Moving Grief - Moving Loss is a program of unusual depth and boldness.
MOVING GRIEF - MOVING LOSS
Performed at Northlight Gallery at Arizona State University (featured imagery by Tomiko Jones).
Moving Grief – Moving Loss is a vibrant program that helps people process loss in a supportive, creative and healthy way. It connects participants to resilience, community and joy.
Moving Grief – Moving Loss invites the intense energy of loss to take expressive form through gesture, shape and voice. Using techniques from Somatic Experiencing ™, dance, theater, improvisation and ritual, this work re-invigorates what we have instinctively understood for a long time; namely that physical expression within community offers health and healing outcomes no pill or talk therapy alone can provide.
Moving Grief – Moving Loss brings people home to their bodies through creative expression where:
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story is embedded in gesture
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feelings are explored through shape
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line drawings visually map the course of loss
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ritual brings community together
“Trauma is not what happens to us, but what we hold inside in the absence of an empathetic witness.”
- Peter A. Levine
How Moving Grief – Moving Loss Got Started
I was abruptly widowed and left with a very young child. Everything felt surreal. I was being called daily by the mortuary asking what was to be done with the body. Friends were asking what they could do to help. I had no idea how to deal with any of it. I was totally broke. Family was far away. The nature of the death was controversial bringing an added layer of drama. I was in shock.
"I remember sitting in a grief support circle in a generic room with yards of fluorescent lights overhead. I was not at all comfortable. I didn’t speak." - Dr. Susan Bendix
But when I went to pick up my daughter in the children’s grief group, they were moving around, drawing, writing, gluing this and that. I remember feeling so much better in that room with wounded grieving children than in my own group of wounded grieving adults.
This was basically the springboard for Moving Grief – Moving Loss. I’ve had a professional career as a dancer, choreographer and improvisational artist. The world of creative expression has profound power as a way to explore difficult feelings. Grief groups and talking can be tremendously valuable. But as a movement artist, processing grief from an embodied expressive perspective made much more sense. Movement is my language.
I developed my program over several years. It incorporates dance, theater, improvisation and ritual. Though Moving Grief – Moving Loss is innovative and progressive, it is not new. The therapeutic nature of movement, voice and ritual have been instinctively understood for a very long time. Physical expression within community offers health and healing outcomes no pill or talk therapy alone can provide.
While developing Moving Grief – Moving Loss, I became a certified Somatic Experience ™ Practitioner – which is a psycho-therapeutic approach to trauma as it is experienced in the body. This knowledge greatly enhanced my work.
The wound is the place where light enters you. - Rumi
I’ve presented this workshop to adolescents and adults. People are hungry for this expressive approach to this very universal experience of loss. There is so much loss right now – a seemingly endless supply. Moving Grief – Moving Loss is powerful in helping people through the difficult journey of loss. It offers healing within a supportive community.
For dance artists and choreographers, it offers a new way to generate choreographic material. For theater artists it offers a way to develop embodied monologues and scenes. For non-dance and non-theater people, it offers an exploration into creative expression and way to be more fully human!