of listening for what best expresses who you are and how you are feeling in that moment. I believe that our bodies hold stories about who we are, and all of us, because of our different experiences, have our own stories to tell. When we take the time to listen, without overthinking what we are doing, we open the door for our physical and emotional bodies to share their wisdom with us. We almost always discover unexpected stories that have been there all along, below the level of conscious awareness. Much has been written in recent decades about how the body holds our stories—some authors say “the body never lies”; others say “the body bears the burden” or “the body keeps the score.” Research reveals that our stories live deep within our muscles and bodies, affecting our neurobiology, our relationship patterns, and our expectations for love and for strife. Isn’t it time we turned to face ourselves and learned to listen?
THE POWER OF BODY WISDOM
Let me give you an example of how body wisdom can remain dormant for decades until we become open to it. One time when I was getting some bodywork done, the masseuse got right underneath my shoulder blade, and all of a sudden I started seeing a scene from my past. It was something I hadn’t ever really thought about; people had told me about it, but I didn’t identify with it. As a young child, I used to go every evening with Hugo, our chauffeur, to pick up my father at the station, and I would run across the street to meet him at the train. One evening I ran across the road and a car came out of nowhere and hit me. It had apparently hit me right where the masseuse touched me, evoking a memory lodged for decades in my body. I saw myself being hit by the car and dragged for half a block. The terror of that experience was something that had been totally blocked. I started screaming and then just sobbing. And then I remembered how Hugo picked me up and cared for me. It wasn’t my father, it was Hugo who held me in his arms and comforted me and carried me. Why was it Hugo, and not my father? Emotions of shock and sadness, of always wanting to be held by my father, arose from this one pressure point in my body.
This story provides a good example of how an experience can live on in the body, long after that experience has occurred. Talking about it may not fully clear trauma—it often needs to be processed on a kinesthetic level. As you can see from this story, the kinesthetic sense was connected to my capacity to remember and to feel emotions about what had happened to me, even though so many decades had passed. This is what is meant by “the body bears the burden.” The body is the one map you always carry with you, and it is shaped by all of your life experience, both positive and negative. As a guide and teacher, reference text and tool, it is vast and matchless. A good map may show many different ways to get where you want to go, and it will also show the way to places you’ve never been before. All the information we need to make a new choice, to take another road to another place, is encoded in our bodies. But we have forgotten how to really read the map. We have limited ourselves to just a part of the picture and mistaken this part for the whole. An important function of the Life/Art Process is the practice it gives us in listening to the multiple levels of meaning within our bodies, even—or especially—when hard or unpleasant memories and sensations are found there. The skill of tapping our body wisdom gives us a more complete experience of all the things that have happened to us, deeply affecting our capacity to direct our lives in the present and the future.
As my daughter Daria Halprin has written: “The entire repertoire of our life experiences can be accessed and activated through the body in movement. Since movement is the primary language of the body, moving brings us to deep feelings and memories…. Whatever resides in our body—despair, confusion, fear, anger, joy—will come up when we express ourselves in movement. When made conscious, and when entered into as mindful expression, movement becomes a vehicle for insight and change.”4
THE PSYCHOKINETIC VISUALIZATION PROCESS AND HEALING THROUGH DANCE
When movement is liberated from the constricting armor of stylized, preconceived gestures, an innate feedback process between movement and emotions is generated. This feedback process is an essential ingredient of expressive movement. When you understand this, movement becomes a vehicle for releasing emotions that are essential in a healing process. The feedback process operates on a level that may not be verbal. It is not always possible to express in words the content of what we feel, where our emotions are coming from, and how to work with the emotions that arise in our personal lives. In trying to understand the messages our bodies are giving us, rather than analyzing or interpreting in a cognitive way, I have found it helpful to use a technique that comes from my years of working with children. After some movement practice, I ask participants to draw the images generated in their mind’s eye by their movements and emotions. These drawings, made on paper or canvas, are what I call visualizations. They are intuitive in the same way that movement is when it taps into a deep primal source. What’s important is that these drawings reveal stories that we wouldn’t otherwise be in touch with, much as dreams do.
Such visualizations provide an opportunity to symbolize an experience, giving you something to refer back to. A symbol may contain many layers of significance, and it remains there in front of you to contemplate, whereas movement is very immediate and fleeting—you move and it’s gone. A visualization is more like a totem, a reflection. You look at it and that reconnects you with the experience, allowing you to feel the moment again. In addition, you may gain insights about what the drawing is saying to you. The process doesn’t end with the drawing, however. I have discovered that it is then necessary to dance your visualization, to connect its images to your movements and emotions through dance. Once you draw an image and dance it, the visualization you create after this dance will be different from the one you did before. So the dance is changing the dancer. It is clear that through this process we can receive messages from an intelligence within our bodies that is deeper and more unpredictable than anything we can understand through rational thought. This process—the Psychokinetic Visualization Process—supports the transformation of the dancer.
These ideas have been reinforced by a personal experience with healing that influenced the creation of Circle the Earth. In 1972 I was diagnosed with cancer. While a cancer diagnosis is sadly not unusual these days, the circumstance of my diagnosis was unusual. As a dancer working from a holistic approach, I had always been concerned with the relationship between the mind and the body. I understood the connection between movement and emotion, but perceiving how the mind works in relation to the body wasn’t so simple for me. At the time of my diagnosis, I was actively exploring the use of visualizations as a way of making that link between mind and body.
One day while I was participating in the Psychokinetic Visualization Process, I drew an image of myself I was unable to dance. This was a signal to me. Why couldn’t I dance it? What was blocking me? I had drawn a round ball in my pelvic area. I intellectualized that it was a symbol of an embryo pointing the way to new beginnings. But some part of me was sure that this interpretation of my drawing was wrong, because I didn’t want to put the drawing into motion. That night, when my mind was quiet, I had intimations that the image I had drawn had something to tell me, and that I was not listening.
The next day I made an appointment with my doctor. I asked him to examine me precisely where I had drawn this round ball. He diagnosed cancer.
I went through traditional operation procedures, and radical ones at that, altering my body for life and leaving me with feelings of real uncertainty about my future. Would I ever dance again? The doctor assured me I was just fine, which was odd because I didn’t feel fine! He also added that if I didn’t have a recurrence within five years, I would be totally out of the woods. Three years after my operation, I had a recurrence. I knew then that I was going to have to make some very drastic changes in my life and my art.
After my recovery from the first operation, I began intensive research. I wanted to understand how it was possible to receive an unconscious message about something in my body through a drawing. For a period of three years, I collected slides of drawings done by students in my classes and I studied them, trying to find a coherent visual language I could understand. I thought perhaps certain colors and shapes meant something or that certain symbols had a particular
