Body Journal · Personal inquiry
On the meeting of body, emotion and relationship and the possibilities that emerge between them.
When disciplines transform one another
During my years teaching in the department for dance makers and teachers at a university in Tilburg, I was asked to design a new curriculum centred on interdisciplinary practice.
I was already familiar with bringing different disciplines into my creations. Movement, music, images and words could share a stage, each contributing its own language. But developing this curriculum helped me name something I had already begun to sense in my Healing Art work.
There is a difference between placing disciplines alongside one another and allowing them to transform each other. In an interdisciplinary process, something emerges that belongs to the meeting itself. Separating it back into its original parts would change what it is.
One of the first changes we introduced was an assignment for students in their first year: to create a dance solo inspired by an encounter with the elderly nuns living in a residential care setting on the premises. This was a considerable departure from the movement research assignments of the previous curriculum.
The students were asked to meet the nuns, talk with them and listen. From those conversations, they would develop a concept and create a solo for another student to perform.
The results astonished me. I noticed a new richness in the work: greater originality, a wider range of themes and a quality of attention that gave the dances depth. The students’ ideas had entered into conversation with someone else’s experience of life.
Their creative decisions now had to respond to a person, a relationship, an experience they could not entirely anticipate. What they encountered met their imagination, their abilities and their limits, changing the work that took shape.
The encounter changed the dance and it changed the dance maker.
Today, this experience helps me articulate the philosophy of the Healing Art studio. It taught me to pay attention to what becomes possible when different ways of knowing meet and to let the encounter influence the direction of the work.
From artistic process to somatic healing
Art has always been, for me, a way of exploring our existence and discovering how else we might live. Through a gesture, an image or a conversation, we can experience something before we know how to explain it. A possibility suddenly becomes tangible.
I recognise this process in healing.
A creative process often begins with an urgency, an impulse: an image, a question, something we feel drawn to explore. In healing, the starting point is often urgent too. Something hurts and we want relief.
That wish deserves care. Sometimes, as we attend to it, questions arise that we could not have formulated at the beginning.
Beginning with the body
A client came to me with a frozen shoulder. She described pain and restricted movement and told me that the treatments she had already tried had brought no noticeable relief. While searching online, she had encountered somatic approaches to physical tension. She found my work and decided to try a session.
We began with attention to her shoulder.
Under the pressure of my touch, she noticed a sharp sensation she recognised. As we slowed down to observe that familiar sensation, we also noticed that she was holding her breath and making a small movement away from the contact.
These details became part of the work. Alongside the painful sensation, we were beginning to notice how she responded to it.
We explored giving the sensation a sound. As she used her voice, she described the experience becoming more vivid, with more depth and dimension. Anger became present.
We paused.
She noticed where she felt that anger: in her face, her upper back and her stomach. We gave her time to acknowledge those sensations.
Drawing on Integrative Gestalt Coaching, we then explored the words “I am angry.” As she repeated them and noticed their resonance in her body, she reported a rush of fear. Her muscles tensed, her breathing became shallower and more intense and she began to sweat.
The session had reached a point where we needed to slow down again.
We paused the exploration and invited her attention towards something pleasant, something that might offer a sense of support. At that moment, helping her find steadiness became the focus of our work.
Following what emerges
What held my attention was the sequence: a familiar physical sensation, a held breath, an impulse to withdraw, the emergence of anger and then fear as that anger became spoken.
Each development changed what I needed to attend to.
Touch brought our attention to sensation. Sound gave her another way to explore it. Words made the emotional experience more explicit. When fear intensified, we shifted towards support and rest.
This is where the connection with my university work becomes concrete for me. The different approaches were changing one another through their relationship with this particular person. What happened through touch influenced how we used the voice. What happened through words changed the pace and direction of the session.
Her responses shaped the work as it unfolded.
I could not conclude from this encounter that anger had caused her frozen shoulder. What she brought into awareness was an experience in which pain, anger, expression and fear became connected for her during the session. That was something we could attend to without turning it into a complete explanation.
It also clarified why catharsis alone could not be the aim.
Once fear appeared, encouraging a stronger expression of anger would have overlooked something essential in her experience. The fear needed attention too. So did her ability to pause, to choose and to remain involved in what was happening.
My task was to accompany that process with enough sensitivity to recognise when the invitation needed to change.
The question guiding me became: how could we make room for what she was feeling while respecting how much she could meet at that moment?
The pause belonged to the work as fully as the sound or the spoken sentence.
When a session enters everyday life
In the sessions that followed, we continued to explore the pain and the fear she associated with it through movement and sound. We moved slowly, allowing time for her experience to unfold.
During this process, she recalled growing up in a household where her father frequently had outbursts of anger. She spoke of how frightened she had been, how much she had worried about her mother’s wellbeing and the promise she had made to herself: she would never express anger that way.
As we continued, she began to recognise how that promise had grown into an avoidance of anger itself.
She described finding it difficult to recognise and express her boundaries. She felt that her current relationships had come to depend on her willingness to accommodate others and that the people around her would not take no for an answer.
The inquiry had widened. Alongside the pain in her shoulder, we were now attending to what it meant for her to feel anger, to express a limit and to allow herself a different response.
Over the course of our work, her shoulder gradually regained movement. Alongside this physical change, she began to explore her fear of setting boundaries. She described changes in how she saw herself and in the quality of her relationships.
For me, this is where integration becomes tangible: when something encountered in a session begins to enter everyday life, changing how a person recognises a need, expresses a feeling or relates to someone else.
What began as pain in her shoulder became an entrance into a deeper inquiry.
I recognise something similar in my own healing. I wanted relief from the pain in my back. Following that experience gradually brought me into questions of safety, personal worth and compassion towards myself. These were qualities I needed to learn to feel and live.
Working with this client reminded me how much can become present when we begin with one place in the body. It also reminded me of the care required when following those connections. Curiosity needs patience. Expression needs room around it. A discovery needs time.
This is the interdisciplinary quality I seek in the Healing Art studio. Bodywork, breath, movement, voice and dialogue inform one another through the person I am meeting. Their relationship gives the work its depth.
Healing as attentive relationship
Beneath this approach is a conviction that is deeply personal to me: at the core of our being, there is love.
Throughout my artistic work, I carried a personal motto: transform pain into love. I believe this possibility also lies at the heart of healing. The process rarely follows a straight line. It asks for openness, courage and time.
In practice, I want this conviction to become tangible. In this encounter, it meant listening when fear appeared, changing direction and giving the pause its place.
Love takes form in the quality of attention we offer.
I see each of us as a living work of art: a unique expression of love, with a history, a rhythm and possibilities still unfolding. Working with this client brought me back to the lesson I had encountered through teaching choreography: we bring our knowledge and experience and then we allow the meeting to teach us something.
That is where healing becomes a creative act for me: in the attentive, responsive work of discovering together what can take shape.
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