Not Just Any Body Part

Bridging Life and Art

In a short story entitled “A Painful Case”, James Joyce writes, “Mr. Duffy lived a short distance from his body.” This is such a perfect portrayal of how so many of us go about living our lives, a short distance from ourselves. Being disconnected from our bodies extends to our feelings, thoughts, emotions, six senses and much of what makes us who we are. It also stands to reason that this divide within ourselves cuts us off from the world at large and nature itself, a baffling and stressful way to be.

Reclaiming our sense of embodiment is not a simple matter. Dancer, poet, teacher and author, Daria Halprin playfully points out that, in some ways, “we keep losing our keys”. Sometimes the loss is small, but sometimes the loss is more great. Embodiment is a process of re finding ourselves, again and again, and we need the body to do that.

How can we bridge that gap between ourselves and our bodies?

How can we expand our sense of embodiment and let our creative life be expressed fully?

How can we give ourselves the permission and freedom to go into creativity and art-making, when we have to really acknowledge our literal reality that is sometimes harsh?

We need life affirming ways to engage these questions. Life is a traumatic event. There are pieces of our history that get reactivated all the time. The arts keep us creative and brings lightness into the process. Working with the arts metaphorically is also a way to apply homeopathy. Our practice becomes the tincture or medicine, and whatever wants to be drawn out comes to the surface. This is at the core of my work.

When talk alone is not enough, I offer creative ways for people to encounter their life and what matters most to them. There are structures and vocabulary we can use to reconnect to ourselves. In this way, we are not removed from our lives but are re situated, squarely in the middle of our lives, in a new way.

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