Embodied Learning - Clay Field Therapy, Guided Drawing and Sensorimotor Integration
Students all over the world learn theory in large, anonymous lecture halls, but then need to practice in small group tutorials. No junior doctor would be allowed to treat patients without the hands-on experience gained in practice sessions. The extensive use of PowerPoint presentations tends to dominate all conferences as a way of managing large groups, and it is the preferred teaching medium online. Zoom has made it possible to facilitate international tutorials over the past 18 months in ways unimaginable not long ago.
Much theory can be communicated in this way; however, our emotional brain craves the connection with others, and our brainstem needs the action patterns of practical application in order to integrate insights. Emotional connection, sensory awareness and the practice of new action patterns all benefit from small group learning.
You may compare cognitive learning to watching a movie about swimming, which does, however, not enable you to swim. If it did, we would all be Olympic champions, Premier League football players, ballerinas or professional surfers. Implicit learning takes time; it requires much practice and repetition before it becomes embodied knowledge. When you actually learn how to swim, you have to get changed, you get wet, it might feel scary, it is messy, maybe even painful and emotional; you experience the ups and downs of getting it, feeling like an idiot at times, and like a master of the universe at others. It is often overlooked how much time it takes to accomplish new action patterns, and frequently also in therapy not enough time is dedicated to such sensorimotor integration.
Children have the unhampered wisdom of learning by repetition. If need be over many sessions doing the same thing again and again. Only once the new action patterns have been integrated do they announce to be bored, and move on.
Cognitive insights can appear so clear and enlightening, but do they stick? How long does it take for a firm resolution to get lost in daily routine, stressors and old habits? Peter Levine emphasizes the importance that resources need to be embodied.[1] We need to be able to access a physical sense of safety for example, to be able to calm down, when we feel threatened; it has to be accessible as a felt sense, if we experience stress. Only, if we can remember what to do, how to breathe, how to protect ourselves under duress, can we have an active response to a stressful or threatening event. We are dealing here not with the idea of safety, but with embodied safety.
Accordingly, embodied learning differs significantly from cognitive processing. This approach might feel confusing or seem to lack structure, but if we stay with the analogy of swimming, if makes sense that integrating insights bottom up takes time, many repetitions and fine-tuning through sensory awareness.
Guided Drawing[2] uses bilateral, rhythmic repetition and body-mapping in a bottom-up approach. After connecting with pain and tension held in the body, massage movements sense what is needed for releasing braced muscular patterns in order to regain vital movement and flow. The renewed felt sense will inform cognitive insights based on an implicit felt-sense identity. “I feel tall.” “I am worthy.” “I matter.” “I can do this.” are lines clients write on their drawings towards the end of a session, while they may have felt crushed, unloved and overwhelmed when they arrived.
We all have an implicit felt sense, which remains mostly unquestioned, because acquired during our early childhood, we have always felt like this. Or clients have responded to adverse life experiences, bracing against abuse, against physical or emotional pain. For many the early childhood patterns and the later life experiences form complex layers of trauma. Guided Drawing enables them to discover within their body first, what they can do, what feels ‘right’, what flows like ‘me’, and they define their sense of self, based on these revised, more connected movement patterns. It is an approach that does not necessarily need to engage with the story of what happened, but it aims at creating more authentic, connected movement patterns. This implicit approach takes time and many repetitions. Only from moving, from repeating, and repeating again and again can we become aware of certain action patterns and how they resonate in the body as destructive or as beneficial for our wellbeing.
We have an inbuilt sense for when something is ‘good’. When a toddler learns how to walk, she will pull herself up, fall down, try again, and again, for weeks on end until one day, the first steps can be taken – and it feels great. You can see her face beaming with pride. We know, when we have achieved something that feels good, that propels us forward to taking the next step in our development. Sensorimotor Art Therapy relies on this instinctual knowing. We implicitly know such goodness.
Clay Field Therapy[3] works with an intriguing feedback loop of learnt motor impulses, which are projected into the Clay Field as we reach out to touch it. The moment we do so, we have a sensory experience of being touched by the material. Initially all clients will connect with the clay in those ways they learnt, when they were infants and toddlers; or what their biography later on taught them about the world. They might fear to get hurt, if they touch; to get lost, if their hands go in. The clay may feel disgusting, or cold – until their hands discover the possibilities of increasing fulfillment. Remember, we all instinctively know what feels ‘good’ and ‘right’, even if we have never experienced it before. Such satisfaction might imply getting big handfuls of clay, being able to have lots; or it might mean to be held safely. Whatever the client lacks or needs in this moment of time can be gained as an implicit sense of a more fulfilling identity.
In all these cases action patterns such as drawing, working with clay or learning how to swim require the repetition of motor impulses with increasing sensory awareness, until these implicit experiences lead to a more competent and confident explicit sense of self. Such learning will not be forgotten. Once we have learnt to swim, even if we do not practice for years afterwards, if someone throws us into the water we will know what to do, because our body has learnt how to swim. The same applies to all embodied learning, which is slower, messier and more confusing than cognitive insights - but the results, with sufficient practice, effect lasting change.
[1] (Levine 2010)
[2] (Elbrecht, Healing trauma with guided drawing; a sensorimotor art therapy approach to bilateral body mapping 2018)
[3] (Elbrecht, Trauma healing at the clay field, a sensorimotor art therapy approach 2013)
Bibliography
Elbrecht, Cornelia. 2018. Healing trauma with guided drawing; a sensorimotor art therapy approach to bilateral body mapping. Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books.
—. 2013. Trauma healing at the clay field, a sensorimotor art therapy approach. London/Philadelphia: Jessica Kingsley.
Levine, Peter. 2010. In an unspoken voice; how the body releases trauma and restores goodness. Berkeley: North Atlantic Books.
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