![\"Power](\"https:\/\/mindfulartstudio.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/11\/Power-of-Metaphor.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\nAt the end of last week, I attended a wonderful conference in\u00a0New York City, The Expressive Therapies Summit.\u00a0My weekend\u00a0was full of\u00a0learning and discovery. Surprisingly though, one\u00a0of the\u00a0best teachers I met wasn’t at the summit,\u00a0but sitting across from me on the train. He’d never heard of art or expressive therapy before.<\/p>\n
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Expressive What?<\/h3>\n
As I began my usual explanation\u00a0about art and expressive therapy, he shot questions at me left and right, cutting me off before I could finish my\u00a0sentences. This might\u00a0have been unnerving, being grilled this way, but it was strangely invigorating.<\/p>\n
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Behind every question was a supposition, another question, and a challenge.\u00a0How does this work? \u00a0Why this and not that? He was trying to\u00a0construct a model of\u00a0understanding. He pushed me to better understand and explain\u00a0what I do. There’s a lot of value in that.<\/p>\n
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One of the anecdotes I told him in order to help explain the work was a visualization and drawing technique I often do with clients. I used my own experience with the exercise as my example.<\/p>\n
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Visualizing a Solution<\/h3>\n
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The exercise entails asking the client to choose a concrete problem on which to focus. Once this is clear, you lead them through a short visualization. Beginning with their attention\u00a0on their breath, you guide them to a state of calm and\u00a0inward focus. Next\u00a0you invite them to imagine that they have\u00a0their own \u201cmental screen\u201d upon which images\u00a0can appear.<\/p>\n You suggest to the client that they imagine that whatever they need to help them with their\u00a0problem is going to appear on their mental screen. \u00a0You encourage the client to accept whatever first appears, no matter how odd or unconnected it might seem.<\/p>\n They should spend time\u00a0with the image, noting its color, texture, weight, scent, taste, and any emotional response they feel while looking at it.<\/p>\n Next, the client creates a drawing of the visualization, and then writes descriptively about the image through the five senses, their emotional response, and any other commentary about the experience.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n When I personally did the exercise the first time, what popped up on my mental screen was a peach. Given that I was thinking about a work problem, I wasn\u2019t immediately sure what it meant, but decided to trust it as instructed.<\/p>\n I began telling my seat mate how a\u00a0juicy peach helped me to see\u00a0that I wasn\u2019t fully appreciating how rich, or \u201cjuicy\u201d the work was already. Before I could go on about my peach metaphor, he cut me off, noting\u00a0that had an apple popped up, \u00a0either juicy fruit\u00a0would have helped me equally, and therefore the image may be less relevant than your ability to extract metaphoric meaning.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n I stopped to consider this. It was an excellent question, really. Our ability to open the imagination, experience something new, and consider how any metaphor could apply is a very important element of this exercise. Indeed, had a dump truck come on my screen, I certainly could have extracted useful metaphors and lessons.<\/p>\n However, it seems to me that the peach popped up because of the particular<\/em> lessons I needed in that moment, that an apple, or a tree, or a dump truck could not have pointed out to me. \u00a0I also saw that the peach was \u00a0a very personal metaphor for me and therefore\u00a0carried more power than an apple\u00a0might have.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Peaches, when perfectly ripe, are an evocative sensory experience. Your fingers are greeted by a soft, delicate skin that is covered with a nearly transparent fuzz. A ripe peach demands care and attention in a way that you handle it. Grasp it too hard and you puncture the skin. Apples bruise too, but are rough and tumble.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n A peach’s scent\u00a0rises to meet you, telling of its\u00a0sweetness.<\/p>\n Apples keep their sweetness secret until you bite them or bake them.<\/p>\n When a peach is truly ripe, you bite it, and the sticky juice runs down your chin, over your fingers, and down your arm.<\/p>\n Apples don’t.<\/p>\n I love me a good crisp, sweet apple. But it ain’t no peach.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n The peach taught me to be delicate with my expectations on myself and to handle the work with care. It taught me\u00a0to pause long enough to appreciate it\u2019s textures and nuance, it\u2019s sweetness, and to drink the juice in each moment before drawing my conclusions.<\/p>\n The peach taught me that trying too hard would mean missing the delicate beauty and perfection right in front of me. I needed to slow down, take stock, and see that things were actually quite good. The only problem was that I was moving too fast, and my expectations were off.<\/p>\n An apple likely could have taught me some very valuable lessons, but for a different problem.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n Metaphor is one of the most powerful tools in expressive therapy, and the one that ties all of the expressive arts together.<\/p>\n Whether like my engineer seat mate, you respond to scientific explanations of how metaphor helps to engage more\u00a0centers in the brain than talking alone, or you respond to a more artistic explanation of\u00a0how metaphor has helped human kind understand and make meaning of our experiences for all of recorded history, you cannot but recognize the power of metaphor.<\/p>\n It’s a short hand for understanding our experience. \u00a0Metaphor is image, sound, touch, taste, and smell. It’s archetypal, universal, and personal all at once. We are excellent at hiding from our feelings and ourselves in language, but we are not so adept at doing so when express ourselves through the arts, and the arts, like dreams, naturally engage metaphor.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n It turns out my seat mate is\u00a0part of a team of researchers at MIT creating an emulsion\u00a0that,\u00a0when\u00a0applied to surfaces, will allow things to release and slide easily off the surface. He used the example of a ketchup bottle. Can you imagine not waiting for your ketchup? No whipping the bottle back and forth to coax the ketchup into descent?\u00a0Good things will come to those who wait,\u00a0and<\/em> those who don’t.<\/p>\n Are you coming out of there?<\/p><\/div>\n <\/p>\n As therapists, we are often looking for emulsions. To help our clients release pain, trauma, old habits, and negative thought patterns. And\u00a0sometimes we are looking for adhesives. To help someone put their themselves, or their life, back together.<\/p>\n There’s no emulsion that can make the pain of sexual abuse slide off a 7 year-old’s body, or magically make a 40 year-old woman who has always been\u00a0told she is\u00a0worthless believe that she is worth being loved. There’s no chemical that will put someone’s relationships\u00a0back together for them after years of distance due to\u00a0mental health and substance abuse problems.<\/p>\n While science has done a lot to illuminate the parts of us that are chemical, electric, and mechanical, it doesn’t understand\u00a0the soul.<\/p>\n So as expressive therapists, we help you speak to pain through metaphor. And which metaphor matters. It is your particular metaphor, informed by your life experiences, feelings, and worldview. Your soul prescribes it especially for you.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n As I attended various sessions on drama therapy, phototherapy, art therapy, and dance therapy at the summit, I was struck by how central metaphor is in every single approach. I knew this, but looking at it through the lens of my conversation with this man crystalized it for me.<\/p>\n Josie Abbernate<\/a> talked about the importance\u00a0of clients and\u00a0therapists\u00a0seeing the metaphors in their clients\u2019 stories, and how she sees them throughout her own life. She told how her clunky car is often her greatest teacher.<\/p>\n Every\u00a0time her car breaks down, she asks the mechanic to tell her very specifically what is wrong with it. She listens very carefully and asks questions until she really understands it, and then extracts the metaphors so that she can apply them to her life.<\/p>\n This is a way of making meaning.<\/p>\n It can\u2019t all be boiled down to analytics, and neurons, and science. Part of what feels good about being human is feeling a sense of wonder.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n This may be slightly hard to imagine, but my\u00a0Dance Therapy instructor at the conference, Kathleen Rea<\/a>, gave us a powerful exercise. She asked us to get together with a partner and balance a pen on our index finger, with the partner touching the opposite end of the pen with their index finger. In this way, the two partners cooperate to\u00a0keep the pen balanced. \u00a0We\u00a0were then instructed to “allow the pen\u00a0to move where it wish[ed].”<\/p>\n Once my partner and I positioned the pen between our two index fingers, I quietly focused, listening for the shift in mood that would tell me what to do next. Before I had a chance to sense anything, I was working frantically to keep up, moving quickly around the room, here and there, up high, over the teacher\u2019s head, to the left, the right, and in circles again and again.<\/p>\n Despite my verbal and non-verbal cues to slow down, it seemed my partner needed to move fast while I needed to move slowly. \u00a0While I’m sure it wasn’t her intent, I felt dizzy and unheard. It was a familiar feeling.<\/p>\n All this came up simply through\u00a0 \u201cfollowing a pen\u201d around the room.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Sensing our misattunement, I turned to another group for the next exercise. This time, in groups of three, we were to keep two pens\u00a0aloft, with the person in the middle holding one pen on each index finger, and collaborating with her two partners. In order to help her focus on the senses, she\u00a0kept\u00a0her eyes closed.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n I invited\u00a0my two partners to go in the middle first. For each, I and the third partner were carefully attuned to our “blind” partner – responding to every twitch, rise and fall, a pure dance forming between us, born of the energy between those four fingers.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Watching the wonder on their face, a smile half spread, eyes closed, and so attuned, so aware \u2013 it was full of beauty. I wished that I could catch the eye of the other partner, to share even more in this amazing experience.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n When it was my turn, I closed my eyes without hesitation, and noted how carefully my partners responded to my every move, following me up, down, a little forward, back. I too wanted to fly a bit, like my first partner, and now I could. I felt heard. Connected.<\/p>\n I did not know these women\u2019s names, but afterward we looked at each other in the eye. We shared a bond because of this experience.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Beautiful. Meaningful. Dance.<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\nThat’s Just Peachy<\/h3>\n
<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\nMetaphor<\/h3>\n
<\/a><\/p>\n\u00a0“So much depends upon a way out. <\/em><\/address>\nA mode of getting here to there, but also a little freedom.\u00a0<\/em><\/address>\nThere’s not much that’s up to you,<\/em><\/address>\nBut this is.” \u00a0– A. Maricle<\/em><\/address>\n<\/a><\/p>\n“Have the colors been there all along?<\/address>\nAlways so beautiful without me taking notice?<\/address>\nHave I dismissed\u00a0beauty?<\/em><\/address>\nRejected harmony?<\/address>\nAbandoned wonder?<\/address>\nThe essence of thing, after all, is its beauty.” \u00a0 \u00a0– A. Maricle<\/address>\n\u00a0<\/address>\nLetting Go<\/h3>\n
<\/a><\/a><\/p>\nThe Power of Metaphor<\/h3>\n
\u00a0Balance and Connection<\/h3>\n
Finding\u00a0Connection<\/h3>\n