

The score described above had a strong therapeutic intent – I wanted to get to grips with my own ‘stuff’. The flower I drew bore no relation to anything in the countryside around. On other days during my holiday in Spain I set myself scores which had a much more external focus:  explore environment using movement and drawing. These were also expressive arts based but without any therapeutic intent – perhaps EA not EAT (I was looking outwards rather than inwards). Nevertheless, there was an emotive content in my physical responses to the outside world. … that mountain on the skyline, a crook like my elbow, the gnarled shape of the almond boughs, the finger-tip blossoms, those budded branches reaching up towards the sun, a cold wind, contracting “brrr!” – echoes in my body everywhere. My drawings on those other days were more representational.

By the end of the week, I found my outer world and inner world coming together – what I saw and felt around me offered perfect images and metaphors for my inner process.

In Homer’s Odyssey, Odysseus wants to hear the singing of the sirens whose voices are so beautiful they often draw mariners who hear them onto the rocks. So he has himself tied to the mast and tells the oarsmen to block their ears with wax. Thus he experiences that terrible beauty but survives without disaster. Dealing with our own unconscious material, our internal demons is also dangerous – we need to be held and carried safely through to the other side. In a therapy session we rely on the therapist to hold us, individually or in a group, and this allows us to reach a depth and intensity of experience we would not be able to achieve alone.  Continuing the analogy, we normally expect our therapists to be strong enough not to need the wax – to feel that they have been to the deep places we may find ourselves in and that they know the way out. However it is possible to establish structures and rules by which we can hold ourselves through experiences of greater than normal intensity. Time-keeping can be supported by an alarm clock or electronic timer or by music of known length. We can even practice alongside or near to another person (as I did in Spain) who has no direct involvement in what we are doing. 

To me the purpose of therapeutic practice is mainly to enhance the quality of my experience, to build bridges (or stalks) between different parts of myself, between my muddy dream body and my waking conscious world, to put me more in touch with my emotions and with my environment. In short to help me feel more alive, more whole and more me.. In the words of Martha Graham:

There is a vitality, a life force, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique, and if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium; and be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is, nor how it compares with other expression. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open.

An expressive arts practice can help keep the channels open.

References

1. I am as always indebted to Jung esp “Four Archetypes – The Phenomenology of the Spirit”
2. James Hillman – “Peaks and Vales” and “Soul and Spirit” from A Blue Fire
3. My practice is based on the work of the Tamalpa Institute (www.tamalpa.org) but I have also been influenced by a number of other movement based practices.

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Movement/Sound-based Expressive Arts Based on the Tamalpa Life/Art Process: 
A New Approach for Alzheimer’s Patients
By Julia Gilden, MA

During the last year, I have been leading a class for the participants of Senior Access, a day program in San Rafael, California, for adults with early stage Alzheimer’s Disease, and at the Personal Care Unit at The Redwoods, a retirement residential facility in Mill Valley, California.  I have found that these populations are surprisingly responsive to expressive arts activities, and benefit directly from the techniques from  Tamalpa Institute’s Life/Arts process .

Founded by modern dance pioneer Anna Halprin and her daughter, Daria, Tamalpa was established in the seventies and is part of of a growing international integrated expressive arts and psychology movement.  Tamalpa combines techniques and processes from Gestalt Psychology, movement, drawing, and writing to explore what our bodies can teach us about our selves and others. 

For older, cognition-compromised people, I use elements of Anna Halprin’s Movement Ritual to awaken the spine and study its connection to all body parts.  Although we work in chairs, participants are able to incorporate many of the concepts and movements.  As we progress through a class, I invite participants to offer movements for the class to follow.  The result is that participants who are rarely verbal or physically expressive have come forward to offer movements and sounds for the group to copy, which allows them a more active role within the community, a development noticed and appreciated by all participants.  At the same time, participants who have the ability to communicate but who may be shy, are also able to more fully participate by taking brief and safe leadership roles as they come up with a movement or sound for every one to copy or incorporate that fits the motif of the moment.  Feedback from staff and participants is that on the days I lead a group exercise, they are more energized and vocal afterwards and for the rest of the day.  I find it remarkable that they are, by being increasingly responsive, able to teach me and others what they need to practice for their growth and sense of inclusion.

Another Tamalpa technique I employ is body-part mapping.  Working with one body part, for example head or hands, participants work alone or in pairs, with very little instruction, simply exploring.  Afterwards, they find other ways to amplify the movement.  We talk about how metaphors influence how we move, and then use those ideas in further explorations.  I am planning to follow movement with drawing where possible.

Recently, I began introducing a basic version of “scoring,” a system devised by Anna and Lawrence Halprin to determine the elements of an activity (e.g., intention, space, time, activity, relationship).  I begin a sequence and the participants add to it until we have four to six distinct movements with sounds and relationship to the group.  This concept is generating more participation from participants who have until now been mostly passive.   Participants are increasingly able to and interested in the ideas behind exercises or explorations, an example of how expressive movement  brings body and mind together and releases the creative spirit.

Many geriatric medical researchers, such as Dr. Bruce Miller, Director of UCSF’s Aging and Memory Center, are reporting the beneficial effects of expressive arts for people with a wide range of neurological-based mind impairment, including those with Alzheimer’s Disease.  Visual arts and writing when used in an expressive environment have been widely documented; movement, less so; and efforts to blend arts disciplines has been described very little from what I have found in the literature.   This is an area I am actively exploring.

Mood, Movement, and Memory: an Age-related Neurodegenerative Complex, a Short Opinion Piece by Lotta Granholm, Heather Boger, and Marina Emborg for the American Society for Neural Therapy and Repair, offers possible neuro-biological connections between deteriorating functions related to Alzheimer’s and to Parkinson’s Disease, and indicate that investigators hae started to look  “biological and/or clinical connection between the triad of symptioms (emotions, cognition and movement).  
From my experiences leading expressive visual art, poetry, movement, and drama exercises at Senior Access, I conclude that Alzheimer’s patients can benefit from all of the arts in ways that allow them the widest possible range of creative input in the moment, but I observe that movement is the most empowering and seems to connect participants to their deeper feelings and imaginings.

I welcome feedback on this report, including possible uses, questions, comments, research, or other resources,

Related Professional background:
BA, Psychology; Stanford University
MA, Education, Dance Specialization; Stanford University
Guided Imagery/Expressive Arts Certificate; Institute of Health and Healing, California Pacific Medical Center
Tamalpa Institute’s Movement-Based Expressive Arts Professional Training Program; in Level II program

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EXPRESSIVE ARTS AND TRADITIONAL CULTURE
An aesthetic rendition of our experience in the Seminar
by Maria Luisa Diaz de León and Rosario Sammartino

An artisan in Ollantaytambo, Peru, opens his doors to a group of people, most of them foreign to that land, language, and culture. The humble master, shares his art, an art that finds its roots in ancient traditions. He invites his guests to experience and join him in the art of patience, love, and respect for a land that becomes one with water and burns in the fire of the heart.
Women weavers, threading their ancient tradition into the knotted social, political, and psychological contemporary world, teach the back strap loom as if it is a daily prayer to what has preceded and what is to come. 
An international group works together for a week experiencing the tradition in creative action: “Poiesis” and suddenly that tradition becomes their history too. 

We had the privilege to participate and teach during the International Seminar of Expressive Arts and Traditional Peruvian Culture that TAE Peru (Terapia de Artes Expresivas/ Expressive Arts Therapy) organized this year in Cusco, Peru. It was a diverse group of thirteen people from Argentina, Chile, Ecuador, Colombia, Norway, US, Mexico, and Peru. The intention of the seminar was to integrate the Expressive Arts experience with the traditional Peruvian arts.

The group worked together for 6 days. We visited and creatively explored sacred places including Moray, the Inca Trail, and Temple of the Sun. We were honored to meet with the Patacanchas, women in a remote Andean community who have maintained a dedication and passion for the art of weaving for centuries. We all learned from our artisan professor in Ollantaytambo, Eduardo, who has become one with the land through the art of pottery. We also met a group of traditional dancers, and learned from them the ritual dance “The Paras” which means “rain” in Quechua.

Taking the Expressive Arts out of the studio and into the traditional culture provoked, evoked, and inspired the group members to create community. We bridged time and space between the contemporary and the ancient, between the familiar and the foreign. Sowing true dialogues between life and art. At the core remembering, in a deep sense, who we are in our common humanity.
Who are we in our common humanity? How is this reflected in our communities? Or coming into a closer focus, how was this mirrored in this particular small international group?

Far from being an experience full of romanticism, the group encountered both its light and its shadow.  Remembering isn’t always smooth. It asks of us not so much about who we were but who we are. We were confronted with our own ancient love, our love of the arts, the one love that feeds artists; a love that has been relegated to childhood and school matters, entertainment and the market. It also confronted us with the hunger for tradition, for the roots we desperately seek to claim.

There are seeds of the Patacanchas, of the artisan and the Inca in all of us. Paradoxically, a feeling of belonging pervaded the experience and a thin veil of longing and impotence came into the group, because we are not them. Anger arrived because there wasn’t anything immediately we could do to fix the being cut and displaced from our roots. A multigenerational disownment was felt across the group, as we sensed ambiguous guilt and embarrassment.

The patient love from the Artisan, the weaving of the weavers, and the passion of the dancer began to shed some light. Moving, provoking, questioning, inquiring... Art was Present! In the words of one of the participants: “We need to take the art out of the museums, the religion out of the churches, and the dance out of the theaters.” 

Each of us thirsts to reclaim our right to live artfully, to weave and model the clay of our individual and collective stories, as well as to dance and invoke the Paras. Only then, we will be assured that the soil of our soul will keep bearing fruit. 
When we learn more about who we are as humanity, we learn more about ourselves. When we encounter self through movement and art, we can embody it, thus expanding the range of possibilities in our lives.  

During the fifth day of the seminar, we facilitated a movement-based Expressive Arts experience. The intention was to harvest the new resources that had been sown into the group, collecting previous activities and experiences such as modeling, polishing, weaving, art and ritual-making. We were attentive to the archetypal myths that were unfolding. Through an aesthetic response to what we had seen, felt and imagined we used the Tamalpa Life/Art approach to reweave some of the provocative emotions and stories that had arisen in our encounter with the traditional arts, culture and community. The body, as the most honorable recipient of our life experience, was allowed to speak its truth. The movement metaphor we used to facilitate the dance was "Opening and Closing", which later shifted into the following Life/Art exploratory questions: what is this experience opening in us?  What is closing in us?  What was closed before? What still needs to be opened? 

Body, as a moving metaphor, opens and closes, reminding us that we are always attempting to integrate life experiences in a constant cyclical gesture, like nature. We are nature, and our bodies are the mirrors of the movement of life. The dance of the cells, the constant pumping of our hearts, our lungs breathing, blood flowing, fluids, organs. Our physical body is our root. And from that root our emotions, memories, stories, images, and new ideas can grow.

Our body as humanity, as community, as group. Our body as My Body. We need to know our roots! Maybe then we’ll be able to grow
into healthy encounters with ourselves, others, and the world.

May we find in deep listening, our way into acknowledging and respecting the different threads that weave together our historical tapestry. May we find in patience, a new modeling for our encounters with one another. May the active and responsible art-making keep us in continuous dialogue with both our light and our shadow. May our bodies continue teaching us how to awaken from the soul’s inertia and move us to be rooted in this world.  
­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­
Maria Luisa Diaz de León and Rosario Sammartino are the co- directors of Tamalpa Latinoamerica (TLA), official branch of Tamalpa Institute, California. TLA is currently conducting community projects, offering workshops and classes on the Life/Art process in Latin America and presenting the work to the public through various scenarios: Education, Therapy, Art and Social Change. www.tamalpalatinoamerica.org

María Luisa Diaz de Leon RSMT, RSME, was born in Guadalajara, Mexico. She holds a B.A. in Psychology, is a Certified Halprin Practitioner and is an Associate Teacher of the Tamalpa Institute. María Luisa facilitates Expressive Arts workshops in the Bay Area of California and in Mexico and is currently pursuing a M.A. in Humanities and Depth Psychology. She is passionate about bringing the Expressive Arts in response to the Latin America reality.
  
Rosario Sammartino was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina. She is a psychologist, specializing in Expressive Arts Therapy. Her interest and passion for the arts and psychology have brought her into the field of Expressive Arts Therapy.  She started her studies at PECETI Argentina and  then studied at the Metáfora, Art Therapy Institute in Barcelona, Spain. In the US, Rosario trained in Expressive Arts at Saybrook Graduate School. She is a Certified Halprin Practitioner and an Associate Teacher of the Tamalpa Institute. She is currently teaching the Tamalpa Life/Art process in Buenos Aires where she also maintains her private practice.

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Dancing for Peace in Luanda, Angola, Africa
A Tamalpa Leadership Training Project
by Dana Swain

• Terry’s fists are clenched. He says he’s angry, feels mad about the danger inside, feels hurt. We explore what it feels like to breathe through the clenched fists—they relax, he lets go. The new posture seems to reveal the hidden hurt and provide some relief.
  
• Lindy’s in and out dance is about restlessness. What does she do when this feeling comes over her? She sits separate but still in the group. It comes and it goes—later she asks that we keep her walking with us so she doesn’t disappear.
  
• Grace shakes her head—she’s in grief and uncertain what out of grief will feel like. She is our prophet, “I’ve been up and down and I’m not going to isolate myself. I mean, I’m doing things, I’m here.”

Heart Drain (abdomen)

Out into the World   (abdomen & hands)

Fountain (legs)

Feathers into Stone (spine)

I remember mixing paint. Mixing it up until it was just soupy enough and that perfect color too. If I could've danced that color that texture then. Then I could've written that damn artist's statement.

When I move,
I can see it.
I can see something.
Something comes and makes sense.

Imagine to flashing back
(That soupy paint could always speak)
It has always had a name
but to get inside you had to let it speak through you
what comes even when pushing is right
it is all right
what speaks to me
what might speak to you
everything has its own language
but there is only one all at the same time
What will come and what will fall away?

Tessa:
"I can speak to you all now I can speak to the girl up late painting all night years ago.
Did you know that color you mixed last night could always speak?
That it could dance?
Stare long enough at a blank canvas or ball of clay it will tell you what to make of it.
And
Please break the rules (self imposed or otherwise).
And
Please paint everything."


Tessa's Comments on Her Story
I have always known I was an artist and that I make art from my gut. It has mostly come easy to me. I can disappear into a drawing or painting for a whole day. Growing up academics were difficult and I got through school with no skin left on my teeth. I struggled with the idea of having a creative life because it seemed like a big challenge and even bigger gamble. I spent several years trying to "catch up" and get to where I thought I was supposed to be going. Finally I began painting and decided I wanted to paint everything! Everything around me was fuel–the world wanted to be painted, experience wanted to be painted. It was beautiful. I was once again in my element and ended up in art school. There I felt held back and stunted. I began to question everything I did naturally. I felt I had lost what I had so once loved. I had difficulty quieting my mind from what I had learned. I wanted to unlearn. I spent the next 5 years shifting through and recycling what was of value. Slowly things took shape. I found myself in a creative job teaching art. I still struggled and sifted trying to get back to my gut with my own creativity.

A year ago I found Tamalpa (or maybe it found me) and jumped feet first, straight into the level 1 training program. At Tamalpa I gained a new resource for art-making . . . MOVEMENT. I began to move, images came and I wanted to draw everything. I felt free to let many things I struggled with sit to the side. With time and practice I have begun to step away and become aware of what I have been doing and how I have been holding myself back. I now have a new understanding of my creative process. I feel like I can make art almost about anything. I can make art about what I move or write and my art can inspire me to move . . . I can make art about someone else's movement, and move in response to another person's art. After one year at Tamalpa I feel I am more inspired than ever and that the possibilities are unlimited.


On Witnessing the Aesthetic Process
by Daria Halprin

Tessa is just completing her 2005–2006 L1 weekend training, and part of the completion process is a culminating “self portrait ritual presentation.” One of the opening lines in her ritual presentation was “I am an artist in recovery.” Her statement of her serious life theme was delivered with such a sense of gritty humor, and her dance enactment—movement being a new form of process, discovery and creation for Tessa—had the quality of very serious play, a serious playing with her themes, her emotions, and the images in her life-sized self portrait that hung on the wall behind her. Tessa was moving her images and her life story. And we, her witnesses, were moved by her. “To be moved” is an interesting phrase; it suggests that feeling and imagination are somehow connected to an experience of being in motion. Having always painted, for Tessa being in motion with emotion and imagination is a totally new process: letting her painting move, provoke, open and inspire, illuminates the “everything” (as she calls it) in her life story.

For me as a teacher, watching Tessa’s final piece was framed by my experience of witnessing her process throughout the past year. Her final presentation, or act of “recovering,” is made so much more authentic and potent by my active remembering. The arts accompany us as we remember so that to re-member is to re-join parts and pieces in a new form, with new meaning and with artfulness. I am excited by the ways in which Tessa has immersed herself in this embodied expressive-arts process of reclamation. Could we call it a healing? And are we brave enough to let that remain a verb rather than a noun—brave enough not to call it fixed or claim that the gritty, underbelly, shadow stuff can be made to go away and then I, it, you will be o.k.? Can we stay in-flux, constantly moving, becoming, with layer upon layer encountered and treasured?

Tessa’s aesthetic response to her training experience speaks to this process of reclamation and re-membering—the reclaiming of herself as an artist who feels she could “paint everything in the world” and does begin to paint “everything in her life.” In doing so, the “everything in her life” is imbued with the potency of poetic inspiration, metaphor and creative spirit as much as it is with the psychologizing process. Or we might say, one feeds the other, provokes and inspires the other—a life-art bridging.

The history of Tessa’s struggle with art and academia is given a richness in retrospect, the artist’s retrospective, which renders it a beautiful and archetypal story of redemption. What do I and what do you want to recover from, what do I/you/we want to redeem, we might ask. What struggle do you want to dance, paint, evoke, provoke, or celebrate in poetry?

Tessa made a very interesting comment in her training group as we reflected together on the experience of performing and witnessing. In the same vein as “I could paint everything in the world,” she said that while her own piece was certainly very meaningful to her, just as meaningful was the way in which her feelings and imagination were provoked in watching the performances of her peers. She said, “I have the feeling of wanting to dance and paint and write about the themes I saw in each of your presentations; your family history takes me to mine; your theme of holding and being held—I want to explore that for myself; your moving and spoken foot poem—I want to explore what poems are living in my feet; your life and death dance—I want to explore what is mine.” Tessa’s statement that “I could paint everything in the world” leads us to “I could dance everything in the world” or “I could write poetry about everything in my life—or your dance, painting, poem—I could explore that and discover how it lives in me.”

The art opens me, the art opens me to you, the art opens us to the world and opens the world to us.


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Life/Art Process Continuum
By G. Hoffman Soto

Life and Art have been intertwined since the earliest days when human beings gained their humanity.  Prehistoric cave drawings reflect the human desire to capture the excitement of the hunt, or memorialize the ardor of a battle. One could imagine dance, theater and storytelling evolving out of the need to share adventures and life's unfolding. Our prehistoric forebears beat the ground or tapped fallen tree trunks to capture the rhythms of the heart beat, changing of the seasons, or to kindle energy to hunt or to war; they made a melody to celebrate a birth or mourn a death; they sang a love or wailed a loss.
Art was always there to symbolize and express life. And by the same token, life was always there to inform and shape art. Birth, death, the changing of the seasons, the planting of a crop, all were acknowledged, celebrated and marked by the community of humans coming together to participate and celebrate. Everyone who participated to make music, to sing, or to dance—to express their humanity by making art, were creating a culture.

Within these cultures there emerged people born with incredible gifts and talents, as well as ones who develop them by hard work and study. These are they who do incredibly creative things. They are Artists with a capital A. At the same time art is not limited to just these exceptionally gifted people, as dancing is not limited to ballet, nor singing to opera, creativity is inherent in all of us. It is innate and some may argue, an essential part of our being, as important to our wellness and our sanity as work and play. Art, then, is a basic human function. One could say that being human and living life form a continual creative process. By extension, inherent in all our gestures, movements, words, and thoughts are the elements for works of art. Hence the Life-Art-Process model posits that doing art and living a life are completely intertwined. They draw from each other and influence each other. They function inside a continuum of living a life and being a human being. To be human is to create. Conversely, not to be involved in some aspect of creative process is not to embody fully our humanity. 

The separation of art from life in Western culture can probably be traced to the dualistic philosophy of Plato, and then Descartes.  Modern industrialism then instituted methods of production that alienated the worker from the product and created an artificial barrier that has separated art and artists from daily life.  This sense of dualism, alienation, and separation permeates almost every aspect of our lives; from education, to religion, to medicine, to our sex lives, and  of course, art. At the same time there is, and has been, a movement where people reject these separations and choose to adopt life styles and practices that meet the needs of perceiving ourselves and life as holistic and interconnected process.  

As our Life shapes our Art, we also have the potential to allow our art to shape and inform our lives. An example of how art impacted my life would be when I was introduced to Yoga as a young man. Yoga means to unite, to unite body, mind, and spirit-- not to see ourselves as separate compartments, but as one, one with all that is. It also taught me that my practice could have a profound impact on how I lived and experienced my life. Yoga was a way of life.
 Another early example was my training in the Martial Arts. The Martial Arts taught me about using the arts to cultivate ways I wanted to be under stress, in movement, and in my everyday life. Who I was when I was attacked in the practice space was not different to who I was in my daily life when I was “attacked” by my children, my boss, or my spouse. How could I stay in a state of grace, and still deal with and resolve conflict in a positive and awake way. How making a commitment to my practice impacted my commitments in other areas of my life. How learning to show up in uncomfortable situations in the studio reflected in how I showed up in life.

Years later I had the great, good fortune to meet and work with Anna Halprin. Anna was developing the Life/Art Process. Later, her daughter Daria Halprin further developed the work, with other teachers at the Tamalpa Institute including Ken Otter, Jamie McHugh, and this author. Anna’s approach grounded my experience and understanding of Art impacting on Life and vice versa. It gave me a way to view my dance and movement, my theater and performance, my drawing and painting, my prose and poetry, and my storytelling, all as resources to shape the art of my life stories and myth-making and then to see my art circling back to influence, impact, and shape how I was living life.

All the time and energy I was investing in dance studios and dojos made up an apprenticeship for the ultimate art we call life. My life was becoming my Art. This perspective serves as a wake up call to bring greater consciousness into my day-to-day activities and relationships. It informs me that life, like art, is both a process and a goal.

I am constantly rehearsing and performing my life by practicing my art, and living my life as art-full expression. Indeed we can extend the idea by saying that how we live our lives is our ultimate artistic expression, and can include the awareness, preparation, focus, intensity, and clarity of any piece of art. Life as Art and Art as Life present a perspective where I can begin to shape my vision of myself in a desirable, creative, and productive way. The information and insight my art generates can be applied to my relationships, my work, and my play.

At this point, let me give an example of what this process could look like. A student is working on owning her voice, to speak her “truth.” As she works through the process, she sees it is tied in with many aspects of how she experiences herself and others. She begins to see how it was shaped in childhood by being the only Asian American in a northern American state predominantly populated by blond north European types. As a child she had been derided by many names and told many disgusting things due to her looking “different” by both children and adults alike. For example, they told her she wasn’t an American but an alien, to go back to where she belonged, that her father is the devil, and so on. 

As we tend to often do she internalized the voices and began to see  herself as different, ugly, and not belonging. She believed that she had no right to speak up and that she did not belong. She also came to realize that deep in her heart voices whispered that she hated blonds and white people, her tormentors. The longer she held that thought the more powerful it became, the more forbidden it became. But, of course, being the lovely soul she is, she certainly couldn’t believe or harbor those thoughts, let alone say them out loud. Over time all these little traumas grew up to be big shadows sucking the life force of our young protagonist. 

Personal shadows such as these have been theorized by the poet Robert Bly’s concept of the “Shadow” phenomenon. Briefly put, Bly talks about how emotions, behavior, etc., that come up in our childhood and that are not acceptable in our families, society, religion, or belief systems are stuffed into little bags.  We then drag them around as we live our lives. The scary part is that these little shadows don’t stay little. As we grow up, so do they. In fact, they flourish. Then in various inappropriate situations, they appear out of nowhere, huge and ferocious. They can startle ourselves as much as anyone else who witnesses them: “Wow, where did that come from?” Then, just as suddenly as they came out, they slip back into the dark to continue to suck our life force and  wait for the next opportunity to jump back into our life in inappropriate and destructive ways.

Perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us once, beautiful and brave. Perhaps everything in its deepest being is something that needs our love.
Rainer Maria Rilke

If we can in a constructive and art-full manner, begin to bring these shadows out of the dark and into the light, then we can begin to see them for what they are, begin even to make friends with them, to use them rather than they us, eventually to express them-- and ultimately, in the Life/Artmodel, to create with them. 
Of course, this is a process, and this is where a therapeutic model can be grafted onto the larger Life/Art Process model. (See Daria Halprin’s “The Expressive Body in Life, Art and Therapy”). The individuals have to work through their issues to get to
the point where they become a resource for creativity. If the problem is too close and raw, then it is not the time to try to be creative; one has to respect the problem/resource and do the appropriate and therapeutic work to be able to reach a point where there is enough  distance to begin the creative process.
And I promise you, that when individuals or students get to that point where they can begin to work, explore and create with the problem/resource it is a blessed moment for all involved. It is the dawn on creation day, and we get to experience the divine in them and in ourselves.

So back to our story. When our lovely young student got to the point  where she was able to begin to create a performance piece around this story, we talked about how all of us are at some point or another are on the outside, the other, the alien. The source of difference could be around race, or gender,  sexual preference, economic status, social class, or how you comb your hair. It may be more damaging for some than others, but sometime in our lives we are going to share that pain of being the other, the  foreigner, the “queer,” the weirdo. And then we talked about how no one, herself included, believed she hated blonds or white folks.

The antipathy was a thought and feeling she once had but never expressed or outwardly owned; instead it had festered in her heart, growing and blocking out other emotions that she wanted to be experiencing. On the contrary, the feelings of being an ugly little alien who hated white folks was keeping her from seeing herself in the way that we, who know her, see her--a  beautiful, graceful, compassionate, and loving human being.

We discussed how once she began to create and perform the antipathy and the sense of alienation, the material became bigger than just her personal story. It became a universal story of alienation. By her creating and performing her material in the class, the studio, or a theater, all of us in the audience, the witnesses, were given the opportunity to be healed from this malaise. When she was able to look the members of the audience in the eyes and say out loud, “I hate you,” when she could say it in the character she was performing, and then also say it as herself, then move back into character, the darkness would, and did, slowly leak out of the shadow. Seeing and holding it in the light caused it to lose a great deal of its dread. In fact, later in the piece our performer lay on the floor laughing and enjoying the moment.

I don’t want to imply that the issue was gone, on the contrary. But it was diffused, and as she comes back to it and works it again and again, she will be working it, and not it working her. As she continues to explore the nuances of her material, she will walk the path of healing and healer; she will become free from the fetters that keep her locked in the feelings of her childhood. As she deepens herself in this process she will say what she needs to say in a way that allows others to hear her truth. She will become more visible and alive as a human being.

In conclusion, I want to reiterate this point: art allows everyone who witnesses the process and the work with the potential to share in their healing, insights, and empowerment. We all begin to understand that our shadows can destroy us if they stay in the dark, and that they can lead to our healing when we bring them into the light. This is a prime aspect of art, it sheds light on areas of darkness, it brings healing to potential malignancies. In this best sense, Art has the potential to Enlighten.

When I bring myself more and more into the moments of light by living in an art-full way, I begin to embody my humanity more fully. The Life/Art Process/Continuum is a practice that allows us to unfold towards the light in a conscious and mindful way. It is a way that nourishes and cultivates us in our ongoing becoming.

G Hoffman Soto
sotomotion.com

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Creating in the Face of Struggle:  An Interview with Helene Vosters
By Joy Cosculluela

I conducted the following interview as an assignment for my Tamalpa Level 3 Fieldwork Supervision training program. The purpose was to interview someone involved in some work I resonated with, to further the scope of work I was already involved in.

Helene Vosters M.A., M.F.A. is a performer, activist and scholar.
Helene’s performance philosophy is deeply informed by her long association with post-modern dance pioneer, Anna Halprin. A student of Halprin’s since 1986, Helene has performed in numerous public and environmental performance rituals produced by Halprin. She served for three years on the core faculty of Tamalpa Institute. Helene earned her M.F.A. in Activist and Queer Performance from New College of California’s Experimental Performance Institute.

Helene has taught on the faculties of New College of California and the California Institute of Integral Studies where she incorporated a breadth of modalities (academic, performance, activist, somatic and healing arts) into her academic teaching practice. In addition, Helene has written, directed and performed in several original works—including Rosaceae, Eve’s Trespass and Green—activist allegories in the form of absurdist physical comedies that explore questions of collectivity, passion, pleasure, sin, alienation, death and war. Helene is currently a PhD candidate in Theatre Studies at York University where her performance and research explorations are focused on awakening the transformative power of collective grief through public performance intervention.

I performed in Helene’s piece “Mourning Papers” in 2007 in Union Square, San Francisco, together with 15 other participants. “Mourning Papers” was a response to Helene’s experience of the Afghanistan War.  Participants, dressed in black working clothes, gathered and formed sculptures while reading newspapers and then sang a song written by Helene.

“Impact Afghanistan War” is her latest project that attempts to register, through her body, the impact of our (Canada/ US and other NATO allies) engagement in the Afghanistan war.  It is a project where she falls 100 times everyday in a public space for one year.  For more information, visit: http://impactafghanistanwar.org

Interview w/ Helene

JC:  What was your motivation behind “Mourning Papers”?

HV:  My motivation was a response to what I experience as an “impossible juxtaposition” of reading the papers everyday, reading all about the suffering ----and just going about life.
 Personally, it started when my partner Cassie’s grandmother and mother died.  Then, 9/11 happened and the U.S invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq became motivations.  I was reading about the wars, reading about deaths in general in our local neighborhoods.  I was seeing how these events were sensationalized and began asking how we were not feeling this empathically … so it was the desire to juxtapose our lack of resonance towards these deaths and ask:  where’s our mourning in all of these?

I also experienced my own level of depression and asked how much of this was mine alone.  I asked what happens to our expression of collective grief?  Why are so many people on Prozac, why are there episodes of prescription drug use in managing our despair, to be constantly happy?  What does it mean to be a citizen of a country at war and go about your day?

As these questions came up, I asked: where is our collective grief?
I felt my own numbness and wanted to explore it.
Like “Impact” I face up against my own inability to feel my grief.

JC:  How is grieving manifested in the West today?

HV:  In “Rosaceae”, I explored the story of we’re given this amazing bounty of living here in this country, but we’ve managed to invest our energy into destruction.  The response of the ensemble I worked with was interesting in that nobody could access their grief… they were feeling more alienation, numbness… and depression, which was different than grief.  Grief is more visceral, emotional.  Depression is more internalizing and isolating. Grief, as I learned in my research, was in ancient times, a public and collective practice mediated by women.  Later on, laws were set in place that restricted the public practice of grief.  Mourning became privatized, taken on by church and state or more contained in homes and individuals.  We’ve become experts at dulling grief.

“Mourning Papers” and “Impact” challenged my own sense of isolation, to try to get past my own alienation.  In “Rosaceae” I tried to awaken the public. I refused to think of it just as my own suffering… I felt it needed to be done in the realm of the collective.

JC:  What were your primary methods in the creative process?

The RSVP cycle was a primary method. (RSVP cycle is a map and a structure for designing themes, intentions and activities to generate creativity.  The “S stands for scoring.) Scoring generated resources, the main one was working with materials ---- newspapers.  I used activities such as reading the newspapers, and reading about death while having breakfast… I explored many ways of physically working with newspapers.  I continue to explore that in costuming today.

So for me, it’s not over… the element of recycling continues in my work. It keeps coming up again and again and I work with it in new ways.

Another model was working with task-based movement.  I came in as a non-dancer and the work was not about choreography.  So having task-based movement invites everybody into movement including my cast for “Rosaceae” who were non-dancers.

Tamalpa-based work with postures and sculpture also was important in giving the ensemble accessible tools to work with, such as exploring emotions through postures.  Other methods derived from Tamalpa are learning to work with space, time, force, and embodying images. I also worked with improvisation.

Within the scoring process, I look at embodied performance as an inquiry, the process of investigating the art of grieving.

JC:  What challenges did you encounter when working with people and how did you work with those challenges?

HV:  One challenge was forgetting how powerful the work is.
My first experience of this power was when I was first working with Anna Halprin.  We worked intensively on deep explorations and improvisations and I had meltdowns.  With Daria Halprin, I learned how to hold the emotional space, to be aware of when that happens when you work with people, and how to enter and exit that space.  I learned to create a container to hold the work and I had to step back and create scores to hold a therapeutic intention (even though the Tamalpa training is not about therapy, it is powerful work) so I gave them creative tools to work with, in a therapeutic model.  For example, if feelings got stirred up, I would ask them to embody these feelings in a posture.  The performers were not dancers and I created a clear space for work and communicated transparently my intentions.    So the biggest challenge is forgetting that not every person is familiar with the Life /Art process and therefore, how do I create space and scores for the work to happen?

I also gave them the opportunity to work with their personal material.  As facilitator and director, I listened to what was generated and was influenced, but I was also aware of not giving over to their ideas. 

Also, it was very effective to have a warm-up circle, which built group cohesiveness, trust, and camaraderie… They would do warm-up movement exercises together, which is very important for people who don’t have Tamalpa vocabulary, people who wouldn’t be able to self-guide themselves when instructed to do their warm-up.

JC:  In your opinion, what makes art valuable?

HV:  For me it’s about art as a meaning-making process, art as an inquiry…Art as in the Life/Art Process.

 In the Life/Art Process, everything in life became a palette for me.  Art is a way to relate to the struggle in life.  Instead of seeing constraints, my life experience becomes another color in the palette… how do I create in the face of my struggle?

In “Impact”, I’m not just responding to me.  The response of other people becomes part of the creative process. I have been accessing how alienated we all are, how we have forgotten how to connect with each other.  My own experience of being ignored while I was falling strikes me as tragic… it makes me see that we don’t even express our curiosity.   So my response to being ignored feeds back into the next fall… It makes me remember about the Afghani people who are impacted by the deaths around them and still have to go on living, juxtaposed by the other half of the world where we go about our own lives in alienation. 

JC:   Do you have any last words about performance?

HV:  Performance as ritual…  ritual as a container for my inquiry… ritual makes my inquiry meaningful, a much-needed element.
In scoring, the container holds me.  I would have skipped commitments because I didn’t feel like doing the score on some days.  Other reasons such as “I feel awkward, or I don’t know where I’m doing this, or my body doesn’t feel like falling 100 times.” The ritual as the score helps me stay committed.  Another example is when winter comes; I don’t know what this will look like.  I don’t now if I will be outdoors, but having a ritual contains my intention, and I will continue to find a way.

What I learned from Helene:

One of the things that came up for me very strongly was the question: What is the role of an artist in today’s world?  I ask that question every day.  The more I come in contact with suffering, mine, other people’s, the environment, the world, the more I believe that the artist has a much bigger response-ability today.
I see Helene as an embodied being, actively relating to the world and generating work that is provocative, accessible, and meaningful.  She inspires me to wake up, to listen, to respond, to relate to my experience, to ask questions, to take a stand, to act and respond artfully.   In my interview with Helene, I am reminded once again about the power of the Life/Art Process in weaving together the threads that make meaningful art.

When Helene talks about confronting her own inability to grieve, I hear her speak to the “Confront/Encounter” process that we practice in the Life/Art process.  (“Confront/Encounter” is part of the Five Part Process that serves as a map to develop awareness, explore our life themes therapeutically, and generate resources for insight and change)  When Helene confronts her inability to grieve, I see her exploring this theme in a creative and embodied way.   I imagine that working with concrete materials such as newspapers, as well as exploring the impact of her body falling on the ground, facilitates full-body expression of numbness and grieving, giving her work depth and authenticity. 

As a performing artist, I feel validated in hearing again, the power of performance as ritual, as a frame for the performer.  I asked Helene how she would be able to sustain herself for a long period of time in “Impact”.  Her response was that it was a ritual for her.  I imagine that offering her action to something much bigger than herself gets her through challenging moments. 

Another realization that came up for me in this interview is my responsibility to be mindful about how I go about generating creative resources. As a facilitator, I see the RSVP Cycle as a powerful tool in providing structure for working with people, especially those who aren’t versed in the Life/Art approach.  I’m reminded of the respect we show for who we work with.  I have the responsibility to ask who I’m working with, what I’m working with, why I’m working this way --- as a baseline.  That information directs me on how I need to work with them, especially when bringing up emotional issues or deep wounds. It is vital in the practice to be able to provide a clear, safe space with the right creative tools to hold the experience mindfully.

Weaving Life and Art in my practice is a life-long learning and commitment to find ways to respond artfully in the face of struggle.  I am inspired by Helene to continue to inquire, to respond to life in the most embodied way and to make meaning through art.

Joy Cosculluela teaches at Tamalpa Institute.  She dances and collaborates with various artists in the Bay Area and performs with Anna Halprin’s Sea Ranch Collective.

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Care to Dance?
By Joy Packard

I wish I could convey, in words, the sound of the drummer's djembe as he leads the children into the performance space. It gives me goosebumps. Every time. It’s a ceremonial calling, plain and potent: “Here we are, we’re coming, witness us as we dance.” Expectancy and curiosity fill the air.  There is something so special about a drumbeat. It resonates with our bodies - and the collective body - in a way that music through an ipod doesn’t. It wakes us up at our very core.  

Aged from five to eleven, the children have been preparing for this moment all morning. At the call, they rise. They seem, to me, like little peace-warriors sallying forth in that full-bodied and whole-hearted way children have when immersed in something they enjoy.

I’m based in the UK and this is a junior school in rural Yorkshire. We are about to dance in the spirit of peace. Their drawings from this morning are pinned to the fence in the field, tea cups at the ready for later, and a sprinkling of parents sit shivering in the English summer weather.

In national curriculum - speak the workshop facilitates three elements of the Global Dimension: creativity and critical thinking; global dimensions; and identity and cultural diversity.  In Joy - speak it’s about meaning-making through movement and opening up new and creative ways of understanding ourselves, each other, and our world.

The seed of possibility for this project began in Angola in 2007 when Dana Swain invited me to work with her on an arts project with 50 Youth Ambassadors for Peace, inspired by Anna Halprin’s participatory dance ‘Circle The Earth’. For all the differences between my life and theirs I saw, too, the similarities and the power of the arts to heal. I wanted to do something locally in my native north east. When I showed some photographs, that I’d taken in Angola, to one of my classes shortly afterwards, my eldest mover, a 95 year-old, said: “this would be great in schools.”

One thing led to another.

What has evolved is a workshop that can stand alone or be integrated into a longer scheme of work. Captured in the video is a morning of expressive arts activities followed by our dance. The school is twinned with Mahandakini School in Kenya through a British council programme. This link provides a practical reference point for the children.

The afternoon is a moving and joyous occasion.  You never know how many people are going to turn up to support and join in. Imagine looking down from above when the dance is in full swing.  You see three concentric circles of dancers, moving in opposite directions, each circle with a different step: the outer circle for running; the middle one for walking; and the innermost circle for standing still. The drummer is in the centre.  This is movement as metaphor for the change process: the urgency of running; the dignity of walking and the recuperation of stillness.

The children move between the three circles of their own volition.  There’s no counting steps, they move in response to their felt body needs. In one workshop when I was standing next to the drummer, I felt a small hand take hold of mine. I’d noticed the girl earlier running very fast in the outer circle, getting a bit pink and sweaty, her bunches bobbing up and down in time to the drumbeat. She peeled out from the running circle, switched direction and joined the middle walking circle. Then I lost sight of her until she held my hand. For me, this is what embodied learning is all about - she was making choices about her dance based on her awareness of breath, pulse, stamina, the drum beat, the people around her, her intention, and her energy level. She stood next to me watching the drummer for a while as her breath slowed, and then, without a word, returned to the walking circle, then back out to the running circle.

This ‘moving mandala’ happens three times. What makes it so moving is that each child comes forward individually and announces their dedication. Firstly, to someone in their own world, then to a cause in our shared world and finally we all run together for the children in their twinned school. At this point each child holds out a hand to their parents and friends and invite them run or walk together. Depending on how many people turn up to support the event, the school hall might be a sea of maybe 50 or 60 people spanning three - if not four - generations moving as one community of peace makers.  The boundary between ‘performer’ and audience dissolving. I’ve learned to trust the process: children are persuasive and it’s good to see them in a leadership role.

I notice different teachers evaluate our time together differently. It’s as if it were a mirror: a PE teacher might remark on the physical aspect; a dance teacher the choreography; art teachers the resulting art work.  A minister from the Churches’ Regional Commission once commented, “...moving and inspiring. You can see the grace of God running through the dance.” In the school in the video the Head Teacher saw it’s unifying potential.  Whole school. Whole curriculum.

As this year draws to an end, I’m reminded of the way we close Peace Week: holding hands in a big circle. A reflection of unity. Uneven in our differing heights and ages, big hands holding little hands, long arms next to short arms, bouncy youthful energy complementing the older, more settled, energy. A bit higgledy piggledy but united in our intention. When the drumming fades we swing our arms skywards and allow the peace within to flow out through the fingertips, upwards and outwards, so that it might land where it’s most needed in the world.

As a way of ending this article - as it’s the holidays - I hold out my hand to you, on my left, and to you, on my right, so that we might do the same.

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Tracking Paper
Iu-Hui Chua

“It is by going down into the abyss that we recover the treasures of life. Where you stumble, there lies your treasure.”

~  Joseph Campbell

I stumbled into the Tamalpa training program in 2008 seeking change, when I was at a place where my personal mythology was no longer serving me: I desired and envisioned something different for my life.  

What I didn’t know was that I was embarking on a journey that would shed light on hidden corners of myself and provide me with rich, powerful experiences of learning and growth. These blossomed into ways to generate art, develop teaching skills, and share tools for healing and art.

The first weekend opened with the lighting of a candle, illuminating our intentions for the year. Stepping into a supportive space of ritual, anticipation mixed with anxiety, I chose the theme of cultivating self-love.

Aesthetic response to my theme:

Dear Self,
My intention is to see all the facets that comprise this whole being
To understand what has shaped me
To appreciate myself with gratitude and compassion
And to accept with peace, who I am

My starting point began with a trauma from a miscarriage intertwined with the immediate abandonment of the “father” due to his fear of my infertility. Combining the breath and the spine took my preoccupied mind back to my body.

My 3 Level check-in:

When I remember my miscarriage
I remember the sensation of feeling pregnant
Of the changes in my body, preparing for motherhood.
I remember the feeling of this physical abundance
slipping from my center.
In grief and fear
I imagine that I have abandoned my own child
and my chance for conceiving.
Will I ever be able to have children?

I offer this question to my breath
Inhaling and exhaling the query.
My spine supports me.
My breath supports me.
My breath consoles my mind into stillness
Focusing my attention on the present
In peace for a moment.

“Breathing Through the Spine Drawing”

Breathing, that regular rhythm of a constant life-long transformation and connection to the world, gave me permission to release emotional challenges and sink into the delight of the present. Dances emerged and connections were woven between new peers. Moving on to standing and doing our postures in life scores inspired the creation of a closure ritual to this miscarriage event in my life.
As I identify my grief
and confront my sense of betrayal, anger and guilt
 pieces of my experience
are slowly released

I identify my profound loss
Through art making and performance, I confront my anger
Through giving into the present, I release my grief over broken dreams, hopes and promises
My breath supports me, as I step away to grow.
My breath, my body’s wisdom, is the sacred container for my continual transformation:

Re-Late (excerpt 2010)
With Rajendra Serber

I don a mask over a mask over my face.
I hide behind this double-faced mask to keep away from the darkness of what’s past.
In grief and fear
I hide behind an armor of indifference.

While working with the head, I identified “fear” as the overwhelming motivator for most of my actions/reactions/non-action in my life. Confusion, Indifference, Anger, familiar friends I have worn outwardly, appeared to have been masking this silent sister.

I am afraid of rejection, abandonment, alienation, pain, death.

I had an injured shoulder and foot during head weekend. In fact I was injured from the very beginning of the program from having performed a Ledoh piece that was described as “an expression of all the pain, struggles and anguish of all my female ancestors” (as one audience member described it). In exploring the head, I found myself huddled in a ball of self-preservation, unwilling to expand my limbs outward or expose my abdomen and chest in a vulnerable state of surrender. I felt this old embodied fear arise. The more it arose, the more physically withdrawn I became.

I fear rejection, abandonment, alienation, pain, death.

To help bring awareness to this heavy fog of fear, I participated in a symposium with several friends where we explored fear for 15 hours. I became well acquainted with the origins of my fear: memories of feeling abandoned by my parents by being left alone in the car in the dark as a child, being ostracized and demonized by my community for racist and religious reasons and for consistently being left for “better” women by my partners.

I fear rejection, abandonment, alienation, pain, death.

Revisiting my childhood fears brought the environment I was raised in to the forefront.
Growing up in a small, racist, conservatively Protestant, agrarian community was by far the most challenging element of my childhood.

Memories:

I am 8 years old, walking to piano lessons like I do every Thursday afternoon. A man walks up to me, spits on my face and states calmly “You are ruining our country. You don’t belong here. Go back to where you came from.” I wonder in silence, “And where exactly is that? Ann Arbor, Michigan?”

“What? You’re not baptized? That means that you’re demon spawn. Your dad is the devil and you’re going to hell when you die. And you can’t come to my birthday party either.” I go home from my second grade class to have nightmares that my dad is actually the devil and that I am a witch. I am convinced that I can fly on a broomstick at midnight, but can’t seem to stay awake long enough to actually try.

Our best friends, the Jewish family in town, tell me about the KKK and their practice of staking burning crosses on lawns of “people like us.” For many months, I stay awake at night on high alert, afraid that my family will be burned to death by the KKK.

I get a phone call from my mother who tells me that my sister is in the hospital in a coma from an attempted suicide attempt. This is the first of 4 similar calls I receive in 4 consecutive years.

My (now ex-) husband tells me that nobody but he would every want to be with me because I am so difficult.

I fear rejection, abandonment, alienation, pain, death.

Whenever I expressed my fears, hurt feelings, anxieties, my parents would tell me to put up a shield to block everything out. And when I would act out or misbehave, usually through violence or destruction triggered by fear, I became “bad,” “wrong,” “not good enough” for my parents as well. I walked around barricading myself from my environment, my emotions and my humanity, reflected by my well-worn collapsed posture.

“3 Postures”
The comfort of protected inner focus
Fear, disappointment, not hoping for too much resides here
I am OK
alone
collapsed

Despite my practice of protection, the messages of being an overall “bad demon” somehow sticks with me still. I struggle with the internal evil vs. good battle on a daily basis. Slowly I hope to work my way towards acceptance of both without judgment.

Feet and Legs. I have often received feedback about my incredible physical relationship with the sky, as if I were made of fire and air. In contrast, I seemed incapable of connecting to the earth and grounding through my body. As I began to expand my dance vocabulary, I desired to be more grounded. During our feet and legs exploration I somehow managed to injure my foot and spent the entire weekend on the floor, with my legs and feet up in the air, discovering:

Grounded
Fear of being
Grounded
afraid to grow roots
of being stagnant
of not being able to run away
of having to confront
conflict
to stand up for myself

I like to disappear
to fly away
to flee
fast and silent
vanish without a trace
faster and faster
until i am only a passing breeze
not letting anything
anyplace
anyone
Settle on me
or me
Settle
anywhere

I needed something to help me confront my fears. They seemed so big, powerful, overwhelming. They were reflected in the social constructs of this society, of the institutionalized (hidden and blatant) racism and Christianity that we are infused with daily.

I had a dance with Lorena and Julia, two powerful women in my group. We came together and looked carefully around, searching and picking imaginary treasures off the floor, ate them, opened our arms out to the sky, balanced on a wide base of strong pelvises and legs, feet firmly planted, blew kisses, breathed in synchronicity, and leapt. In our dance I discovered my source of support for confronting my fears.

It looks like a long way down.
If I jump, will I fall forever?
There is no bottom that I can see. Just endless fast falling water surrounded by lush forest.
I look up at the expanse of sky stretching above me, clear, blue, empty with open possibility.
If I jump, will I fall forever?
Will the sky swallow me up in its infinity?
I can’t decide.
Yes jump no jump stay go stuck.
Stuck here on this island of in-between.
I look for answers, inspiration, something to tell me what I should do, where I should go
up?down?stay?
Searching seeing eyeballs peeled for any small sign.
Nothing.
Something falls into my palm.
I taste it.

It expands in my mouth until I have to blow it out in a million kisses.
It gives me strength to lift my listless limbs with my tenacious bite like a mother cat carrying her young and I remember that the mother father protector caregiver unconditional lover inside me will always carry me to where I need to go.
To breathing in the beauty,
exhaling life force.
Reminders that trees birds sun wind elements
are here and there inside and outside of me.
Shake off the sticky tar like indecision
and jump!

I jumped into the pelvis weekend, opening up my wounded uterus to find it crowded with ghosts. My mother, telling me to never have children or they would ruin my life like we did hers, my sister who can’t have children of her own, my aunt who said I should have children since I’m not doing anything else of value and my ex who had no faith in my fertility. I had to release them all, expel them from my creation space and allow room for what I want to hold there.

“Anchor Pelvis”

I jumped into confronting my fears and having a good old shakedown with them during my self-portrait explorations. The “bad demon me” of my childhood managed to resurface during a Soto coaching weekend in which I had an intense confrontation with it. A manifestation of a tangible being with claws, a creeping crawl and a hissing voice with “I hate you all” as its looping mantra. As it materialized I could suddenly confront the multitude of profiles that comprised its existence. Part of me thanked it, for it had fueled my anger mask of protection, of defiance, of protest, of art. I recognized its usefulness and also recognized that it was no longer serving me. I extended compassion towards it, releasing the demon and allowing it to transform into my little girl self, vulnerable, hurt, and needing comfort. In the final moments of coaching, I cradled and held us together with the strength of understanding and care. I enact my (first day of training) theme of self-love.

For my self-portrait performance, I struggled with trying to create something with the same intensity as the month before. It wasn’t happening. My biggest battle was between my performance ego and my desire for authenticity. Not surprisingly, after my performance I was left not with a feeling of accomplishment or empowerment as I had hoped and even expected on some level, but one of abandonment, depression and despair. To feel this way at the culmination of a year’s work was extremely frustrating. I fell into a “vortex of doom” and spent the next month stewing there.

 “The vortex of doom” was the month of trials, struggle and treasure. I was faced with feeling challenged and defeated by experiences in my personal life. My relationship was disintegrating, teaching was one disaster after another, performing became unrewarding and work was difficult. I sought out support but was met with solitude. Panic of abandonment arose, and to quell it I turned to the guardian within myself for help. It was in this space that I discovered how to use the Tamalpa work to turn a negative into a tangible and fruitful positive and to change the grip that negativity had on me.

We all experience negativity--the basic aggression of wanting things to be different than they are. We cling, we defend, we attack, and throughout there is a sense of one's own wretchedness, and so we blame the world for our pain. This is negativity... But if we look into it more deeply, it has a very juicy smell and is very alive. Negativity is not bad per se, but something living and precise, connected with reality.

The basic honesty and simplicity of negativity can be creative in community as well as in personal relationships. Basic negativity is very revealing sharp and accurate. If we leave it as basic negativity rather than overlaying it with conceptualizations, then we see the nature of its intelligence. Negativity breeds a great deal of energy, which clearly seen becomes intelligence. When we leave the energies as they are with their natural qualities, they are living rather than conceptualized. They strengthen our daily lives...."  

~ Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche

Suddenly things began to shift and Change entered my life in a big way. I began taking my personal challenges from life /work as material to create scores. I imparted these to my high school students to perform. Artistically de-centering and altering the relationship with the initial trauma was the key to extracting me from the “vortex of doom.” It provided distance from the event as well as created a productive and often entertaining experience.

This lesson reinforced the words of Daria from that first day of the training, that healing is recognized in the formation of new relationships to our old stories that exist within us. We can’t change the events of our lives, we can only change our narratives about those events.

It was in this space that I felt the release of several issues on a somatic level. After sharing a score and having it performed, often with lots of laughter and enjoyment from everyone involved, I could finally feel my shoulders relax, my breath expand my chest, and my head release.

3 Level Check-in:
When I share my score and hear your enjoyment and see your involvement and creativity
My shoulders drop, my breath becomes fuller and my ribs expand.
I feel valuable, delighted and fulfilled.
I recognize that all my life experiences have value
and that I have the skills to create something new with these experiences.

This was perhaps the greatest gift from Tamalpa from my Level One Training. Sharing this gift with my students has led to incredible results. The amount of bonding, expression, creativity, revealing, and sense of empowerment developed has been truly amazing.

Working with this process inspired courage in re-approaching my self-investigation. Looking even further into the depths of what lay beyond my fears, I found grief. At first, personal grief for my loss of my fetus, partner, dreams of parenthood. Later, grief for the injustices of the world. Grief for my ancestors who have suffered from those injustices. Grief for the pains life serves us. Grief for humanity.

I was fortunate in that I was asked to participate in a performance in which I played a mother who had just lost her young daughter, thus offering me an opportunity to bring this grief into art. After a particular show, one audience member who had experienced a similar event in her life, wept and thanked me for the gift of permission to grieve the loss of her own daughter.  I dedicated all the rest of the performances to her and to all who had lost their children in their lifetime.

Beneath grief, I found, most surprisingly, love. A deep love of life, everything it offers, the wonders, the surprises, the mysteries. A deep love for humanity in all its shapes and forms, with all its flaws and demons. (“Demon,” as Joseph Campbell describes, derived from a Greek word meaning the dynamic of life.) Yes, a deep love for our ability to feel and express our diverse and extensive palette of emotions, our somatic genius, our wild imaginings that have created world wonders and our connection to the energies of our earth. Being reminded of my connection to all there is to love about this world inspired and strengthened my spirit.

This new feeling of expansion was challenged during the Level 2 training. Pema Chodron once noted that our greatest teachers are those that trigger us the most. It proved to be true during this work, with Ken being at the forefront.

I was challenged with his ideas about groups, collaborations and leadership, testing previous ideas.

In one of the first weekends I remember feeling threatened, on an irrational level, that if I started changing my whole ideas about collaborations, I would lose my identity which I had spent so much time and effort creating. Recognizing this enabled me to develop compassion and understanding towards people who feared and resisted change. An uncomfortable unrelenting pressure in the head plagued me while I fought with my old concepts. I developed an appreciation for those who made an effort to change their ways of thinking and being, especially the ones cemented in their beliefs. It’s easy to walk into a room with an open door and welcoming arms. It’s not so easy to come into a place with a locked and bolted entrance, no keys, and who-knows-what behind its door. Despite my resistance, I did take Ken’s teachings to heart and implemented them in my work with my students.

Ken’s teachings also pushed me to transform my personal life and extricate myself from an unhealthy relationship into a new space of growth. While necessary, it was a difficult time.

I spent the rest of the summer allowing myself to experience and embody the loneliness and grief of the past few decades that I had staved off with previous distraction. These emotions physically constricted my heart and lungs, put pressure around my head and at times felt like an irreversible sentence of suffocation and death.

Soto’s ideas and explorations in nature about “being” vs. “doing” and the creative art mode that encompasses the space in between, acted as a touchstone of sanity and healing for me. It allowed for the validation of my experiences, accepting myself more readily and a slow recovery. Having a half-day to rest in our bodies in nature was truly a regenerative and restorative experience. Sinking in the warm sand, feeling the soft caress of a zephyr, listening to the pebbles rumble with the tide awoke my total being. Muscles, skin, and senses were stimulated, expanded, and plump with experience. I could see with clarity, smell with more richness, touch with more sensitivity, and hear with more depth. Energetic freedom elongated joints, muscles and cells. I often go back to nature and repeat this exercise to remind myself to be present when the tornado of past and future anxieties tries to whisk me away from reality.

Aesthetic response:

Being (2010)
A piece inspired by time in nature with photography by John Felix Kokoska.

One idea from Ken that really stuck with me was that peace didn’t necessarily exclude conflict. I decided to try that out in a collaboration with Linda and Laura. Uncomfortable. While discussing our ideas, I found myself sitting balled up into a tense fetal position with fingernail imprints in my palms and occasionally sprawled out completely on the deck in sheer frustration and a sense of futility. We had a difficult time finding a way to come up with a score that we could all agree upon, but after arguing, disagreeing, going back and forth and brainstorming, we finally did come up with a score that was extremely satisfying and fulfilling.

I went on to utilize the group-life philosophies of Ken in a performance I co-directed with a colleague at Tamalpais High School, resulting in a great success. Along with this, we used the Life/Art and RSVP processes to generate and organize original material.

In the Dark (2009)
Directed by myself and Kathryn Zdan
Collaboration with Tamalpais High School Students
Photography by John Felix Kokoska

Another valuable tool Ken shared with us was his work on triggers and how to deal with them in teaching/facilitating scenarios. This encouraged me to look at the situations that I commonly get triggered in. One place was with a particular class I was teaching where my issues regarding respect and self-value kept arising. Bringing awareness to the moments when heat would flush my countenance, my jaw clench shut, and my legs stiffen to iron allowed me to recognize my triggers and change my tactics in handling the class. What resulted was everyone’s feeling voiced, heard, and valued in the end.

Taira was also a pivotal influence in being a role model for me on how to work effectively with triggers. I would see her get triggered in various situations and then watch her manage herself professionally and compassionately with growth, learning, and respect as a result. Managing my own triggers proves to be a weakness I need to bring more awareness and attention to in all of my relationships, so witnessing Taira’s skill was inspiring and instructive.

One of the main issues I deal with on a daily basis is feeling unsafe. In my hyper vigilance I am constantly putting myself into a fight or flight mode with spurts of adrenaline spotting my body chemistry. Sue Martin’s lectures brought clarity to the states I was constantly bouncing between and gave me resources for maintaining a more temperate space. I began working with Adriana in her private practice to help separate my fears from reality and bring me into the present. Our sessions usually consisted of somatic meditations of sensing the body in the present, drawings and sculptures, and building boundaries. I use this work in conjunction with the techniques of Sue Martin to help with feeling safer in life. Clear boundaries are a constant struggle with my flexible and inconsistent nature, so practicing grounding in the present is a great help.

This summer offered me a very empowering one-on-one session with Daria that gave me some concrete physical resources for boundary building and self-realization. I began on the security and support of the floor, off which she brought me standing. At first vulnerability and fear stilted my effort to come up on two feet. Eventually I moved to a place of standing on my own-- standing my ground, standing and taking up space, standing with force, standing with firmness and volume in movement and voice. Empowered and liberated, I expanded. I defined and claimed space with a sense that it was my right to do so. I do have a right to take up space. I do have a right to stand up for who I am, for what I want, for how I feel and for what I need.

I do have a right to be.

Beginning at my first day at Tamalpa to this moment of stepping forward into being, I can see how my intention to cultivate self-love is slowly building into realization. Reflecting on my life has filled me with gratitude. I am grateful for the opportunities to develop compassion and understanding through my difficulties. For turning the experience of prejudice and discrimination into spurs urging me to fight for equality, freedom and justice. For engendering humility into my being. For experiencing change on a firsthand basis and creating hope for future generations. For recognizing that the shadows of our humanity allow for the beauty of forgiveness. I know I still have a long way to go, for evolution doesn’t happen overnight, but in looking back, I’m encouraged by how far I’ve Grown.

The world we find ourselves in, the person we think we are - these are our working bases. This charnel ground called life is the manifestation of wisdom. This wisdom is the basis of freedom and also the basis of confusion. In every moment in time we make a choice.

From the very beginning to the very end, pointing to our own hearts to discover what is true isn't just a matter of honesty but also of compassion and respect for what we see.

~ Pema Chodron

Bibliography

The Hero’s Journey: The World of Joseph Campbell. Dir. Janelle Balnicke and David Kennard. Writ. Balnicke, Phil Cousineau, and Bill Free. Perf. Joseph Campbell. DVD. Holoform Research Inc., Mythology Ltd., William Free Productions, 1987

Campbell, Joseph. “The Dynamic of Life.” Joseph Campbell Foundation, 2009
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gfKOnj0gPCw&feature=related

Chodron, Pema. When Things Fall Apart. Boston: Shambhala Publications, Inc., 1997

Rinpoche, Chogyam Trungpa. The Myth of Freedom and the Way of Meditation. Boston & London: Shambhala Publications, Inc., 2005.

Special thanks to Taira Restar, Cheng Lok Chua and John Kokoska for their generous support and help in writing this paper.

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Dancing with Chaos: Lessons in Life, Art & Leadership
By Ashley Crofoot

In a semester-long afterschool expressive arts program at an inner city middle school, five teenagers sit in an uneven circle on the floor, with paper and oil pastels before them.   This afternoon they noisily pushed, pulled, and galloped into our makeshift classroom, the concrete-walled and windowless overflow room off the side of the school cafeteria, calling out, “Hey Miss Ashley, can we move right away today!?” So, for the past fifteen minutes the students have been taking turns calling out and physically exploring various imaginary scenarios – “You’re a turtle stuck on its back!....You just won an Olympic gold medal!” Breathless and quieter now, they have each been asked to draw in response to the question, “Where am I ‘at’ today?” 
For our drawing activity, in which I also take part today as model-participant, my fifteen-year-old seventh grade student Jay has chosen to sit next to me, as he often does.  Jay, a physically tiny boy, has been consistently disruptive yet eager to be included in the group, in spite of frequent emotional and physical outbursts, vocalized unwillingness to follow through with the directions of many of the group’s processes, and an obvious difficulty “fitting in” with his peers.  Today he begins his drawing as though attacking the page, scribbling furiously with his oil pastels in black, orange, red.  Chunks of color fly as he crumbles the pastels with the force of his motions.  Repeatedly, he blows the oily bits so that they scatter onto my drawing, each time glancing at me from the corner of his eye.  I feel a twinge of annoyance and anxiety within; is this kid getting out of control again?  How can I “keep him in line” for the sake of the group?  I feel the pressure of indecision build until, in a moment without thought, I abandon the pinks and greens that I’ve been drawing with, and begin to work the fragments of his pastels into my own piece.  Each time a spray of orange or black or red lands on my paper, I bring it into my own drawing.  I enjoy the sensation of rubbing and smearing the pastels onto the page until their forms are completely absorbed and integrated into the paper, and the image that emerges is abstract, yet surprisingly pleasing to me in color, shape, and texture. 
In the process of this drawing, I have encountered my own frustration with another person’s behavior, and discovered a lesson that I can apply to other relationships in my life: in appropriate contexts, I can allow others’ “stuff” to be a creative resource.  I can embrace the messiness of relationship, and enter into a collaborative paradigm of community in which surprise, variation, and improvisation are welcome.  In turn, my student has the opportunity to experience himself as accepted and acknowledged not in spite of, but inclusive of, his frustrated desire for attentive contact.  I can’t be sure in this moment that he will experience the activity and our interaction in this way; however, he does tell me that he likes my drawing, and this is the first day that I’ve ever witnessed him staying with a project to the end. 

Six weeks ago, I entered into this job expecting to provide underserved urban teenagers with powerful experiences of self-awakening within a focused workshop environment.  What I found instead was a chaotic institutional landscape, a group of students with wildly divergent resources, limitations, and special needs, and a near-complete absence of onsite supervision, in combination with my own lack of experience as an entry-level expressive arts educator.  I’ve struggled to get them to stand in a circle, much less sustain deep processes of body- and art-based growth, as I had envisioned.  This job was intended to fulfill the internship hours required by my training program at the Tamalpa Institute in order to become a certified Tamalpa Life/Art practitioner, and later a Registered Expressive Arts Therapist.  With a much less structured and supportive program environment and participants with very different capacities and interests than I had been prepared to meet, these seemingly remedial activities and skill sets aren’t at all what I had planned on focusing on during my internship.  With all of these unmanageable and unexpected “distractions,” I've been afraid that I’ll never get to the “real” work and learn how to be a “real" Life/Art Practitioner.  In my darkest moments I’ve felt myself floundering in a sea of bewilderment, shame, and resentment, and wanting to just quit.

In the creative process as well as that of personal transformation, there is no way out but through.  When all my implicit fears and limiting beliefs were triggered by the realities of this teaching experience, I was quickly forced to make a choice: either engage with what was coming up for me in response to the situation, or truly fail, either by flight, collapse, or explosion.  As my experience with Jay illustrates, in the expressive arts we are given the opportunity to ask ourselves, “How am I relating to the experience of art-making? What thoughts, beliefs, feelings, and impulses are showing up for me, and where else do these themes play out in my life?” In this way, the process of creation becomes a mirror to our inner workings, and our teacher.  In the very same way, I have found that the experience of facilitating expressive arts processes consistently reveals to me the core personal themes in need of attention in my life at any given time.
Using the tools and models of my personal practice in the Tamalpa Life/Art Process, I took the presenting themes of my “personal mythology,” which included fear of failure intertwined with the desire for control over outcomes – “needing” the process, participants, and myself to look a certain way in order to feel successful and secure in my work – into my own studio time.  I worked with the Life/Art tools of intermodal movement, drawing, poetic dialogue and written reflection to clarify my challenges, resources, and themes.  Over the course of the semester, the focus of my intentions began to shift away from specific outcomes, and toward an essential orientation, which can be described as:

• A practice of collaborating with all that which is beyond my control;
• A welcoming of all unanticipated and unfamiliar situations as improvisational opportunities;
• The capacity to resource in the midst of doubt and flux;
• Connecting with the moment while it’s happening;
• Dropping ego attachment to the work;
• Creating and holding appropriate structure in the midst of creative chaos;
• And operating from the assumption that there is genius in me and genius in others, simply awaiting recognition and invitation. 

I experimented with reframing those elements which I once resented as limitations, into resources.   These new resources included:

• Uncertainties and questions, both my own and my students’;
• Diversity within the group;
• The participants themselves, complete with all their gifts, opinions, reactions, and needs;
• And my own personal mythology and Life/Art material as it emerges. 

Clearing away some of the most distorting and obstructive elements of my own storyline, I was freed to see more clearly both the gifts and the needs of my students.  I discovered that all the information and inspiration I needed was right there, in the expressions of the students themselves; their unique and brilliant gifts were also immediately present, and evident to the attentive witness.  I learned the value of leading as a way of sensing, responding to, and holding structure for what was already there, adding to this the more familiar resources of thoughtful intention, planning, and clarity of expectations and boundaries within a solid container. In retrospect the validity of this approach has always been supported in my experience as an artist, in which I consistently find that the most moving, authentic, and transformative pieces are not those in which I have attempted to conquer my medium or imagination through technical prowess, enforcing a prefabricated image of what the experience and outcome “ought to” look like – but rather those expressions which have been shaped by a practice both disciplined and open to unexpected resources, in which I experience myself as a collaborator within a larger creative spirit.  In the case of group as well as private sessions, an aspect of that larger spirit is the field created by all participants within the expressive arts space.
As my own orientation changed, the play space within our group seemed to open up, the kids began to both share and listen more, and our time together felt increasingly rich.  They jumped up with excitement when I walked through the door toting my bundle of ipod, speakers, craypas and drawing pads; they sometimes complained that we didn’t get enough time together.  My source motivation as a facilitator shifted from loyalty to “the work” as a specific form, into excitement for my kids and who they were.

One day after nine weeks of sessions the kids sit down to draw in response to a movement activity in which they were asked to imagine themselves growing from seeds to plants. After ten minutes or so, I ask the students to "pause and take a look at your drawing, wherever you are in the process of completing it for now.  If this drawing could speak, what would it say TO YOU?"  Though he kicks his feet under the table and talks the whole way through, frequently becoming distracted and returning to his drawing only when I firmly remind him to, Jay has participated with the group throughout the afternoon.  He finishes the session with a drawing of a blue and red tree in thick colors and bold black outline; underneath it he writes, "I am thriving into success."  When he reads this statement to the group, he keeps his head down, but I see a big smile on his face.  Today is the first day I have ever witnessed him write a sentence.  After class, he gives me a big hug before running out the door.

I know now that as a guide, I can’t take credit for what was, at least in my world, a small miracle.  The work itself does this, and the participants do it.  My responsibility is to continually hone my own knowings, to clarify my own presence, to be brave enough and devoted enough to surrender, yet stay active – to the process, to myself, and to others.  It requires the passion and discipline of the work to let go of all that which blocks my capacity to show up for my own life and to be of service.  Clearly, the guiding of processes for others is an expressive arts practice in its own right: it is a call to deep engagement in an unfolding mystery which in itself facilitates personal transformation.
As a guide, one of my primary mediums is relationship. Just as movement can be shaped through space, time, or force, and drawing by color, shape, or texture, the elements of my practice as Life/Art guide exist within the dynamics between myself and my clients, and between myself and my own experience.  In the same spirit that I approach expressive movement and poetic dialogue, facilitation as a process is an ongoing experiment with the improvisational interplay of surrender and creative will.  As I practice guiding others in the expressive arts, my own capacities for awareness and creative choice-making are developed.  My students and clients are co-creators and challengers, teaching me how to deepen and expand myself as an artist and human being.  And as I grow, the quality of this relational medium becomes more and more imbued with love.  As my ego takes one little step at a time out of the center of my motivations as a Life/Art practitioner, it becomes clearer to me that everything I do, I want to do for love:  for the enchantment of the world and its members.  Each workshop, each session, is an opportunity to fall in love and to believe in the instinct for wholeness that lives in everyone.  To the extent that I can move toward that knowing, my life and my work become my art. 

Ashley Crofoot is a somatic movement and expressive arts practitioner based in the greater Indianapolis area.  A practicing poet and dancer with a training background that ranges from clinical midwifery to performance improvisation, Ashley is a graduate of the internationally renowned Tamalpa Institute for movement-based expressive arts therapy.  She holds a B.A. in body-based expressive arts therapy from Prescott College, and is pursuing a Master's degree in Transpersonal Psychology from Naropa University, with an emphasis in the healing relationship between humans and nature.  Ashley currently works in the  experiential therapy program at Charis Center for Eating Disorders. She also offers private coaching sessions for individual clients and regularly facilitates movement-based expressive arts workshops in the greater Indianapolis area. She can be reached at ashcrofoot@gmail.com. 

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