That pink thread is a lifetime

Featured writer Karen Beetle / Glass Lake Studio founder Markus Alexander led a creative adventure at NYEA in March. Below are a few photos by Sharon Melius, along with Karen Beetle’s reflections on the experience.

March 17, 2009, 9:00 am

Last Friday night, I was brought back to a beloved world that I haven’t visited for a long time. Immediately I felt at home and felt the joy and delight of reconnection. That world is the amazing, inner discoveryland of expressive arts. Markus Alexander was the founder of Glass Lake Studio now New York Expressive Arts. He was in town to share about his most recent work in Peru with earthquake survivors and to do what he does best — to facilitate a creative adventure.

“Deep Play” is how he refers to the joyful work of self-expression using the arts. The depth comes from our ability to settle into our own experience and to feel our roots reaching deep into the Earth. This quieting and centering practice becomes the base for the flowering of our expression in the world. This unique expression is facilitated by the arts and results in a deepening capacity to act from our inner knowing as we walk through our days. Expressive arts play involves simple, expressive materials: paper, fabric, thread, tissue paper, beads, sticks etc. Think nursery school and remember the joy of using materials for no goal at all. Remember the feel of the glue and the pine cones and your fingers pressing and sticky. Remember the satisfaction and freedom you knew as you ran off to the playground and hung wtih sticky fingers from the monkey bars.

On Friday night, I ripped paper dots into shreds and threw them in the air and chased them with gold tissue paper and felt the urgency and joy that play evokes. As human beings, we are meaning makers, and the swirling dots were the edge of my relationship to what is nowable in this world of air and change. I played with my own capacity for impact in the swirling unknown. I have seen again and again in my play therapy sessions with young clients — that to act in metaphor is to build a road home. For an earthquake survivor, there are scraps of life that remain — an uncle and a house, but no parents. Parents and siblings, but no work and no school. Every day is about walking in rubble with torn scraps of paper. And yet the capacity to know waits under the surface — an untapped reservoir of hope.

Expressive arts and play remind us that we can know. The red tissue paper goes there and the pink thread winds around to the left. Crumpled paper forms an arduous path, but there is just enough pink thread to make it all the way back. As the sticky fingers wind the thread — pushing and sealing — the road is built. The heart lightens and the body quiets — just enough so that the soft rays of the rising sun appear to dance in the rubble and in that moment — all is not lost. The long path back from despair begins with these quiet moments of possibility. That pink thread is a lifeline.

Addressing self consciousness

Featured writer Geoffrey “Markus” Scott-Alexander, MA, REAT, CAGS, (PhD Candidate) is the founder of World Arts Organization and Glass Lake Studio. He has served as core faculty for New York Expressive Arts training since 1986 and is a faculty member of the European Graduate School.

The greatest deterrent to the clients’ ability to have a voice is self-consciousness. Needing to sound right. Needing to sound good. Needing or wanting a voice based on what they have heard outside themselves, apart from themselves. Comparing destroys playfulness; the dis-ease of self consciousness is continually exacerbated by the clients’ incessant comparing themselves to others.

When the flute-like voice compares itself to the saxophone personality, it is doomed to feelings of inadequacy. Likewise, when the saxophone personality becomes self-involved, it is also self-conscious in a self-involved way. What is the way out of this conundrum and constriction, this potentially crippling self-consciousness? A significant key is enjoyment, beginning with increasing the clients’ ability to enjoy their voice – as is. There is always somewhere to go, something to develop. At the least, however, playfulness is extremely hampered when the clients are self-conscious, experiencing the sound of their voice as inadequate, unrefined, or in any way less than their fantasy of what their voice should be.

Enjoyment of the voice ‘as is,’ is where it can begin, delighting in the ‘as is’-ness of it. This is usually essential to progress. Delighting in the ‘as is’-ness of the voice translates or has the capability of translating/transferring into other areas. For example, moving as is, the rabbit not comparing itself to how the tiger moves. Without this first step in the healing journey of the voice as is, there is little possibility for subtlety. Without a core of simple, honest delight of the voice in its relaxed state, any explorations are contrived, fake bravado with little possibility of there being a lasting therapeutic effect.

The other arena of self-consciousness is the realm of the voice in silence. Self- consciousness in silence is deadly. Awkwardness, discomfort, restlessness are all aspects of self-consciousness. The capacity to be still, gentled, and quiet at any time must be nurtured and encouraged – taught, in order for the clients to have a voice that grows out of their own being. We of the expressive arts community mustn’t skip over the importance, preciousness, and essentialness of comfort with the quiet, the silence – the rests in the line of music being made.

Quietude. Time to collect, gather, reflect, ponder, feel, moving gently in or slowly back out. Silence needn’t be stagnant…

Teaching clients to have a relaxed, full, enjoyable silence, alone and with others is essential. A full voice comes out of a full silence.

Delighting in the fullness of silence can come before or after expression. It must be a part of the ongoing understanding of the flow and expression of the voice, however. An antidote to self-consciousness can be enjoyment. The expressive arts therapist’s comfort with his or her silence models its essential place in play-ground…silence as essential to play and to the ground played upon. Without a delight in silence, the quiet voice is misunderstood. The palpable power of silence can be experienced by the therapist and client alike. The subtle, gentle beginnings of expression from that silence can then be appreciated and carefully tended to.

Tending and coaxing the voice out of its silence is only one side of the equation. The silence after the storm also has inestimable value. Feeling the effects of expression in the silent space where reverberations pulsate upon the heart, body and mind…and if we’re lucky, touching the Soul as well. Feeling the effects of expression in all the nooks and crannies of our psyches that, that voice on that day touches. The silence – the place where surprise has all the room it needs to do its job in the creative process.

…a holding back, sustaining, containing,
waiting attentively,
getting to the ‘wanting’…
—M. Fuchs-Knill