Written by: Kelsay Elizabeth Myers, Executive Contributor
Executive Contributors at Brainz Magazine are handpicked and invited to contribute because of their knowledge and valuable insight within their area of expertise.
I used to think of myself as an aching question, an absence on which you could hang anything because without knowing about my own origins and history, where could I be found?
Was it in the sanctuary of my mind my refuge an imagined garden with a birdbath at sunset, the roses in bloom, and the birds soaring peacefully in the sky?
Was it in the light shining softly at the center of all the protected layers of darkness enfolding it like an eggshell with multiple layers of protection?
Or was it in the slow burn the negative space between my heart and my sacral centers the blood tears falling like water or the fire in my feet?
These were the metaphors and symbols I began my Tamalpa Institute Life/Art Process® training with. Physically, I had a fire in my feet and fire in my belly rising up my core to my heart center. Yet, it was a gentle fire, a slow scorching that felt both heated and necessary to my journey of becoming emboldened as a woman and a leader. Emotionally, I felt protected like a fleshy eggshell surrounded by darkness and light with many different layers of self-protection. And mentally, my mind has always been my refuge, the place I can turn to feel at peace and find understanding.
For the first 32 years of my life, I lived entirely in my mind, shielding myself from my own emotions and entirely cut off from my body and physical sensations. As a Korean adoptee who surrendered at birth and was sexually abused in foster care for the first three months of my life, my initial entries into the world were traumatic, and I grew up unconsciously escaping into the interiors of my mind and imagination which was highly evolved and created such beauty, such peace, such abstract and complex theories from which I could remake myself according to my own desires. I used to live with the question: Is art found in the shattering of the self?
For a while, my answer was yes. My process of living this inquiry was to place myself in what I called an aesthetic blitz because it was like an explosion of beauty that overwhelmed all the senses. Outside of academia, however, such an abstraction itself exploded, and I found that in order to experience true human connection at the emotional and physical levels, I had to go downwards and heal the connection to my heart, body, and environment that had been severed at birth.
The healing of those severed parts of myself could not take place in my imagination or artistic creations alone; they could only be restored somatically. In the first Tamalpa training, the faculty had us stand with our feet solidly planted on the ground, our knees slightly bent, and they instructed us to begin to pulse, or gently bounce, so the vibration traveled through the whole body mimicking a heartbeat.
As I pulsed physically, I remembered when I was 7, and my parents brought my dog, Charlie, home with us for the first time, and the breeder had instructed us to put a ticking clock in his bed that night so that it would mimic his mother’s heartbeat and calm him (mentally), and I realized the significance of never being held at my birth mother’s heart to feel her vibrations in my own body (emotionally). Although it was painful to experience that loss at the moment, I also knew how much I had been wanting to feel that loss my whole life, in fact.
It was a gift to have that felt-sense experience of it, and I am also reminded of one of the things my therapist offered me at the beginning of our work together. She said: “Our gifts are our challenges, and our challenges are our gifts.” Pulsing, for me, is like that. It’s challenging and painful, yet soothing and calming. A bit like transformation itself. I am now living the inquiry: How does art enable a living expression of the whole self? which echoes my earlier inquiry: Is art found in the shattering of the self? with more healing.
The Tamalpa Institute Life/Art Process® has been key in making a bridge between the creative expressions of my mind and soul and the physical and emotional reality of my lived experiences for transformation and healing. Part of the process is to differentiate and identify the four levels of awareness we operate within any given moment:
what is happening physically in our bodies at a sensate level that we can observe and witness;
what we’re feeling emotionally;
what we’re imagining mentally and any thoughts, beliefs, and associations we’re creating; and
expressing it all through soulful artistic practices like writing, drawing and dance/movement.
Founded by dance pioneers Anna and Daria Halprin, the Tamalpa Life/Art Process® is an integrated approach to expressive arts that uses artistic processes and media to explore and deepen our relationship to psychological life, social issues, and creativity itself. Our work is committed to the exploration and application of movement, dance, and art as a healing and educational force. We draw from the wisdom of the body and the creativity of the imagination as sources for authentic expression, artful communication, and transformation.
I came across the Tamalpa Life/Art Process® in my research as a doctoral student of transformative inquiry at the California Institute of Integral Studies. As a scholar-practitioner, I’ve now trained in many trauma-informed and integrative somatic and soul-based modalities which I bring into my own expressive arts coaching and workshops, but Tamalpa is at the heart of what I offer because of its multimodal healing and emphasis on cultivating long-term growth using the embodied arts as a practice and way of looking at life physically, emotionally, mentally and soulfully.
Being able to identify what is happening to me on all the levels and integrate them into a personal expression has provided the mirroring I did not receive as an infant and child. Mirroring is an act of reflection and can be an artful way of expressing one’s whole self. And for an adoptee or any person who did not receive the appropriate mirroring in their formative years of development, it can be truly healing. That’s why I designed my Mirrors of the Soul coaching programs to:
Connect clients to their soul’s wisdom and help them express it through being witnessed and mirrored.
Encounter any creative or internal blocks they may be experiencing, meet and move them through the body, transform through the process and grow in their daily life.
Uncover the many places where mirrors for soul expression or creativity are found in the body.
Ground and center that creativity within the client’s own resources and metaphors.
Is there a question or self-inquiry you are living with or have been living with for years that you’d like more time, space, or support in exploring? In my coaching programs, I use the Tamalpa Life/Art Process® to guide my clients through their own self-inquiries using the four levels of awareness and the tools outlined here:
If this sounds interesting to you, please reach out to me through www.dialogicalpersona.com and find out more at www.dialogicalpersona.com/mirrorsofthesoul. If you’d like to learn more about the Tamalpa Life/Art Process®, go to www.tamalpa.org.
Kelsay Elizabeth Myers, Executive Contributor Brainz Magazine
Kelsay is a professional writer, artist, and registered somatic movement educator (RSME) with the International Somatic Movement Education and Therapy Association. She is passionate about trauma healing and restoring connection to ancestral roots and wisdom for a fuller sense of self and creative expression. As an expressive arts coach and founder of Dialogical Persona Healing Arts, LLC, she helps people from all over the world that want freedom from inner blocks holding them back embody resources to transform their lives with soul-based expressive arts programs and courses. The mission of her work is to hold space for the full expression of a living, vibrant and multifaceted self through the embodied arts. She has trained with Tamalpa Institute in the Life/Art Process, Clean Language facilitation through The Academy for Soul-based Coaching and Integrative Somatic Trauma Therapy approaches.
