Methods and Maps to the Mother Well #3
The Five-Part-Process + the Psychokinetic Imagery Process
Dear Community,
This is the third part in a series. If you’d like to go back and read the more foundational information, please go back and do that. Or read on below!
The Five-Part Process
Another methodical structure The Life Art Process offers is that of Halprin’s (2022) five-part process, where the participant identifies, confronts, releases, changes, and grows.
The five-part process builds on the three levels of awareness. As we gain more awareness of the different parts of our experience, we can identify patterns or repeating choices that we would like to then confront and release, thereby creating change and growth.
In the Mother Well, I used the interview process to identify what mothers, in general, were feeling. But there is also the personal process of identification that happens with each mother. This will be something that will continue within the group form I am offering in April-May. The points of contact between the personal and the collective are a huge leverage point for us all in this moment of profound collective transformation.
What are our individual stories?
How are they also the stories of our communities?
How does the identification of this connection help us to confront and release isolation— creating change and collective growth?
Early on in the process, one mother was able to confront her loss of self through her relationship patterns with her daughter. Of course, this is a tender individual story and an important one as well.
It is also a collective story.
In the coming months, as I gather mothers for the group-form Mother Well process in April-May, I want to keep in mind that these tender stories become more deeply felt and also more spacious as we release them into the collective well of mothers to dance with and relate to.
Our guilt that we didn’t get a certain moment right and our shame that we are not good enough to be mothers, parents, or humans are right there with us through the challenges of raising a person from infancy into adulthood.
Brené Brown says that shame thrives in disconnection (2021, pp 34-39). When we share our stories with one another, shame shrinks. Brown describes shame as an emotion that is very centered in narcissism because when we feel shame, we cannot focus on anyone else’s feelings but our own. Using multimodal creative expression to shrink the shame and guilt mothers feel — is community healing.
threshold to the water, 2024
Psychokinetic Imagery Process: Working with Imagery, Poetic Dialogue, and Movement
If the process of identification and confrontation sounds oh-so-serious, let me introduce the Psychokinetic Imagery Process and attune us all to the creative process once again— a key component of TLAP that helps to broaden, loosen, and texturize the density of our transformational journeys.
Working with different modalities such as movement, drawing, and writing/dialogue allows the participant to “bypass our preconceptions and allows resources from the unconscious to surface” (Halprin, 2022, P 131).
When we move, our body tells stories we didn’t even know were there. These stories are important missing pieces of our collective conversations! Paired with drawing, writing, witnessing, and dialogue, movement offers us the potential for these stories to be seen, understood, and integrated into our collective psyche.
Being with the body first in dance allows for writing to become more fluid, to come from the body instead of from the mind— which oftentimes finds safety with ideas, rationality, and logic. Olsen encourages “write from your whole body” and “cultivate a supportive listener within yourself” (2020, p. xxiii-xxiv). There is nothing wrong with the mind stepping in, but when we can access ourselves in different ways, we discover new choices and possibilities. We cultivate the inner witness to our thoughts, feelings, and sensations.
The Psychokinetic Imagery Process also invites interpersonal witnessing.
As a practitioner with these mothers, I was not a passive bystander, thereby allowing their processes to be solely singular and individual. I was also a first responder! In TLAP we call this aesthetic response. It is a process whereby the witness (in this case me, the practitioner) is engaged with an authentic response to the participant’s art, movement, or words. This is the dialogue piece. In the group process starting in April, we will be witnesses to each others’ processes— honoring both the individual stories and the ways they weave together to create community support through art.
Think of being an audience member. What does it mean to take in all that art without allowing for an authentic response to emerge?
What does it do to us as humans to simply watch? What do we learn from that model?
Conversely, if we are given the space to respond to what we see, to make and share meaning, and to feel out loud— well that is something entirely different.
For example, one of the mothers remarked in her writing, “You don’t have to keep secrets to yourself.” As a witness, I found this to be such a profound moment and one that opened up the space of personal experience, teaching me so much.
Our minds can be tricky, helping us to keep secrets from ourselves. Movement, art, and poetic dialogue help us uncover our secrets in new ways, allowing us to be more honest with ourselves.
And when we are more honest with ourselves, we know ourselves better, and the whole world benefits from this.
ending ritual altar, 2024
UPCOMING OFFERINGS:
1- April-May— GROUP FORM MOTHER WELL: Fridays late afternoon-evening
On land at the confluence of the Columbia and Willamette Rivers at Kelly Point Park for two afternoon rituals
In studio at Atrium at the Breathe Building in SE Portland
Online orientation and 2 individual sessions online or home visit
2- April 13— COSMIC CORPUS: Monthly In-Person Astro-Explorations with collaborator Gina James! Sunday afternoons starting April 13
At Atrium Movement at the Breathe Building in SE PDX
Somatic, interpretative, exploratory, experiential community astrology
3- October 2-5, 2025— LIVING ASTROLOGIES CONFERENCE IN SANTA FE, NM:
Hosted by Jason Holley and the Hermes/Hestia Center for Living Astrologies
My workshop— The Artemesian Well: Exploring Lunar Depth through Movement Ritual and the Tamalpa Life Art Process
Other experiential workshops to experience astrology through a relational, imaginal, and embodied lens
References:
Brown, B. (2021). Atlas of the heart: Mapping meaningful connection and the language of human experience. Random House. https://www.google.com/books/edition/Atlas_of_the_Heart/ZvwyEAAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=atlas+of+the+heart&pg=PR11&printsec=frontcover
Halprin, D. (2002). The expressive body in life, art, and therapy: Working with movement, metaphor and meaning. Jessica Kingsley Publishers. https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Expressive_Body_in_Life_Art_and_Ther/BkKBGP-2PHcC?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=maps+and+methods+of+the+practice+daria+halprin&pg=PA3&printsec=frontcover
Nagoski, E., & Amelia Nagoski, D. M. A. (2020). Burnout: The secret to unlocking the stress cycle. Ballangne Books. https://www.google.com/books/edition/Burnout/DlnDDwAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=burnout+and+nagoski&pg=PR9&printsec=frontcover
Olsen, A. (2020). Body and earth: An experiential guide. Wesleyan University Press. https://www.google.com/books/edition/Body_and_Earth/dd7QDwAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=body+and+earth&pg=PP1&printsec=frontcover
I love this brilliant, beautiful series Sarah-Lu. I'm so glad you're creating this.