The Expressive Body in Life, Art, and Therapy

Working with Movement, Metaphor and Meaning

Daria Halprin

• Publisher: Jessica Kingsley Publishers
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781846423758
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Psychotherapy
• Index: Psychology

Drawing on her extensive experience in expressive arts therapy, Daria Halprin presents a unique approach to healing through movement and art. She describes the body as the container of one's entire life experience and movement as a language that expresses and reveals our deepest struggles and creative potentials. Interweaving artistic and psychological processes, she offers a philosophy and methodology that invites the reader to consider the transformational capacity of the arts. In this essential resource for anyone interested in the integration of psychotherapy and the arts, Halprin also presents case studies and a selection of exercises that she has evolved over her career and practised at the Tamalpa Institute for over twenty-five years.

PART ONE

Introduction

CHAPTER 1

Movement as Metaphor

The Buddha said, “The whole universe, oh monks, lies in this fathom-long body and mind.”

Ayya Khema (1991, p.54)

The foundation of this approach to movement-based expressive arts therapy is a view of the body and its primary language, movement. This view includes our understanding of how the body reflects our way of being as humans. We are a multiplicity of physiological and anatomical functions, emotional responses, cognitive and imaginal thinking, soul, and spirit. We are motivated by a compilation of life experiences and possibilities which include both destructive and creative imprints, impulses, and desires.

Just as the physical body gives us a literal and concrete structure that expresses who we are, so every part and function of the body can also be understood as metaphors for the expression of our being. We feel and observe our life experiences through our bodies. Focusing on the body and its language of expressive movement, we are able to draw our awareness to sensation, posture, gesture, emotion, and thought in concrete ways. The musculoskeletal structure shapes our characteristic body posture by containing, holding, and protecting our organs and nervous system. All of the stresses of our lives are stored in and affect the body, often creating distress and imbalance, which are reflected in our emotional and mental states. Our bodies contain our life stories just as they contain bones, muscle, organs, nerves, and blood.

Central to this work is a core philosophy: The entire repertoire of our life experiences can be accessed and activated through the body in movement. Since movement is the primary language of the body, moving brings us to deep feelings and memories. The way we move also reveals disabling and repetitive patterns. Whatever resides in our body – despair, confusion, fear, anger, joy – will come up when we express ourselves in movement. When made conscious, and when entered into as mindful expression, movement becomes a vehicle for insight and change. As creative and mindful movers, we are able to explore whatever rises to the surface, experimenting, opening up, and investigating ourselves in new ways. In this moving out of unconscious material, we bring all that we have not been aware of into clearer view.

In this approach to movement-based expressive arts therapy, people learn a practice which teaches them how to access and understand the messages of their bodies within the larger context of what is happening in their lives. Not only can we cultivate awareness and the ability to witness what is happening in us by focusing on the body, using expressive movement we can respond consciously and work creatively with whatever arises. By going to the deepest levels of our physical, emotional, and thinking body, we can free ourselves of some of our conditioning and history. Movement then becomes the metaphor for our way of living our life stories.

There are many profound and effective practices for working with the body and movement. In this approach, we work with movement as metaphor from an artistic point of view, actively using the principles of creativity and art making. The material of the work is the real-life issues and concerns as they arise out of and are expressed in movement, drawing, and dialogue. By working in a nonlinear and highly creative way, we expand our normal or ordinary field of play and ways of thinking so that we generate new resources and arrive at a more complete understanding of the self.

In this practice, we immerse ourselves entirely in the experience of the moment: giving ourselves over to sensation, feeling, image, or thought. The stuff of our lives acts as the muse who calls us to the dance, the poem, the painting, or the stage. We wait without reservation or judgment, and welcome whatever in us wants to come forward. As artists do, we cultivate a willingness to fight, surrender, deconstruct, rebuild, not know, let go of our attachments to what will happen, take risks, look at the underbelly of things, and welcome the shadow as much as we long for and celebrate the light. We grapple with and play with our personal material until a breakthrough occurs, and a new form or way of being is shaped.

This attitude of the artist as seeker brings us into a creative confrontation with ourselves and with our lives. We may experience it as destabilizing when our old ways of thinking and behaving are challenged. We may encounter a period in which we are stripped of our old costumes, and have nothing new in the closet to wear. However, in our creativity lies passion and hope, which motivate and inspire us to shape new postures, like a dancer who shapes her movement, or a painter who works with paint to bring a vision to life.

A dance, for instance, becomes the field of play upon which we are able to safely project our responses and relive some of the disturbing situations in our lives. Feelings and experiences are transformed through this dynamic use of creativity. In improvisation, we can try things out, make discoveries, take risks, do it again if it does not feel right, be silly, brave, nasty, or enraged, tear things apart, put it all back together, or make love and war in the imaginal field of the expressive arts studio. We can express feelings that need release, face demons of the past or the present, or feel the pure joy of our bodies, minds, and spirits in communion. We create models for new ways of learning, knowing, and expressing.

In this way, our lives feed our art by making it real and authentic, and our art opens and reflects back to us images of who we have been, who we are, and who we might become. As we find our integrity in the ways we shape our bodies, movements, images, and feelings through art, with time and practice we are able to shape more creative relationships with ourselves and others.

The way we work with creative process and the arts is, however, very different from that of the artist who immerses herself in art for art’s sake, or who shapes her art in order to deliver a message to her audience. We work with the arts metaphorically, as a way of identifying, reflecting on, and changing our conditioning. We work with art and the creative process as a paradigm for addressing suffering. In such a practice, we place our focus on the process itself, and on the insights that emerge, rather than on the outcome or product.

We transfer principles and practices of the arts as creative process in order to facilitate awareness, insight, and positive change. To fulfill this purpose, we need to frame our experiences so that therapeutic value and sustainable learning become possible, just as a painter uses a frame to mount a canvas.

The framework through which we practice this work must serve the purpose of strengthening what we call the life–art bridge, that being the metaphoric relationships between our art making and our life circumstances. With framework and structure, immersion in the arts becomes a therapeutic and educational experience in which art is transformational and healing.

In addition to having an understanding of and willingness to work with the principles of art and creativity, practitioners in the field of expressive arts therapies need philosophical, theoretical, and practical frameworks. We need an embodied understanding of working with the metaphoric qualities of body sensation, expressive movement, images, and words. A methodology of learning which teaches how to understand movement as metaphor imparts a knowledge of the body and gives us the tools we need to see all the ways in which movement reflects who we are.

In learning this practice, we work with the following principles or ideas:

•Our bodies are our vehicles of awareness.

•There is a relationship and interplay between the physical body, emotions, and thinking.

•Body sensations, postures, and gestures reflect our history and our current ways of being.

•When we engage in expressive movement/dance, the ongoing themes and patterns from our lives are revealed.

•When we bring sound into our movement, we are giving voice to our feelings and stories.

•When we work on our art (whether a dance, drawing, poem, or performance), we are also working on something in our lives.

•The symbols we create in our art contain valuable messages which speak to the circumstances of our lives.

•The ways we work as artists teach us about the ways we relate to ourselves, others, and the world.

•When we enact positive visions through our art, we create images and models that can become guiding forces in our lives.

•As we learn how to work with the principles of creativity and the practice of the arts, we are able to apply what we learn to all aspects of ourselves, including the challenges in our lives.

Through movement and multimodal art mediums (drawing, poetic writing, music making, singing), we are able to bring forward the material of our lives, reveal what has been hidden, and express old stories in new ways. The passion and creativity of the arts allow us to live with our suffering and find release through creative play. In such a process, we can symbolically face the demons of the past and the present. As our body posture changes, so does our posture in life. As we dance out our anger, we see it more clearly and find a more constructive expression for it. As we become attuned and aligned physically, emotionally, and mentally, we grow closer to fulfilling our potential as human beings. We can say, then, that a life well lived is the aim of this work. Such an aim speaks to an intrinsic interdependence between art, psychology, and spirituality. In describing the theories, methodologies, and practices of this work, I also hope to illuminate this essential interdependence.

In the following chapters, I will explore the following core questions essential to making this an embodied practice bridging our art and our everyday lives:

•What is happening in my body?

•What is calling for change?

•How is my body carrying my life story?

•How is my movement revealing things about my life?

•How can my art help me shape and change the way I relate to whatever disturbs me?

•How can I live in authentic and moving ways?

This book approaches these core questions directly in Part One (Introduction), which explores a meta-view of movement in Chapter 1 (Movement as Metaphor). In Chapter 2 (How I Got Here), I talk about how this work arose out of my own personal struggles and needs. Part Two (Roots and Cross-Pollination) shifts focus to examine the historical context and the trends in psychology, somatics, dance, and modernism/postmodernism that most directly affected the development of this approach to expressive arts therapy.

Part Three returns to the core questions, emphasizing the practice of the work itself. Chapter 8 (Creativity, Art, and Therapy) proposes the psychological relevancy and healing power of art processes. In Chapter 9 (Maps and Methods of the Practice), I describe the basic theoretical models of the work. The psychokinetic imagery model presents the work as an intermodal arts practice and is followed by workbook exercises. In Chapter 10 (Body Part Metaphors), I present a complete expressive arts system for working with the physical body and associated metaphors. Exercises accompany each body part. Chapter 11 (Living Artfully with the Wounded Self ) offers a way of applying this work in a therapeutic framework that incorporates all of the theories and models of this practice. Chapter 12 offers two case studies to give readers a sense of how this work looks in one-on-one settings.

In the concluding chapter (Art as a Healing Force in the World), I attempt to place the practice of movement-based expressive arts therapy within the overall context of the importance of the healing arts in the world at large.

CHAPTER 2

How I Got Here

Be careful lest in casting out the devils you cast out the best thing that’s in you.

Friedrich Nietzsche (in Kaufman 1982)

My personal life is the ground from which this work has grown. My approach to movement-based expressive arts therapy is a phenomenological one – that is, it is based on subjective, lived experience. Stephen Levine (2000) describes phenomenology by remembering Edmund Husserl’s advice to let our thinking be guided by what is revealed through the experience of our lives. Levine (2000) goes on to say, “Such an uncovering demands that we enter into a dialogic relationship with that which we seek to understand, a relationship in which not only the being of the thing we study but also our own being comes into question” (p.88). I have developed the structures and theories of my approach through precisely this kind of study and questioning.

My personal struggles brought me to certain key questions: How do we reintegrate ourselves when we have fallen apart? How can we bring disowned and unhealthy parts of ourselves into creative dialogues where healing can occur? Although some consider it a risk for a therapist or teacher to reveal her own story, I would like to describe in a personal way the ground out of which my work arose. I do so with the hope that this will encourage others to find value in their own stories and to consider how the arts can provide an inspiring way to move with and transform our suffering. In this spirit, I offer some of the private places of my own suffering through a brief autobiographical sketch.

I used to say that I felt as if I had been born into a circus family. I had an image of having spent most of my childhood under the big tent, surrounded by the freaky and the surreal, which had their own peculiar kinds of beauty. I later came to understand that the feeling of being born into this sort of life had as much to do with the way my work became my calling as it did with the weird and colorful circumstances of my childhood family life. For in my childhood, while other children dreamed of running away and joining the circus, I dreamed of running away and joining “the normals.”

From my earliest years, I was trained in dance and immersed in the avant-garde art scene. My parents were innovators and public figures in their respective fields. I suspect that the drive and passion they shared for their work kept them together as much as it created a competitive, highly combustible, and achievement-oriented...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Of Related Interest
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Dedication
• Acknowledgments
• Foreword by Jack S. Weller
• Preface
• Part One: Introduction
• Part Two: Roots and Cross-Pollination
• Part Three: The Practice
• Part Four: Conclusion
• References
• Further Reading
• Contacting the Tamalpa Institute
• Subject Index
• Author Index