Category Archives: creative arts therapy

Moving together builds bonds from the time we learn to walk

09 Wednesday Apr 2025

Posted by in creative arts therapy, Dance Movement Therapy, Developmental, Movement, parenting, Research, unison

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Whether they march in unison, row in the same boat or dance to the same song, people who move in time with one another are more likely to bond and work together afterward.

It’s a principle established by previous studies, but now researchers at McMaster University have shown that moving in time with others even affects the social behavior of babies who have barely learned to walk.

“Moving in sync with others is an important part of musical activities,” says Laura Cirelli, lead author of a paper now posted online and scheduled to appear in an upcoming issue of the journal Developmental Science. “These effects show that movement is a fundamental part of music that affects social behavior from a very young age.”

Cirelli and her colleagues in the Department of Psychology, Neuroscience & Behavior showed that 14-month-old babies were much more likely to help another person after the experience of bouncing up and down in time to music with that person.

Cirelli and fellow doctoral student Kate Einarson worked under the supervision of Professor Laurel Trainor, a specialist in child development research.

They tested 68 babies in all, to see if bouncing to music with another person makes a baby more likely to assist that person by handing back “accidentally” dropped objects.

Working in pairs, one researcher held a baby in a forward-facing carrier and stood facing the second researcher. When the music started to play, both researchers would gently bounce up and down, one bouncing the baby with them. Some babies were bounced in sync with the researcher across from them, and others were bounced at a different tempo.

When the song was over, the researcher who had been facing the baby then performed several simple tasks, including drawing a picture with a marker. While drawing the picture, she would pretend to drop the marker to see whether the infant would pick it up and hand it back to her — a classic test of altruism in babies.

The babies who had been bounced in time with the researcher were much more likely to toddle over, pick up the object and pass it back to the researcher, compared to infants who had been bounced at a different tempo than the experimenter.

While babies who had been bounced out of sync with the researcher only picked up and handed back 30 per cent of the dropped objects, in-sync babies came to the researcher’s aid 50 per cent of the time. The in-sync babies also responded more quickly.

The findings suggest that when we sing, clap, bounce or dance in time to music with our babies, these shared experiences of synchronous movement help form social bonds between us and our babies.

It’s a significant finding, Cirelli believes, because it shows that moving together to music with others encourages the development of altruistic helping behavior among those in a social group. It suggests that music is an important part of day care and kindergarten curriculums because it helps to build a co-operative social climate.

Cirelli is now researching whether the experience of synchronous movement with one person leads babies to extend their increased helpfulness to other people or whether infants reserve their altruistic behavior for their dancing partners

McMaster University. Helpful bouncing babies show that moving together builds bonds from the time we learn to walk.

Believe in ourselves

30 Wednesday Oct 2024

Posted by in creative arts therapy, Dance Movement Therapy, Psychology, Psychotherapy

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I am a Creative Arts & Dance Movement Psychotherapist and I have worked with children, adolescents, and adults in a variety of clinical and non-clinical settings. I think that what E.E. Cummings once said sums up one of my objectives when working with patients at the hospital:

“We do not believe in ourselves until someone reveals that deep inside us something is valuable, worth listening to, worthy of our trust, sacred to our touch. Once we believe in ourselves we can risk curiosity, wonder, spontaneous delight or any experience that reveals the human spirit.”

Dance Movement Therapy and drawing

23 Wednesday Oct 2024

Posted by in art, creative arts therapy, Dance Movement Therapy

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In Dance Movement Therapy (a Creative Arts Therapy), therapists use a variety of tools. One is the use of drawn images. When I work with clients I use art in service to therapy, allowing the client to draw before moving so the image becomes a prop, and/or a drawing after moving allowing the client to draw their experience.

In the creative arts process, symbols that are created contain valuable information which speak to the circumstances of life. The unique aspect of the creative arts is that it often taps into the subconscious using a different part of the brain to express than what is used to verbalize

When using drawings with clients I look beyond the  psychopathological perspective, and view the work for its intrinsic value as an expression. I acknowledge the universality of images and symbols with an open mind to the uniqueness and specific feeling content of the client’s creation.

 

 

A tree as metaphor

17 Wednesday Apr 2024

Posted by in art, creative arts therapy, Dance Movement Therapy

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Before I ever got to graduate school to study dance movement therapy I practiced, studied and assisted in a movement based creative arts modality for 20 some years. This modality, called Motional Processing is based on the (Anna) Halprin Method and uses therapy techniques from movement, art, writing, drama and group. When I work with groups and individuals today these techniques are an essential part of my practice.

One of these techniques is working in the environment with metaphors. In 1991 while assisting with a Motional Processing group I had an opportunity to jump into the experience as a participant. This particular group was a ten-day residency of adults who came together to learn and expand their self understanding through a creative arts group process. On this day we went to a park and the group was instructed to find a tree that spoke to some aspect of where they were in their lives and once they found the tree they were to explore their thoughts and feelings through writing, drawing and moving.

The tree I chose was an oak that was quite massive and spoke to me of solidness and tradition with deep roots. My exploration of this tree included creative movement around the mighty oak as well as a poem and drawing.

SONY DSC

Blessing Tree
The words I hear come from
The voice of De Danna & the sound of
The wings of the Red Tail

In procession we walk/ side by side-proud like horses
The rows sway with each hoof beat

Together our voices raise the cry
A sweet song of ancient harmonies
Which dance on our
Lips –hands-feet-hearts

We are the tribe that carries the talking feather

Come let us bless this tree
And weave a circle round
And celebrate the birth of a new spring.

In the creative arts process the symbols that one creates in writing/drawing and movement contain valuable messages which speak to the circumstances of life. The unique aspect of the creative arts is that it often taps into the subconscious parts of ourselves and literally uses a different part of the brain to express.

This tree, for me, was a symbol of strength, endurance and family of choice: the strength of roots and the endurance to maintain under pressure, and family, as a great uncle or perhaps a grandfather.

I embrace trees in my life as symbols and more. Trees have been friends, play mates and companions in my life. They have been a place to hide, to cry, to feel comforted, and to play. Trees have provided food, shade, color and scent. They have and continue to be a blessing in my life.

The neuroscience of creativity

27 Wednesday Mar 2024

Posted by in brain, creative arts therapy, Creativity, Mental Health

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Do you have to be intelligent to be creative? Can you learn to be more creative? In this episode, we speak with neuropsychologist Rex E. Jung, PhD, who studies intelligence, creativity and brain function. He discusses why – even if it sounds counterintuitive – intelligence and creativity may not have all that much in common.

Transcript of an interview with Audrey and Rex Jung from the APA website.

Audrey Hamilton: Do you have to be intelligent to be creative? Can you really learn to be more creative? In this episode, we speak with one neuropsychologist who studies intelligence, creativity and brain function. He talks about why – even if it sounds counterintuitive – intelligence and creativity may not have all that much in common. I’m Audrey Hamilton and this is “Speaking of Psychology.”

Rex Jung is an assistant professor of neurosurgery at the University of New Mexico and a practicing clinical neuropsychologist in Albuquerque. He studies both brain disease and what the brain does well – a field of research known as positive neuroscience. His research is designed to relate behavioral measures, including intelligence, personality and creativity to brain function and structure. He has published research articles across a wide-range of topics including traumatic brain injury, lupus, schizophrenia, intelligence and creativity. Welcome, Dr. Jung.

Rex Jung: Thank you, Audrey.

Audrey Hamilton: Could you first of all explain neuroimaging and tell our listeners how it helps researchers understand how people think and act?

Rex Jung: Sure. So, neuroimaging is the tool that we use to measure the brain and there’s lots of different neuroimaging techniques. I use three main neuroimaging techniques – the first that I learned in graduate school was magnetic resonance microscopy, which sounds kind of complicated. But, it is a technique that basically looks at the chemicals in your brain. It’s in a standard MRI machine like you would go to get your knee scanned. But, using some sophisticated techniques you can look at certain chemicals in the brain. Some of those chemicals are very involved in important neuronal processes. And we’ve correlated those with behavior.

A different technique is called diffusion tensor imaging, which allows us to look at water movement in the brain. And this is important because there’s lots of tubes going through your brain like the wires that connect up your computer to the Internet. And these tubes, called axons, are connecting up different processing modules of your brain and those have to be healthy. So, we can look at the health of those axons, those myelinated axons, the fatty sheath like the insulation that surrounds those tubes.

The third technique that we use is just structural magnetic resonance imaging and that allows us to look at the processing modules of the brain – the cortical thickness – the computers that are on the surface of the brain and how much or little of that you have on the surface of the brain. Those are the three main techniques that I use. There’s functional imaging, fMRI, that most people have heard of where you’re looking a blood flow, as well. Those are ways that we measure brain structure and function and this gives us the ability to do scientific measures that then we can correlate to behavioral measures in psychology.

Audrey Hamilton: Does being highly creative mean you’re also more intelligent?

Rex Jung: Not necessarily. There’s a controversy about this in the psychological literature and some people have found correlations between creativity and intelligence. They’re usually pretty low, this association. And some people make a lot of that, this low association. But usually, because this association between creativity and intelligence is low, it means that you don’t necessarily have to be intelligent to be creative. So, I spent over a decade studying intelligence. It’s one of the reasons I started studying creativity because it seemed like something distinctly different and interesting than intelligence, which I have studied. I work with very highly intelligent people in academia and scientists and not all of them are creative. Why is that? If they do go together I would be working with all of the creative people in my city in Albuquerque, but that wasn’t the case so creativity seemed to be something different.

Audrey Hamilton: Can a person learn to become more creative or simply gain intelligence?

Rex Jung: There are some tools and techniques that can help people to be more creative. We’re starting to learn more about creativity and it’s one of the things that I’m excited about in terms of creativity is that there might be ways to increase your creative capacity.

Intelligence unfortunately seems to be much more under tight genetic control. The genetic correlates of intelligence are high, like .75. So, if you have twins – they’re going to be identical twins – their correlation of their intelligence with one another is going to be very, very high. So that implies that the genetic involvement of that capacity is under much more tight control than the environment would be.

With creativity, we don’t have that information and I’m hopeful that you can modulate or modify creative cognition much more than intelligence. There are studies out there that have shown increases in intelligence scores of two, maybe three points on a particular measure, which are not particularly high. But those are also controversial. Some have been replicated. Some haven’t been replicated. And we really don’t see that in terms of intelligence. With creativity, there’s a pitched effort to try to increase creativity scores on some of these measures and we’re seeing some good initial results and I’m very hopeful about that.

Audrey Hamilton: How does the way a person’s brain works and is structured influence how creative or intelligent he or she is?

Rex Jung: The research that we’ve done shows that the brain organization of intelligence and creativity are quite different. So, when you think about those measures that I talked about, those neuroimaging measures, the brain of someone who is intelligent – think of bigger, better, stronger, faster – all the measures are pointing to higher integrity of the brain of someone who has high intelligence. So, the cortical mantle is thicker, the white matter, the wires are more myelinated, the water can travel faster and in a coherent direction, you have more of these certain chemicals that I was talking about.

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Audrey Hamilton: It’s beefed up.

Rex Jung: It’s beefed up, yes. So you can have a better organized brain.

With creativity, the story was different. In different regions of the brain, we were seeing weaker connections, thinner cortex and different levels of these same biochemicals. So, it was really clear from these studies that intelligence and creativity were different because we were seeing different pictures in the measures we were taking of the brain. But I tend to look at creativity and intelligence as two different kinds of reasoning. That creativity is kind of reasoning without all of the information present. So, call it abductive reasoning. But, you have hypothesis testing about how the world could work without all of the information present. So, you have to use abstraction and metaphor and stuff like that about this might look like this or this might be this way.

With intelligence, you’re using deductive reasoning, where it’s rule-based reasoning where a equals b and that’s the way it goes. You have a rule for how this relationship works. So, creativity and intelligence are probably different types of reasoning. Both are very adaptive, but they’re just different for different types of problems that you have to solve out in the world.

Audrey Hamilton: Is real creativity rare? How about genius?

Rex Jung: So, creativity is common and genius is a lot more rare than we would believe. The term genius gets thrown around a lot. But, I think genius is rare because that combination of brain organization where you have high fidelity, beefed up brain in certain regions and then kind of down regulated brain in other regions is really going to be kind of rare where that is present in the same brain. So, to have that back and forth between intelligence and creativity, the ability to do both of those reasoning processes well, where you can do first approximations, hypothesis testing, abstraction and then create a rule, a novel and useful rule out of nothing before is rare and that is true genius.

Audrey Hamilton: Well great. Thank you so much for joining us, Dr. Jung. It’s been very, very interesting.

Rex Jung: Great. Thank you, Audrey.

Past Talking: Dance Movement Therapy

17 Wednesday Jan 2024

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Dance/movement therapy, defined by the American Dance Therapy Association (ADTA) as the “psychotherapeutic use of movement to further the emotional, cognitive, physical, and social integration of the individual,” and reflects a core social work value in its emphasis on meeting clients where they are. Everyone can meaningfully participate, regardless of his or her level of physical or cognitive functioning, and it’s not necessary for clients to be able dance to reap the benefits.

“Movement is the medium of dance/movement therapy the way water is the medium for swimming,” says Donna Newman-Bluestein, BC-DMT, adjunct instructor of dance/movement therapy at Lesley University in Cambridge, MA, and official spokesperson for the ADTA. Dance/movement therapists, she says, use dance, expressive movement, and words as the means to engage, interact, and heal. This type of therapy, she says, is healing chiefly because it “engenders a feeling of connectedness to another person; call it bonding or a sense of belonging—this is essential for health and well-being.”

The arts, says Newman-Bluestein, “teach us a great deal about values, about life, about getting along, about balance, and health. The dominant culture has values that I would consider upside-down. Even though no more than 35% of what we express when we speak is verbal, the nonverbal is ignored. For people with cognitive issues, the nonverbal is of the utmost importance. The expressive arts therapies in general are something they can excel at and grow in.”

The entry-level credential, R-DMT (registered dance/movement therapist), is based on completion of a graduate-level dance therapy program approved by the ADTA and 700 hours of supervised clinical fieldwork and internships. Board certification requires an additional two years of paid clinical employment supervised by a licensed/registered mental health professional.

Past Talking: Poetry Therapy

29 Wednesday Nov 2023

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Poetry therapy is “the use of language, symbol, and story in therapeutic, educational, and community building capacities.” It’s effective, with a wide range of populations, from children to elders, and with a broad range of problem areas, including family violence, homelessness, death and loss, and suicide. For example, it’s used when therapists employ poetry and creative writing to work on positive youth development with middle school children or when working with veterans and their families. A collaborative poem may be a helpful tool in gerontological work, while a dyadic poem may help facilitate couples/marital therapy.

Poetry therapy, which, according to the National Association for Poetry Therapy (NAPT)—established in 1969 as the Association for Poetry Therapy and formally incorporated as NAPT in 1981—has been a recognized healing art in the United States for more than 200 years, is a means through which individuals—such as those navigating grief or living with depression or cancer—can find voice for their feelings and a medium through which to participate in the therapeutic process.

The reasons poetry therapy may succeed where other traditional therapies may not—is that it is culturally sensitive and nonthreatening and thus able to “break through resistance, validate, and promote interaction.” Through practice and research, there are three major domains of poetry therapy—introducing a poem into the practice session (bibliotherapy tradition), promoting focused expressive writing (well documented health benefits), and utilizing symbolic or ceremonial activities to aid in life transitions. It’s consistent with the strengths perspective but easily adaptable to a wide range of theories, e.g., cognitive-behavioral, narrative, systems, and psychodynamic.

The International Federation for Biblio-Poetry Therapy provides credentials for poetry therapists. Certified poetry therapists and registered poetry therapists are master’s-level credentials obtained after completion of an approved program of didactic training, experience, and supervision.

Past Talking: Art Therapy

22 Wednesday Nov 2023

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Art Therapy
According to the American Art Therapy Association, art therapy is “the therapeutic use of art making, within a professional relationship, by people who experience illness, trauma, or challenges in living, and by people who seek personal development. Through creating art and reflecting on the art products and processes, people can increase awareness of self and others; cope with symptoms, stress, and traumatic experiences; enhance cognitive abilities; and enjoy the life-affirming pleasures of making art.”

Registered art therapists are credentialed by the Art Therapy Credentials Board of the American Art Therapy Association after obtaining a master’s degree in art therapy and gaining supervised postgraduate clinical experience.
There’s no client who can’t be helped by art therapy, Goebl-Parker says—not even the blind. That, she suggests, is because art is felt as well as seen. “Art therapists really can be anywhere; any setting in which it would make sense that there would be a therapist or a counselor is where art therapy can be helpful. For example, it’s increasingly used, she says, in substance abuse, where it can help provide the motivation for treatment.” Goebl-Parker uses it “as a way to crystalize for clients what they can get out of therapy so they can stay committed to something and to help people locate their own impetus for change.”

One of the leading strengths of art therapy rests in its ability to harness the power of the metaphor. “There’s a huge range in how it’s used,” Goebl-Parker says, noting it might be “a metaphor of the material engagement—what it feels like to have your hand in the clay bucket—or the story of the object one makes.” Children in a session may be nonverbal, but in the process of “messing around with materials” they create clear metaphors for what they’re experiencing that can later be discussed. “So people who would have a hard time doing that work verbally can work in metaphor and the materials become an adjunctive way for them to have language, to have a different kind of voice,” Goebl-Parker says.

An offshoot of art therapy that’s increasingly popular is phototherapy. “Photo therapy techniques can be used for most psychotherapy situations, and there are numerous applications for different age populations and diagnostic groups, such as adolescents, people with schizophrenia, abuse survivors, and bereavement groups,” explains Gontarz York, who describes herself as a “lifelong gerontological social worker” who finds photographs to be powerful therapeutic tools.
While phototherapy can be useful with any population, Gontarz York uses it chiefly to elicit memories for reminiscence and life review work with older adults.

“Everyday photographs, found in albums and boxes, framed by the bedside, mounted on walls, posted on mirrors and refrigerators, offer therapists wonderful opportunities to begin conversations, develop relationships, and offer older adults the opportunity to engage in meaningful interactions through reminiscence and life review.” Every photograph, she explains, is a self-portrait, a window into the inner world of the client. “As clients discuss their photographs, we receive a fuller understanding of who that person is and how they perceive their world,” Gontarz York says. “Besides being a lasting memory of lives and actions, photographs document the past and contain valuable information regarding relationships and personal values,” she adds.

Past Talking: Drama Therapy

15 Wednesday Nov 2023

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Drama therapy relies on a range of techniques to meet numerous therapeutic goals and outcomes, including, according to the Drama Therapy Association, the ability of clients to tell their stories, rehearse desired behaviors, practice relationship skills, set goals, improve interpersonal skills, achieve catharsis, appropriately express feelings, and perform the change they wish to be and see in the world.

Among the drama techniques yoked to other methods of therapy to achieve these goals are storytelling, role-playing, improvisation, performance, and the use of puppetry and masks.
Among its many uses, “Drama therapy is spot-on for working with recovering addicts,” Bailey says. “Addicts are afraid of feelings and have been numbing their feelings out for years with their substances of choice. Drama therapy is all about experiencing and expressing feelings, but it tends, especially in the beginning, to be fun, so addicts can work on slowly learning how to feel again, and feel with other people, without becoming stressed and feeling the urge to get high.”

As with other creative arts therapies, an especially powerful aspect of drama therapy rests in its ability to promote relationship building, and its nonthreatening nature encourages participation. “Drama therapy, because it generates strong bonds of trust, helps addicts work on their fears of getting close to others, asking for help, and wanting to give and take in a relationship,” Bailey says.

Another group of clients for whom drama therapy can be particularly helpful are those on the autism spectrum who have difficulty understanding and expressing emotion, Bailey says. “Drama therapy,” she adds, “provides lots of practice on these nonverbal as well as verbal communication skills. It creates trusting relationships and provides training in give and take as well as flexibility—very needed abilities for people on the spectrum.” What’s more, she says, it’s fun, so it’s easy to motivate people to participate.

A registered drama therapist is a master’s-level credential administered by the North American Drama Therapy Association (NADTA) to individuals who have completed courses in psychology and drama therapy as well as two clinically supervised internships and 1,500 hours of work experience coupled with theater experience. Candidates have either attended an accredited drama therapy master’s program or completed the NADTA Alternative Training Program under the mentorship of a board certified trainer.

More than talk

09 Wednesday Aug 2023

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While therapists can draw upon any number of talk therapy techniques to help their clients, there are times when talk isn’t helpful or can’t be summoned. In such cases, the arts can open a back door to the psyche, drawing from individuals that which they cannot yet put into words, thus catalyzing subsequent therapeutic conversations. Creative arts therapies involve the use of the arts—visual art, music, dance and movement, drama, and poetry—to facilitate therapeutic goals.

According to photographer Marianne Gontarz York, MSW, LCSW, “Eighty percent of sensory stimuli enters through our eyes and goes into our brains where it is retained visually, nonverbally. Most of us think, feel, and recall memories not in words but in imagery. These images become a verbal language when we attempt to communicate what is going on in our mind to someone else.” The creative arts, Gontarz York says, “offer our social work clients a nonverbal way of expressing themselves and communicating their needs. These adjunctive therapies are invaluable in allowing people to express themselves when words cannot.”

In addition to facilitating communication, the arts also help clients forge relationships. “Creative arts therapies are wonderful starting grounds for building a verbal and nonverbal trusting relationship between a client and therapist and in group therapy between members of the group,” says Sally Bailey, MFA, MSW, RDT/BCT, a professor and director of the drama therapy program in the School of Music, Theatre and Dance at Kansas State University. “Working together on a project—whether that is a drama game, a mural, a song, or a group poem—creates connections that gently allow clients to reveal parts of themselves to others for a richer interpersonal knowledge.”

While creative arts therapies aren’t necessarily or entirely nonverbal, they recognize that talking isn’t always the best way to communicate, and, as a result, encourage and facilitate self-expression and active participation without depending entirely on a verbal articulation of issues. “The arts therapies provide a complement to traditional ‘talk therapies’ because they can address the full range of human experience—cognitive, behavioral, and affective domains,” says Nicholas F. Mazza, PhD, dean and Patricia V. Vance professor of social work in the College of Social Work at Florida State University. These approaches, he says, are being increasingly used in social work practice because the evidence for their usefulness has grown and been demonstrated by clinical reports and by qualitative and quantitative studies.

Arts therapies are “old human technology that has been used as long as there’s been art,” observes Shelly Goebl-Parker, MSW, LCSW, ATR-BC, program director of the art therapy counseling program in the department of art and design in the College of Arts and Sciences at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. Indeed, the healing power of the arts was well known in ancient Rome and Greece.
“The arts have a long history in the practice of psychotherpy going back to the settlement house movement in the late 19th century,” Mazza says. “Through the years, the arts have been incorporated as adjunctive techniques in individual, family, group, and community practice.”
Any of the creative arts modalities may be used as a primary form of therapy or an adjunct to other modalities to improve the physical, cognitive, and psychosocial well-being of individuals with psychiatric disorders, developmental disabilities, neurological diseases, physical disabilities, and medical conditions, and may be practiced in the entire spectrum of therapeutic settings.

Kestenberg Movement Profile: Tension Flow Rhythms

16 Friday Dec 2022

Posted by in creative arts therapy, Dance Movement Therapy, Preschoolers

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KMP Movement Analysis is the comprehensive system for identifying psychological, developmental, emotional, cognitive and global health/imbalance through movement observation, notation and interpretation.
If the mind, emotions, and body are a closely integrated , mutually interacting system, then it is reasonable that we should be able to gain information about the mind by observing the body. The body and its manner of moving not only reveals aspects of current feelings and emotions, but can give us insight into an individual’s past. As Loman and Foley wrote in 1996, “…experiences get stored in the body and are reflected in body movement.” A person who feels rejected may develop a hollow, narrowed body attitude which expresses and reinforces such feelings throughout life. Because both physical and emotional experiences leave long term traces upon the way people hold themselves and move, the study of movement opens a door to the study of patterns of early development, coping strategies and personality configurations.

We walk together

02 Thursday Jun 2022

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In my work with clients/patients I sometimes use the written word to help process what they are feeling and what I am feeling about working with them.  I worked for years at a residential drug/alcohol rehab center and wrote a short poem about one experience.

1. We walk together
toe to heal
In the way we came here

Youngest to oldest – Male to female –
Opiate to alcohol – Forceps to stone

2. We all
Everyone of us
walk for a reason

3. Up the hill
breathlessly
we reach the top

4. around the pond and into the trees
A shelter – A holding
in the environment

5. Close your eyes
Notice your breath – As you inhale – as you exhale
Feel the wind – notice the smells – the scent of the earth

The sunlight and shadows sway back and forth to the rhythm of the branches moving in the wind

6. Don’t be afraid – shiver- cry out – weep – scream
We are all killers inside
We are all healers inside
Our blood runs through the veins of our ancestors
And is here to stay – an echo of times now gone

A dream of times yet to come

Interpretation

1. Today I took my clients outside to the park. We walked in a pecking order; the client with the most time were in front followed by the others in order of time, drug of choice, sex, finally by age. It was a metaphor for their life journey, of their choices and circumstances thrust on them from birth.

2. In the clients (and us all) our journey is a reflection of who and where we came from. Our personality and our history. Our wants and needs. Our understanding of these things. In this residential rehab clients have come because of an intersection of factors, both internal and external.

3. The walk with the clients took us up a sharp and steep hill, the last little leg of our walk before we reached the park and the pond. The walk of addiction is a mighty hard row to hoe in the discovery of the self

4. The clients were very happy to see the pond and dogs and people, and we headed for the trees to find some sanctuary. This little stand of trees I felt would be a good holding environment to do a movement meditation in a public space.

5. I led the group through a meditation in the environment, giving them a chance to be calm/passive and feel nature, with its enormous power. Like that higher power that 12 step teaches. Also nature has a rhythm that we, as earthlings cannot escape, it is deep inside us, with us since the womb.

6. In the mediation I encouraged the group to go to where it was safe and to go a little beyond safety, to a new place. Being different (clean/sober) in a setting (park) that is familiar is challenging. They will face that challenge when they leave the rehab. As addicts they must accept their dark side, and they must recognize their light side. This killer and healer is the story of being human, told by all cultures since we first lit a fire and huddled together. It is this story telling that teaches us to remember the mistakes so we know what to do if we make them and know how to avoid them.

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Dance/Movement Therapy & Rena Kornblum

10 Wednesday Nov 2021

Posted by in creative arts therapy, Dance, Dance Movement Therapy, Movement, Psychology, Psychotherapy, Wellness, YouTube

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The University of Wisconsin-Madison, School of Social Work, presents a lecture by Rena Kornblum.
Dance/movement therapy is the psycho-therapeutic use of movement to further the emotional, cognitive, physical and social integration of the individual.
In this video, you will learn about the field of dance/movement therapy, and how non-verbal work can augment your practice.
Rena Kornblum, MCAT, ADTR, DTRL, is the Executive Director of Hancock Center for Dance/Movement Therapy & a Board Certified dance/movement therapist.