An interview with Rebekah Windmiller

Rebekah Windmiller is a graduate of Glass Lake Studio NYC and the post-graduate program in Expressive Arts Therapy at EGS. Currently she provides expressive arts therapy for patients at the Interfaith Medical Center in Brooklyn, N.Y. She is the Founder and Director of the nyc Epressive Arts Studio, also located in Brooklyn. To contact Rebekah, click here.

When and how did you get into EXA?
My bachelor’s degree was in Music Therapy. My training was very activity oriented, and being an artist, this approach felt unimaginative and stifling. When I worked, I noticed that I felt limited by using music alone, and I often brought in dance and visual images. At this time, I also was discovering my love for dance and choreography and this ultimately pulled me into it, and away from the arts therapies. I never worked in MT but spend 10+ years working in NYC as a dancer/choreographer. Eventually, the hardships of the artists life weighed on me and I needed to get out of my “B job” in accounting. I thought I’d go into the arts therapies again because I might just ‘like’ it, as opposed to hating accounting. Knowing I could not pursue traditional arts related therapy because of the psychological interpretation prevalent there, I sought out something else, although I did not know what I was looking for at the time. Through an internet search I found Glass Lake Studio and EGS. This was in 1999. I had many pressing questions about the arts and therapy together, and all of my teachers allowed me question with veracity, and without imposing a theory onto my thinking. I think this quality of open-ended thinking is what enabled me to stay in expressive arts. It was critical to me that I could develop as a thinking artist.

What drives you to do this work?
I could not do this work without community. The qualities that I love in EXA — playing, messing around in paint then disturbing space with my moving body, inspiring others to MAKE STUFF and making lots of stuff myself, sensing the world (seeing deeper, listening more closely, touching what I love), phenomenology (breaking down the inner/outer duality, SURFacing with the DEEP, ripping things apart), love, beauty, unanswerable questions, permission to not-know, rolling on the floor as truth, mark-making as knowing, singing my way into and out of longing, writing until I make a new way of conceptualizing the world, continually re-imagining life — all of this is held within a community of PEOPLE: PEAPS!; Teachers Turned Friends Turned Colleagues Turned Teachers; Students Turned People Turned Professionals Turned Friends; My jazz musician friend, Adam Armstrong who talks to me about improvisation; My Analytic Art Therapist Friend, Lyn, who gives me ground to push against; Rebekah Lancto, who asks questions and inspires me!

In what capacity do you use EXA? work? personal? therapy, education, consulting?
I work with buffons: psychiatric patients and drug addicts.
I attempt informal research on beauty by drawing, writing and dancing, until the work develops into a formal research.
I teach others to find their own way into expressive arts.

What was it like to learn how to work intermodal?
Fun! It was a relief because I always felt drawn to intermodal work. Learning to use my voice was profound — it still is.

What is your personal philosophy about EXA?
If there is anything that holds us together, making art can do it, for a moment or two.
Making art is terrifying, necessary and beautiful. We need courage to step into it.
Art is a life-giving resource for all people.
Art can be destroyed. Art is repaired destruction, sometimes. I am not talking about a psychological repair.
Sometimes, art-making is the only possible response to loss.
While art is sacred, we have to rip apart the sacred to keep it so.
Art gives no answers, only clues. We live best in the ambiguity of intuitively sensing our way.

If you were to give future EXA students advice what would it be?
Make a lot of art. Dance everyday, if you can. Sing with your friends. Send poems to your lovers and enemies. Ask a lot of questions. Be brave. Be sincere. Be honest. Take risks.

An interview with Denie Whalen

Denie Whalen, MA, CAGS is a graduate of Glass Lake Studio and the post graduate program in Expressive Arts Therapy at the European Graduate School in Switzerland. She is a mother, grandmother and gardener. Currently she serves as director for the New York Expressive Arts Program in Albany, N.Y. and provides ‘artreach’ to underserved populations in her community. To contact Denie, click here.

When and how did you get into EXA?
The arts showed up early in my life, in the form of writing stories, talking and singing to my horses, reading everything from The Bobbsey Twins (early) to the complete works of Eugene O’Neil (later), all ways of staying engaged in my life, digging in the dirt for meaning. Formally, exa training came after ‘marriage and the baby carriage’ and 20 years of working in the medical model as an occupational therapist. And just as the frustration of working within a very goal-oriented milieu was heating up for me, exa opened playful and imaginative new perspectives and gave me a name for living life within metaphors. A storefront flyer introduced me to Glass Lake Studio in Albany and after an introductory workshop at the studio, I began a course of study with Markus Alexander, traveled to Switzerland for three years of summer Master’s work, sat in as Markus vetted his exa coaching program and then found myself ready to step up to a leadership position as Markus moved on to his own territory ahead. I returned for CAGS study and since graduating have been facilitating the program at New York Expressive Arts.

What drives you to do this work?
It’s like approaching a garden and picking up on a kind of sensory attraction. First I see the open-faced flowers of the clematis. I come closer. Then the aroma of the roses calls and I continue. Soon I hear the gate close softly behind me and I am in the garden, free to meander and marvel at the beauty I experience there. There’s nothing quite like time in the garden. The title of my master’s thesis was ‘The Old Seed’ and gardening/growing metaphors feel very natural to express how I enjoy the process of this work and reconcile my longing for stability within the endless cycles of change.
Here’s a collage that says something about that.

In what capacity do you use EXA? work? personal? therapy, education, consulting?
First I make a conscious intention to apply exa principles and practice to my everyday life. I try to say yes; I walk around a situation, the way I turn my paintings upside down and sideways to see them from all the different perspectives. Growing up as an only child and probably having a solitary nature, I am both challenged and thrilled by the community aspects of this work. I continue to learn about my capacity for being in community and finding my way to contribute to it. Writing has always been a natural way of expressing myself, getting clear about what is going on in my life and around me, working things through, all of that. So I try and write everyday and read poetry. When I started studying exa, I was introduced to free-form, body-centered painting and now is it a great joy to be in the paint, especially in the company of others, especially my little granddaughter’s, natural artists if ever there was.

I am working hard to continue the work that Markus started here in Albany, finding my unique way of bringing the work into the world through shaping a training program that responds to changing needs and circumstances, by reaching out to underserved populations and by keeping a research perspective at the heart of the work, always.

What was it like to learn how to work intermodal?
Like so much of this work, the intermodal method feels natural and reminds me of working on a healthy interdisciplinary team; in arts-based language it would be like being in an orchestra, a choir, an ensemble, a dance troupe. When it works the experience feels rich and complete, all things said and done. The process unfolds like a Japanese book of folded pages, What I think it takes for the process to work is flexibility and open-heartedness in the participants and a skillful sensitivity and courage on the part of the facilitator to either stay out of the way or to intervene. to effect a good fit of art modality and a transfer at the “right” time. So that understanding of intermodal method and transfer is what I started with. What I am learning about and exploring through work in the studio is that relationship is at the heart of the matter. So much depends on the emerging and shifting interplay between/among persons who are doing the work together, whether it is a learning relationship, a helping relationship, an accompaniying relationship. Most of my work is with groups and I am finding that intermodal transfer can feel more organic to me in a 1 on 1 situation. In groups the transfer can feel a bit like a one size fits all so then perhaps it is about finding the universal within the particular.

What is your personal philosophy about EXA?

is it work?
is it play?
what is it?

no rules, only limitations opening to possibilities
no goal, only intention to explore

is it a calling?
when it comes.
does it leave a card?

yes, in my gut, in my heart,
in every cell of my body

it pleads
it seduces
it invites me in for tea

stay and rest a while, here and now
enjoy what is unfolding in front of my eyes
as I envision what could be

everything depends on those who continue
and not at all on using capital letters

If you were to give future EXA students advice what would it be?
Don’t try this at home alone. This work will change your life in ways you cannot imagine and the community of other like-minded and ensouled persons is essential to a successful journey through this territory. If you are ready to “step forth with courage” and do the work and play required to discover your beauty and the beauty of others, to explore the serious questions of life in a light-hearted way, then expressive arts is for you. Welcome aboard.

An interview with Steve Podry

Steve Podry is a graduate of Glass Lake Studio NYC and the post graduate program in Expressive Arts Therapy at the Eurpean Graduate School,(EGS) Switzerland. Currently he directs the LEAP Program at Bedford Hills Correctional Facility in Bedford Hills, N.Y., an arts-based family literacy program. To contact Steve, click here.

When and how did you get into EXA?
Since childhood I seem to have always been making things: pictures, forts, robots, inventions, songs, stories – but it was mostly in solitude.  As a therapist in the ’80′s, I was fascinated with talk therapy, especially with the presence of images as they emerged in the conversation, but ultimately even the non-ordinary talk of a therapy session seemed inadequate to what a human being really is.  I spent years on a project exploring the connection between what we do with our imaginations and what happens in our life.  I then wanted to find a way back into doing therapy but I knew it would need to include the arts somehow.  On April 19, 1998 I went to an introductory Expressive Arts Therapy workshop given by Geoffrey Scott-Alexander.  His spiritually focused, non-psychological, intermodal approach seemed to be the kind of therapeutic practice I was born for.  I was “home.”   I trained with Geoffrey (Markus) for three years and then later went on for the CAGS at EGS.

What drives you to do this work?
When I look around, it seems to me the universe is not quite finished.  At every macro and micro level, creation goes on and on, and, whether we realize it or not, human beings are participants in this creation – along with everything else.  The particular gift we burning mammals seem to bring to the table is this strange thing called “imagination.”  When I am working in the arts, especially in the company of others, I quietly thrill to the sense of life’s perpetual, kaleidoscopic disclosure coming through us.  I love feeling life and psyche unfold.  Expressive arts provides a way to be in the thick of life’s mystery and emergence.

In what capacity do you use EXA? work? personal? therapy, education, consulting?
I use the arts personally, with friends and family, and as the foundation of a parenting and literacy program at a women’s prison.  This program exists as a place where therapy and education overlap.  We use the arts for academic learning, for self-knowledge and personal development, for career exploration, group therapy, parenting, and community-building.  I also consult with other parenting programs in the prison and provide art-based staff development opportunities (and resuscitation).

What was it like to learn how to work intermodally?
I had scratched the surface of such a thing before, particularly in experiments with drawing music and describing it in words, but the incredible range of possibilities had never occurred to me until the workshop with Markus.  Working intermodally made complete sense to me.  It opened a whole new and exciting dimension in therapeutic process.

What is your personal philosophy about EXA?
My answer to the second question above suggests much about my philosophy.  We are participants in Creation and feel “healthiest” or most alive when we live that way.  Expressive Arts makes that idea concrete and experiential.  Gadamer says, “The power of the artwork suddenly takes the person experiencing it out of the context of his life and yet relates back to the whole of his existence.”  Artistic process inevitably eases us out of our little boxes:  We become more related to our total selves, to each other, and to Creation at large.  By sensitizing us to realities beyond the scope of our habitual narrowness, the arts deepen and inform our capacity to respond, to interact with, personal, social, political, and natural Creation.  As responsive aesthetic participants in Creation we become more ethical, more cognizant of our mutual dependence on everything that exists, for there can be no artistic process, no ongoing creative unfolding, without contact beyond our constricted selves.  In this way, the arts serve a wider ecological purpose.  Art too is part of nature’s homeostatic dialogue with itself.  Art is Nature - with a human touch.

If you were to give future EXA students advice what would it be?
Explore using the arts for every personal challenge, no matter what it is – physical, emotional, mental, spiritual, political.  “Poiesis is always possible,” says Steve Levine.  So, too, the arts can be used to establish relational consciousness and a base of rapport with any phenomenon that exists.   Never underestimate the range of people, situations, and phenomena we can open fertile relationships with using the arts.  Explore this every chance you get and your universe will crack wide open.

An interview with Susanna Armbruster

Susanna Armbruster is a graduate of Glass Lake Studio and the post graduate program in Expressive Arts Therapy at EGS. Currently she works as an Expressive Arts Therapy Educator at Bard College in Annandale-on-the-Hudson facilitating the Children’s Expressive Arts Project with students at the college.

When and how did you get into EXA?
EXA asked Greg, my husband, to tell me to listen up, that I was supposed to do this work. In the summer of 1995, while we were still living in NYC, he and I attended Omega Institute for a week. He attended the workshop, “The Creative Connection” with Natalie Rogers and Markus was a co-facilitator. Greg participated fully in the workshop and he understood the philosophy of exa as they presented it but he knew it wasn’t something he was interested in pursuing. However, he felt that this was something I should look into because it combined helping others with creativity. I had been struggling for years to understand why I was on the planet. I wanted to help people, I needed a spiritual base in my life and I needed to understand who I was as a creative person. Greg realized this was where I needed to be. While at Omega, he introduced me to Markus and then months later, after I had moved up to Red Hook, I attended a one-day introductory workshop with Markus. That was in early 1997 and I have never left!

What drives you to do this work?
When I look back at my life, remembering all the different journeys I’ve been on, this is the one thing that has helped me tie them all together. All the things I did when I was in my early 20′s drove me to the proverbial bottom of the well and it has been through exa that I’ve found a way to reconcile myself to those actions. And at the same time, it truly has given me the opportunity to help others in so many ways–from being an active listener to being able to talk to a child about dying and lots of things in between–so the theory that we, as practitioners, have to be able to sit with our own stuff before we can sit with others and their stuff showed up in my life’s interactions and proved that this work is about truth. I’m compelled to continue in this work because I believe in this truth.

In what capacity do you use EXA? work? personal? therapy, education, consulting?
Currently, I use exa in education, training Bard College students in the Children’s Expressive Arts Project so they can facilitate art-based workshops for emotionally disturbed, autistic and under privileged children in our local community, New Orleans, and globally.

Right after graduating from the Master’s program at EGS, I for a local Hospice where I facilitated children’s bereavement groups and worked with siblings or children of Hospice patients. I no longer work for this Hospice but volunteer with a children’s bereavement group. I deeply miss the work I was doing, especially work in the homes, but realize that the work with the college students will touch children’s lives so that eases the missing somewhat.

Personally, exa allows me to be creative in many ways while helping me sort through personal issues. Or not. It’s also taught me that sometimes I just need to be still, to not be doing something all the time and that I still have value if I choose to just sit an afternoon away!

What was it like to learn how to work intermodal?
Learning to work intermodally was like learning to love horses, after one kicked me in the head when I was a small child (yes, that’s a true story). I was afraid of horses when I was small. To me, they were big and strong and unpredictable. So I didn’t go near them. But then, I was kicked by one and amazingly, I didn’t get hurt. Then I was totally in love with horses. I didn’t get my own until years later and I was ecstatic. I loved that getting ready to ride was always the same process (get the horse, put on the bridle, blanket saddle, etc.) but what happened after that was going to be different every time and the two of us chose our direction and speed! Then when the ride was over, the process of putting everything away was the same.

So, in a way, I had to get kicked in the head by exa to realize that I won’t be hurt by it . . .

Working intermodally gives me courage to depend on a structure that holds whatever needs to happen. Also, redefining “intermodal” is a fun thing to do–how can office work be intermodal? What about allowing so much play that you don’t “see” the work but the magic of the moment tells me that something deep is happening? Realizing that intermodal offers more than just visual art, writing, movement and sound . . . always being curious about what’s next . . .

What is your personal philosophy about EXA?
Markus has always maintained that exa is a lifestyle and I totally agree. What we do in a workshop can also be done in the way I go about my day. I can better see the connections between seemingly unrelated things and if I’ll take a moment, things will lay themselves out before me in new ways. There are resources I can draw from, that even the mundane holds magic, that I have the ability to let things move around and be flexible.

I also believe that every person deserves to know their own creativity, whatever it looks like, and be honored for it. Especially children. Children need to grow up supported by adults who realize that their imaginations have merit and that play, beauty and creating can happen just for the fun of it.

If you were to give future EXA students advice what would it be?
Don’t stop. Question? Yes. Challenge? Yes. Keep going? Yes, a zillion times.