Our Story: From More Body In Focusing to Arts In Focusing

When we were ready to step into the arts, we were in the midst of certifying as a FWB practitioner (Focusing with the Whole Body). FWB was connecting to prior trainings in body-psychotherapy and we felt quite happy doing more body in Focusing

Then, a dream depicted that we were taking the wrong direction train. The call of hour was immediate change of direction. Our dream force urged us to leave behind the well-known for to head into the unknown

We enrolled in the 2017 FOAT® training program with Dr. Laury Rappaport, took additional trainings in trauma-informed Expressive Arts and Person-centred Creative Arts, and suscribed to a university art therapy program and practical art couses. This comprehensive training bundle turned out to set us on the right track

How did we come to let go a promising career as a body specialist and change life track for the arts?

In 2011 we had been visiting the Saintbury Center at the University of East Anglia UEA/UK during the UEA Focusing and Philosophy Conference

The center's art museum and shop layed out a print depicting a full circle in four parts waiting to be put together. Seeing this picture it hit us on a sudden that our efforts to bring our Focusing profession to completion were still in a puzzle state

A PhD at UEA looked the perfect match to complete and we prepared for a PhD with Judy Moore and Campbell Purton as UEA supervisors. Unfortunately the UEA PhD turned out to be not feasable. Pursuing completion in a German doctorate, we realized that completion was not to be found inside of our linguistic culture. We left the doctoral program with unfinished PhD work

Our PhD interest had been on intermodal Focusing, so we turned to Focusing with the Whole Body FWB to study the range of Felt Sense modalities practically. Words were indispensable for guiding FWB practitioners, and as we could not identity with FWB language to the full, we felt stuck

The art training bundle we compiled years later was informative about the linguistically right place to dwell in. It was a place located in embodied aesthetics

Our coming to completion was linked to non-native vocabulary, and processing along visual and intermodal symbolization was leading to non-verbal vocabulary of unique origin showing up in our artwork

Through trial and error we identified the one missing piece we had been looking for. It was no additional piece but the glue that holds together and at place pieces of self that were split off or in desintegrated state

Experimenting practically along experiential slow art, this glue became overt. It came into effect the most by re-experiencing kinaesthetically what had been expressed artistically. This one move of experiencing and re-experiencing could be done self-directed, and this was our breakthrough

We found that experiential artmaking calls on all the senses to serve the body's next right step, and studied the theory of polyaesthetics

We discovered that artmaking in itself is not a safe place (the setting of art fascilitation is the safe place)

We did not expect artmaking being risky (but it was) and were surprized by its energizing power once risks were taken

We realized that following our art sense was processing along deconstruction and reconstruction, leading to no right nor wrong

We learned that art is culture-bound and found out that artmaking can bypass cultural structure-boundness the moment we get connected to our creative instincts

What we found in experiential Felt Arts as essence were new grounds for living a Focusing life to the full