Last January we met with María from Arteterapia Gestalt Madrid. GestArte y Arteterapia Gestalt Barcelona and Madrid – Hephaisto School to explain what we do in the School of Process Work for a possible future alliance of the two entities. We think that the best way to better understand possible ways of collaboration was to know first-hand our methodology and our training and seminar programs.
This is explained by María after having attended part of the last seminar:
NEED AND HOPE. Two words that start and arrive at the same place in me. I feel the need to stop and take sides, and hope that by doing so I am participating as much as I can. Both sensations that during the last year have become more evident through the consequences that become visible in my daily life and that of my community.
I have been receiving recommendations from the Process Work Institute for almost a year and I finally have the opportunity to get to know them closely through their Seminar Remodeling historical patterns: climate, structural racism and classism.
This connection has been possible thanks to my work at Escuela Hephaisto and GestArte. From both entities I feel that we share something basic with the Institute and I am pleased, now that I am writing these lines, to confirm it and to visualize new encounters.
I was participating in the first part of the seminar with the presentation by Andy Smith and the practical exercise by Gillian Emslie. I was pleasantly surprised by the large number of people who were in the seminar and at the same time it made me feel that indeed, there is a need for spaces and proposals for empowerment and awareness to carry out movements for change.
The afternoon began with an important reminder that I appreciated, an invitation to take care of the body and to listen to us. In order to collect, change, create, listen, … it is necessary that we be, beyond the conditions of the frame (in this case online), that we put the intention to be present with our bodily sensations and attend to them in order to have the energy available.
This way of opening a meeting, which is familiar to me from the way I work from Gestalt Art Therapy, was an opening to find my way of being in the seminar, to be fully present. A simple gesture that made me feel in a familiar and common place.
After the presentations, Andy’s introduction begins and I immerse myself in a vision and a reflection on the organization of communities, politics, technology and the economy that have left our base, ecology, nature in the last place. And with this reflection some latent questions, what is happening outside is what is happening inside? How are these two realities, interior and exterior, related? How do I reproduce this in myself?
It is beyond me to reflect what was shared at a theoretical or vision level, it is not my intention in these lines, because also each listener surely captured something different. Trying to summarize it here would be poor. But I share what impacted me the most.
Each encounter or stop that allows us to feel and become aware of our communication capacity, also allows us to take responsibility in the great system that goes beyond borders or currencies, a system where we are also viruses, organisms trying to coexist. A system in which, seen with a perspective of order, I do not feel that we are more than nothing. On the contrary, perhaps we are “nothing” come to more and wasting time in guilt, egoic lies and attempts to overcome our weaknesses by skipping our entire history as organisms.
And by feeling this, everything is easier. We coincide in our desire to feel better, not to suffer, to seek pleasure, avoid pain, and despite this we create scenarios in which it is difficult for this to develop, because we do not take our place into account. So small and so big.
We create. We create it, we change it.
This feeling is also something that I live in my daily work. What we create we can also transform. Every little change that I take in myself is reflected in my surroundings, no matter how small.
And with this creative capacity, in what way did we decide to put it at the service of life?
My hope is in taking responsibility, every day a little more. By sharing in group dynamics, I was pleased to meet other people who inspired me with many possibilities and different views on this hope of mine.
And so I began to create my own image of this internal organism that invites me to see myself as something smaller and at the same time with more capacity to be in the whole.
After this experience, I hope that more people join the Institute’s initiatives and I trust that they will open interesting meetings between the Hephaisto School and Gestarte where we can include art and the body in our reflections and creations.
Thanks to Mar, Andy and Gill for the invitation!
Thanks to you Maria, we hope it was useful to you, it helped you to get to know each other better and we hope that we can grow together, in alliance.