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 meaning. But if there was a system in this, I could not find it. What I did find was that none of these questions could be answered in a rational, logical, or systematic manner. It just didn’t work that way for me. What seemed to work was the process: when people danced their images and moved back and forth between dancing and drawing, the messages would be made clear through their movements and drawings. The visual images couldn’t be codified in rigid terms because each person had a unique story and expressed it in a personal way.
At the same time, certain symbols and principles seemed to repeat themselves. For example, in a whole classroom of self-portraits, which often took weeks to create, I might notice that almost every drawing had a snake or a tree or a water image. Or that the drawings indicated polarities and opposites—a dark side and a light side. In conjunction with the intense individuality of each drawing, certain common themes seemed to appear again and again. I learned that until these images were personally experienced through dance and movement, their messages remained mysterious. It became apparent how some of the repeating images and polarities had to do with the ways we are all connected to our common environment—the natural world—and the elements that make our lives similar to one another’s. This is what Jung refers to as the “collective unconscious,” a collection of images that we, as human beings, share. It could be that these images are lodged in the cells of our bodies and that they connect us to one another across time and across culture.
Let me describe how I learned something about my life story, the mystery of my own personal imagery, and my connection to the natural world by dancing a self-portrait created at the time of the recurrence of my illness. When I first drew myself, I made myself look “perfect.” I was young and brightly colored. My hair was blowing in the wind. I was the picture of health and vitality. When I looked at the image after drawing it, I knew I couldn’t even begin to dance it; it just didn’t feel like me. I turned the paper over and furiously began to draw another image of myself. It was black and angular and angry and violent. I knew that this back-side image