Jurisprudencial

Seventeen women gather in a sunny carpeted conference room for a morning workshop about art therapy. We begin with a centering exercise in which all are asked to write down their intention for this time of creative inquiry. Then I ask everyone to stand and find a space where they won’t bump into a neighbor. I begin with the first rhythm, ‘flowing,’ and suggest that people follow my cues or find their own path with eyes closed or lowered so that they attend to their own internal experience.

Start with one hand. Let a flowing movement move from your hand to your arm to your shoulder. Experiment with pacing; let the motion be faster, then slower. You may find a particular tune coming to mind. Go ahead and hum it. Now engage the other arm. Be the conductor of your own flowing symphony! Now get your torso involved…now your hips. Go gently. Now legs. Move the flow out into space. Open your eyes just enough so you don’t bump into others. If you do, let the flow carry you along. Now raise your eyes and really see another person. Notice what her flow looks like. Go ahead and

imitate her movement. Try it on for size. It’s OK to copy… Now come back to your own flow.

And so on for about 10 minutes.

Then come to stillness. Review your experience, the sensations that accompanied it, any colors, sounds, images that came. When you are ready, go to your place and translate the energy of flowing, your flowing experience, onto paper (18 x 24 inch rough newsprint or gray bogus paper). Use either pastels or oil pastels or charcoal. Don’t try to make a picture. What you’re doing is translating energy into marks on paper. It’s fine to keep standing and moving or humming while you draw.

After about 15 minutes of drawing, I give the next directive.

Now move into writing. Either on your paper, front or back, or in the journal you brought, jot down notes about these five questions: 1. What was my personal response to the flowing rhythm? 2. What is my response to the drawing I made? 3. Where in my life do I experience this rhythm? 4. Is there somewhere in my life I would like more of it? 5. Where in nature do I experience this rhythm?

And so goes the morning, until by 11: 30 (two hours) we have explored all five rhythms: flowing, staccato, chaos, lyrical and stillness. Then we push the tables against the wall and arrange all the artwork in a giant radial so that all the ‘stillness’ drawings form an inner circle with the other four drawings radiating out from there in the order they were created. We look, just standing back and taking it all in. Some people stand on chairs to get a better perspective. ‘What do you see? What do you feel? How was it for you doing this sequence?’ Many speak. They liked it. They feel more alive now. They notice how their least comfortable rhythm, often ‘chaos’ or ‘stillness,’ holds the most energy and attraction. Several note their difficulty with ‘lyrical’ because it reminded them of stereotypically feminine characteristics: ‘too pretty,’ ‘ballet like,’ ‘sweet,’ ‘too pink.’ ‘I’m trying for something more direct and powerful.’ Yet others found lyrical the perfect remedy for too much chaos or too much formless flowing. One woman described the discomfort of her chaotic movements as jerky, surprising, random, unpredictable, hard on the body. Given that, she is surprised when her chaos on paper yields the image of a butterfly struggling from a cocoon. She realizes how chaos is a fundamental aspect of birthing, of any creative process, and feels comforted by the reminder that springtime is chaotic and giving birth is arduous.

Gabrielle Roth (1989) recommends ‘doing the rhythms’ every day. Her book, with its many stories about the energizing effect of her rhythmic exercises on people’s lives, inspires the kind of creativity which mimics the full range of

nature’s cycles. For me, the only omission in Roth’s approach is the concept of destruction, although it may be assumed in her ‘chaos’ sequence. Destruction goes hand in hand with creation, as any gardener will tell you. Pruning, weeding, recycling waste into compost…these are health-giving activities that encourage the production of more abundant flowers, more desirable fruit. Art therapist Cathy Malchiodi (Malchiodi and Cattaneo 1988) describes how the destruction of a particular basket drawing was her

first step toward liberation and separation. The images that resulted from the chaos of destruction represented steps to understanding and identifying my feelings about my situation and the role I played within it. (Malchiodi and Cattaneo 1988, pp. 56–57)

In the same vein I have invited clients to rip up a hated repetitive picture, select a small number of the colored pieces which seem interesting in and of themselves, rearrange those dozen pieces on a clean page, glue them down and use additional art media to embellish or create an environment for this new image. Here again, as in the natural cycle of death and rebirth, the breaking down of old forms is critical to the emergence of the new.

Working with children from abusive homes prompted me to develop a variation of the destroying/rebuilding activity described above.