A student in a week-long summer art therapy and Authentic Movement class had the following spontaneous experience. The structure she uses to tell her story parallels the power of the sacred symbolic healing process as described by Donald Sandner (1991) during his research on Navaho healing rituals. That process includes five stages: Preparing, Evoking, Naming, Transforming, Releasing.
Preparing: My first attempt at walking within the enclosed circle felt
awkward. Internally it felt quite silly… I adjusted to the quiet… As I walked, I became amazed at the weakness of my left side and my inability to walk straight without tipping from one side or the other. Engulfed in time and space, I listened to my body language. In no uncertain terms, it was plainly telling me things were ‘out of balance’ in my life. I discovered that imbalance was a recurring theme.
Evoking: During the beginning of session three’s movement, I was having
a glorious time, praising and worshiping God, singing within my spirit, and enjoying a closeness so desperately needed, when to my utter astonishment and horror, various noises began to enter into my environment. First there was slapping on the floor…quickly joined by body slapping … The noise got louder and louder, shattering my quiet world. As I tried to protect myself, I covered my ears and internally cried out, ‘Stop it, stop it’ when my body
remembered… [The student drew an image that reflected a traumatic experience in her childhood.]
Naming: A time long ago, as a small child, I was laying in bed and hearing
my parents argue…Mom was shouting at my Dad, but in addition…she was screaming, ‘I am going to kill you with this knife!’ I could hear the clank of the knife. My body remembered the paralyzed feeling within and the internal crying out. I remembered my hands over my ears…the position of my legs…the room…I was experiencing this direct knowing…it was not pleasant…I wanted to get away.
Transforming: Through some deep breaths, a very faint remembrance
came to me…that a person can imagine Jesus with them in a memory that needed healing…I raised my arms and cried out to my God. At that moment, Jesus was at my side. Arm in arm we walked together to that house, to that kitchen, to that room. I saw my Mom and Dad together there, they were telling me how sorry they were. Mom tenderly cried out; she didn’t mean it. She reached out to me with loving arms. Dad’s arm was around my Mom and all four of us embraced as the painful memory became surrounded and flooded with God’s supernatural love and forgiveness…[The second drawing reflected the transformative power existent in the imaginal realm. Without conscious or directed attention, the student encountered a healing image. This image allowed her to reconcile an image of pain with an image of extraordinary power and beauty.]
Releasing: [Later, in group sharing] Although a little apprehensive, I
showed both my pictures and shared exactly what happened. The encouragement and support I felt was overwhelming. I skipped dinner that night, grabbed my little cassette recorder and a tape with some praise music, and began a slow walk on the path next to the lake. I had never been so in touch with every movement of my body. I wanted to sing and dance. My movement was choreographed with the tape and I inwardly laughed at what two joggers must have thought as they passed me on the narrow path. I did not care. The experience was too enjoyable. It was a direct knowing of my own experience of healing. My legs were light and my heart was dancing.
From an imaginal perspective, a trauma can continue to plague a person because, when a trauma is experienced, it ‘literally’ becomes part of the victim’s bodyspirit. As described above, cells, muscles, bones, and organs make subtle responsive adjustments to what is experienced as intolerable. The reality of a wounding forms an inner imaginal pattern that our body can ‘hold’ indefinitely, presumably for purposes of survival. It calls out to us through a hunched shoulder, a face whose features grow contrary, a stiff knee, an aching back, not simply as the results of physical miscalculations of a mechanical body but as
sensory responses of imagination to body’s contact and experience with an other.
Arnie Mindell (1985) and Peter Levine (1997), among others, provide theory and forms for understanding and negotiating the healing of these traumas. Through trial and error, early Navaho scientist-doctors developed an imaginal methodology including the forming of images in the sand, and complex ritual based on cultural spiritual beliefs, to heal traumas. What this student imaginally experiences not only evokes an image of early childhood trauma but also transforms it into a healing image. In the presence of a witness, her authentic powerless feelings of the small child evoke the powerful presence of divinity. With it as her ally, she is able to deeply imagine, i.e. directly experience, a healing outcome to the trauma. The final step of bringing it back to the community, and being supported, changes the level of her experience hierarchically from one of her self-system (somatized trauma) to a larger social system: her trauma is healed not only inside her but through the collective human support she receives within the circle (Dow 1986). In this story, her art images stand as testament to the reality and truthfulness of her extraordinary experience.