A practicing expressive arts therapist, a participant in a nine-month ‘Imaginal Practices: Art Therapy and Authentic Movement’ group for two years, tells the following story. It reveals the rich aboriginal heritage contained in our bodyspirit. What is in our cells and bones ultimately transcends our particular culture and time. Repeatedly the message offered is one of healing and love.
I find myself standing with my hands behind my back. They are bound behind me and I cannot move. I feel the noose around my neck and my feet dangling just off the ground. The sounds in the room are strangely removed from me, as if I am there and not there. There is movement and sound all around me but I am separate, as if in limbo between this world and another, as if I am between life and death. It is hard to think and to feel. I am suspended in a reality where there is neither thinking or feeling. Inside me I know that I am dead, that I have been hung. I am waiting. There is nothing to do… There is no wishing that this did not happen to me… I wait a long time, my only question, ‘What now?’ I feel fire all around me. The sounds come closer. A mover is very close and below me making unearthly sounds. The sounds begin to fill my vacant reality. I know that I am hearing the sound of a wounded animal. It is not of this world but of another. The soul of the
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creature is crying out to the wild emptiness, telling its tragic tale of abandonment and neglect.
My heart opens and in a moment of deep compassion, a sob moves through my body. When it passes I begin to feel shaking starting in my feet.
As I surrender to it, it moves up my body, its intensity increasing until my whole body is shaking and my hands fall free. Now the shaking is so intense that it begins to move my feet. I am conscious only of surrendering to the shaking. I begin to move about the floor. I hear my feet pounding on the floor as I move. It is not a movement that I am consciously making. I do not think I could make such a movement if I were to try. It is too erratic and too quick for my conscious mind to direct. I am only conscious of not trying to stop it.
I move for quite some time before I stop from sheer exhaustion. I want only to fall to the ground and rest. A voice inside stops me. ‘Stay on your feet!’
I obey and catch my breath. ‘Walk in the world! Give it to others!’ I hear. I begin to walk in a large circular movement, something I often do. As I walk I feel energy moving up my body and out my arms. With a full heart I want to shower love over everyone in the room. I walk the circle until I feel finished.
Then I lie down on the couch and rest deeply. I am moved to walk again.
Again walking the circle. I come to rest on a chair sitting alone in bright sunlight. The bell rings ending the movement.
I begin to draw (Plate 12 in center section). I know I must start on black paper. I must show me hanging in the dark green forest with fire all around. I must make some representation of the dancer who moves with such force and abandon, the ritual dancer. I see him dancing around a fire. When I try to draw him only his head emerges, his face framed by the scaffolding on which I hang. Soft watery compassionate eyes emerge. His face is surrounded by fiery hair. When I try to draw his mouth, I see that I have drawn wings on the woman, me, who was hung. I know now that he is there to receive my spirit and take me into my next reality. A warmth fills my body as I look at the drawing. Only now does my conscious mind take hold. I remember a warning from Jean Shinoda Bolen that the burning of the witches affects us today deep in our body memory when we begin to move more deeply into our body wisdom. Though I have grown tremendously, I struggle with fear in my life, with letting my power move freely in the world and with full force.
I feel a deep healing from my movement and my drawing, an understanding that while crazy, horrible things happen in our world at the level of culture, there is a deeper reality, which is at its core benevolent. Peace envelops my body as I let this feeling of benevolence absorb my reality. What is so very precious is that this new understanding of benevolence is not a thought or a belief it is an actual bodyspirit experience. [Later] I am filled with new strength as I go about my work in my cultural reality, working in my own way to bring balance to the light and the darkness that surround me.
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As witness, I evoke my human capacity to ‘contain’ the space that this brave woman is working in, and to travel with her as an imaginal ally. My own bodyspirit journeys with her as her story unfolds: we share the imaginal space.
The metaverbal language of her bodyspirit, both in movement and in art making, provides the whole circle of participants with a deeper initiation into our aboriginal human capacity to hold and be guided by bodyspirit wisdom.
Mystery is more important than analysis
Bodyspirit continually invites and expresses itself as unitive energy whenever we pursue the patterns of our imagination over time. Whether as a single image, or a series of images, the healing call to wholeness is inherent to our human nature.
Mystical experiences reach beyond personal story to reveal collective patterns that offer a culture or group an opportunity for revisioning essential myths.
Equally, such transformative patterns reveal forgotten intuitions and retrieve lost relationships among all life forms, phenomena that Abram (1996) describes with great beauty and awe.
Some months after the visit with the ‘imagery doctor’ who invited me into the ‘apricot cells’ experience, I bring her drawings from my illness. Back in school working on my doctorate I think she might serve on my doctoral committee. She is enthused about the images as I unfold their story to her, and then the conversation takes an unexpected turn. She begins to analyze the images, suggesting that this figure or that figure means one thing or another, e.g.
in an image where I am crawling across the floor during Authentic Movement, she comments on how ‘masculine’ the image looks and asks if I have any thoughts about her observations. Soon it becomes clear that her interest is in my doing a careful Jungian analysis of the images for my dissertation. While Jung was the primary ‘spirit’ who guided me into the world of psychology in the 1970s, I feel myself distancing from her and her well-intentioned comments.
Her suggestions don’t ‘feel’ correct. What neither of us know at the time is that there is a different ‘calling’ going on. I intuitively trust the inner impulse not to reduce my experience to a particular psychology, but rather to stay with the mystery.
What does it mean to stay with mystery? On the personal level, why not analyze, explain my images? Viewed on a larger scale, in the face of the current greedy monoenculturation of the Earth, how can mystery be helpful? An answer doesn’t come easily. I stop, wait, look. An image begins to form; it comes as ‘skin,’ then, ‘semipermeable membrane.’ A possibility emerges. Images are
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like my skin: they are continually birthing and dying, forming, transforming, melting away. To fix any image to a glass slide and slip it under the eye of a psy-chological microscope, even with the best of intentions, alters it. My skin is to
‘hold’ me together as a recognizable form, but it is not to isolate me from others nor to prevent me from fully participating in the field that holds all of us. My semipermeable skin itself says ‘No separating!’ Neither myself nor the images are something to be isolated from the context of our original aliveness – even with the best of intentions.
The value of this truth challenges me to stay with mystery, stay vitally connected with the ‘someone inside me’ who holds me on my journey. Mystery offers the balance needed to offset the delusions that we can know everything we need to know intellectually. Participating in mystery is an active healing balance to the addictive behaviors we Westerners seem to be swimming in.
Mystery allows more space for ourselves to inhabit; we feel less need to numb the pain of living lives too fast-paced and fast-packed for our own well-being.
For aboriginal cultures, illness means imbalance. Ceremony and the arts are directed toward mending the imbalances, making amends, and putting the individual and community world back into balance with the ‘something larger.’
This is, of course, also the value of the creative arts therapies. Mystery reminds us that our aboriginal bodyspirits participate in a universe that is cyclical; the cyclical nature of our lives are each micro-cycles of earth’s bodyspirit, even as the Earth is recycling itself within one universe (a gift of the apricot cell story). With mystery, we see beyond cultural dogma and beliefs; we wake up from our cultural entrainment and begin to live the rich human lives for which we were created.