Power
Power made me a coat. For a long time I kept it in the back of my closet. I didn’t like to wear it much. But I always took good care of it. When I first started wearing it again, it smelled like mothballs. As I wore it more, it started fitting better, and stopped smelling like mothballs.
I was afraid if I wore the coat too much someone would want to take it or I would accidentally leave it in the dojo dressing room. But it has my name on the label now, and doesn’t really fit anyone else. When people ask me where I found such a becoming garment, I tell them about the tailor. Power, who knows how to make coats that you grow into. First, you must find the courage to approach him and ask him to make your coat. Then, you must find the patience inside yourself to wear the coat until it fits.
Listening in therapy is an art form. If done effectively, change can happen through helping
the client move further into their ongoing flow of experience. The wording comes in a variety of versions; however, the idea behind the term listening is similar as can be seen across the following samples:
A safe and steady human presence willing to be with whatever comes up is a most powerful factor. If we do not try to improve or change anything, if we add nothing, if however bad something is we only say what we understand exactly. Such a response adds our presence and helps clients to stay with and go further into whatever they sense and feel just then. This is perhaps the most important thing that any person helping others needs to know. (Gendlin, 1996, as cited in Cornell, 2005, p. 149)
In Art Therapy, I listen to what people make with their hands:
The listening response is an attempt to make contact with and carry forward this experiential flow. It’s not enough for the therapist to just say back the client’s words. Words are not feelings. The listener is trying to point his words at the concrete experiential flow for which the listenee is making symbols (words). The listenee checks the listener’s words against this ongoing flow. When the listening response is just right, it has an experiential effect – the flow of experiencing is carried forward. (Friedman, p.73)
This listening opens possibilities for children to grow and develop in a way that is inline with their innate potential and desire, not in ways imposed on them. As an art therapist I know that authentic listening empowers children to get in touch with their implicit knowing of what the next right step is for them to feel better, get out of conflict and be able to move ahead in their lives. It is helping the child listen to and ‘be with’ whatever is disturbing them at the moment and teaching them that they can tolerate those emotions and sensations and listen to what they are saying to them. The focus is on supporting the intelligence of the child’s inner creative process. The child is learning to trust and stay with themselves and their own evolving process, which enables them to feel that they have advocacy, knowledge in knowing what they need to feel whole and healthy.
I work with a lot of children who live in foster homes. Some of my children have moved multiple times. In my art therapy studio, we make a lot of homes. Homes for animals, us, and dolls. Is it necessary to feel ‘at home’ where you live in order to evolve? Can our roots grow anywhere? Can we feel ‘at home’ in any environment, with any people, in any conditions? Home often has cultural, societal, familial, political connections characterized by family, and memories that translate into feelings of safety and love. When moving to a new place, one often feels in a state of limbo; both excited about the new possibilities and alien in the new home. One could feel like tourist, imposter, outsider, or exile. Salman Rushdie in Step Across This Line (2002) writes “the human dream of leaving. a dream at least as powerful as its countervailing dream of roots . . is the tension between these two dreams.” (p. 13) When we move to a new place we live in this tension. Will that tension turn into a trauma, or new possibilities for growth and healing? It could go in many directions: ‘How does living in a city that does or does not feel like one’s ‘home’ affect you? Can people thrive in countries, cities, houses in which they do not feel at home? What does it mean to be without home? Is it necessary to feel ‘at home’ where one lives to be ‘at home’ in one’s life experience? What is a home? What is home to you?
I have used the process of making prayer flags with groups in many different ways over the years. A prayer flag is a rectangular cloth often found strung along mountain ridges and peaks high in the Himalayas to bless the surrounding countryside or for other purposes. These panels are wood-blocked printed with words and images. In our Archetype Group we made Prayer Flags as our art response to studying the Sun and Moon Archetypes.
The cloth pieces can then be hung in a covered outdoor place or inside. I have made prayer flags with clients in grief and loss groups, addiction groups and other process groups. It is a beautiful way to send a prayer out into the universe.
Rainer Maria Rilke: “Go into yourself and see how deep the place is from which your life flows.”
"We promise according to our hopes, and perform according to our fears."
~Francois de La Rouchefoucauld
Suggestions for doing a Moon Collage:
One way you can do a collage for this archetype is to think about your relationship with it and try to find images and words that reflect it. Do you include the Goddess in your Spiritual expression? Is she not yet discovered or feared in your psyche? How familiar or foreign is this realm? Another approach with this archetype is to do your collage centered around your relationship to nature. Show your feelings and thoughts about what you love, need to feel peaceful, and whole. How do you communicate with nature; is it by walking, staring at the ocean, swimming, or through your love of animals? You could fill your collage with images of Moons. Portray how this word affects you. Does it conjure up images of beautiful shimmering moons, mysterious half moons, waning, waxing, or new moons? Do you plant by the moon phases or do you bleed by the cycles of the moon? You could also approach this collage by showing a reflection of your psychic abilities. You could also center this collage around your mystical experiences and insights. Maybe you will want to do it in the light of the moonlight. Enjoy.
This weekend I taught a Level Four Focusing and Expressive Art Therapy workshop. One of the exercises we explored through art making and Focusing, started with an attunement to lightly, gently touch in with a part of us that may be holding traumatic memories, sensations and or feelings. The group experienced through Focusing, the regulatory capacity to be there for this part of them. Staying Present for themselves, staying with the experience as it unfolded moment by moment and developing the capability to give complete, unconditional regard to their wounded or traumatized part or parts helped regulate and allowed these parts to move into fresh experiencing. Our neurobiology and our interpersonal relations create a sense of our well-being.
In Focused Centered Art Therapy we are working with attuning our relationship with ourselves and our parts and healing our attachment that may have been severed due to trauma. The interpersonal attunement that is felt and experienced during Focusing then can be witnessed when it is expressed and carried further in art making. The attunement and resonance that happens in a Focusing Session between a therapist and client, as well as the attunement that the client feels with him/herself is carried one step further when the client expresses this attunement through paint, clay or other means. The attunement which is integral to healing is now also felt in the creative expression that the client has experienced. This consonant relationship between therapist/client, client/self, client/creative self provides stability and safety, such that the client can be with difficult, painful feelings in a way they have not experienced before. They are able for the first time to feel a sense of “Self” and “Someone There”, as well as, but separate from, a sensation or feeling. There is a “Me” and a “Something.” Where once they were merged withthe experience, there is now a refreshing sense of a whole person andan experience. In the attuned therapeutic relationship, there is also the sense of alliance with another who can simply “be with” our experience in Presence, which allows life forward movement to occur.
