Rhythmic Movement as a Vital Trauma Response

In recent weeks I find myself watching dance and movement video clips wherever they appear on social media. My soul craves them. On the days when I cannot go out and walk, I turn off all the lights at night, search for streaming Gabrielle Roth and dance to the 5 Rhythms in the dark. The many posts on Facebook inviting me to visit famous art galleries all over the world, to take virtual tours through the pyramids, and glide along the walls of the Sistine Chapel soon feel strenuous, like yet another thing to focus on. My eyes are hurting from too much screen time and the incessant online bombardment with visual stimuli.

A Visual Meditation: The Higher Consciousness

One of the core tools in my practice is a visualisation exercise I learnt in the nineteen seventies from Jungian analyst Phyllis Krystal (Krystal 1995). It is a visual prayer that can communicate a profound sense of safety flowing from a spiritual core that remains undefined or as you like to imagine it. I apply the exercise consistently as a visual aide to picture the client-therapist relationship and how both relate to what she called the ‘Higher Consciousness’. I introduce it to almost all groups I facilitate, and frequently meditate like this on my own.

The Primary Shapes in Guided Drawing: The Lemniscate

Lemniscate is the term for a horizontal figure eight. Of all the primary shapes this is the least threatening. It is without exception experienced as positive rhythmic flow without any threat of overwhelm.

The Primary Shapes in Guided Drawing: The Spiral

The spiral pattern of growth is found throughout nature as rolled-in fern, in shells on the beach, in the shape of an ear, in a fingerprint, the umbilical cord and how an embryo is curled up in the womb.

“Both the winding forms of the intestines and the brain have been depicted in religious and symbolic art as the labyrinth of spiral path, which creates, protects, and lays the foundation of the new town or centre”. (Purce 1992)

The Primary Shapes in Guided Drawing Series: The Bowl

The largest bowl we experience in our body is the pelvis, and while there are other places in the body that can be drawn as a bowl such as the diaphragm or the back of the head, the most common association with this shape is the pelvic floor. The pelvic bowl is the space in which we settle down to relax or which we dissociate, when we are ‘upset’. It is where our spine is anchored

Bilateral Body Movements

At the last weekend workshop we made “gymnast's sticks” from driftwood and branches we found in nature. Cut them to size to make handles, then decorated them with pieces of dyed cheese cloth, other fabric, and ribbons. We painted the materials, some embroidered it and carved “magic” into their sticks. Dancing with music, alone, in pairs and as a group with our sticks was not only fun, it also activated our mirror neutrons, created group synchronicity and connections.

The Primary Shapes in Guided Drawing Series: The Arch

Over the next few months, I will share insights about a couple of the main shapes that characterize this approach but for now we shall take a more in-depth insights of the Arch. The structure of Guided Drawing is based on a number of primary shapes, which all have a universal, archetypal quality.

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