By the time we were ready to dive into the arts, we were in the process of becoming certified as FWB practitioner (Focusing with the Whole Body). FWB was linked to our previous training in body psychotherapy, and we felt quite happy doing more body in Focusing. Then a dream showed us boarding a train in the wrong direction. The need of the hour was to change direction immediately. Our dream force was urging us to leave the known behind and head into the unknown
We enrolled in the 2017 FOAT® training program with Dr Laury Rappaport, took additional training in trauma-informed Expressive Arts and Person-centred Creative Arts, and enrolled in a university art therapy program and practical art couses. This comprehensive package of training proved to be the right way forward
Why was this change of path so important to finding our own language as a Focusing Professional?
In 2011 we had visited the Saintbury Center at the University of East Anglia UEA/UK during the UEA Focusing and Philosophy Conference. In the center's art museum and shop there was a print of a complete circle in four parts waiting to be put together. Seeing this picture we suddenly realized that our efforts to complete our Focusing profession were still in a jigsaw puzzle state
A PhD at UEA seemed to be the perfect solution and we prepared for a PhD with Judy Moore and Campbell Purton as our UEA supervisors. Unfortunately the UEA PhD turned out not to be feasible. As we pursued a German PdD, we realized that completion was not to be found within our linguistic culture. We left the doctoral program with unfinished doctoral work
Our doctoral work had been in intermodal Focusing, so we turned to Focusing with the Whole Body FWB to study the range of Felt Sense modalities in practice. Words were essential to guide FWB practitioners, and as we could not fully identity with the FWB language, we felt stuck
The art training package we put together years later was indicative of the right place to be and develop our own language (it was the place of embodied aesthetics). Our completion was linked to a non-native vocabulary, and processing along visual and intermodal symbolization from the body sense led to a non-verbal vocabulary of unique origin appearing in our artwork
Through trial and error, we found the one missing piece we had been looking for our entire career. It was not an additional piece, but rather the glue that holds together and in place pieces of self that were separated or in a disintegrated state. Through hands-on experiments along the lines of experiential slow art, this glue became apparent. It was most evident in the kinesthetic re-experiencing of what had been expressed artistically. This one step of experiencing and re-experiencing was a crucial self-directed step forward, and the breakthrough to discovering our own way of teaching the Felt Arts language
We found that experiential art-making calls on all the senses to serve the next right step of the body (and so we began to study the theory of polyaesthetics). We discovered that artmaking in itself is not a safe place (the Felt Arts facilitation setting is the safe place). We did not expect art making to be risky (but it was) and were surprised by its energizing power once risks were taken. We realized that following our artistic sense was a process of deconstruction and reconstruction of the visual vocabulary, resulting in no right or wrong, but a constant layering of new kinds of meaning. We learned that art is culturally bound and found out that art making can bypass cultural structure-boundness the moment we connect to our creative instincts. What we found in the experiential language of Felt Arts was a place that freed us from responding to any linguistic social codes
Having been born into a family as the youngest member and having always suffered from having to conform to pre-formed linguistic codes in groups, this new found freedom meant everything to us in order to build a Focusing life to the fullest
