Body-Mind-Soul

Just so’s you’re sure, sweetheart, and ready to be healed,
‘cause wholeness is no trifling matter.
A lot of weight when you’re well.

– Toni Cade Bambara, The Salt Eaters

Imagination is absolutely critical to the quality of our lives […]
Imagination gives us the opportunity to envision new possibilities –
it is an essential launchpad for making our hopes come true. […]
When people are compulsively and constantly pulled back into the [traumatic] past,
to the last time they felt intense involvement and deep emotions,
they suffer from a failure of imagination, a loss of the mental flexibility.
Without imagination there is no hope, no chance to envision a better future,
no place to go, no goal to reach.

– Bessel van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score:
Mind, Brain and Body in the Transformation of Trauma

Cathartic Method (or Therapy)

Method of psychotherapy in which the therapeutic effect sought is ‘purgative’: an adequate discharge of pathogenic affects. The treatment allows the patient to evoke and even to relive the traumatic events to which these affects are bound, and to abreact them.

’Catharsis’ is a Greek word meaning purification or purging. Aristotle used it to denote the effect tragedy produces on the spectator: ‘A tragedy […] is the imitation of an action that is serious and also […] complete in itself […] with incidents arousing pity and fear, wherewith to accomplish its catharsis of such emotions’.

Breuer and then Freud adopted this term and used it to mean the desired result of an adequate abreaction of a trauma. According to the theory worked out in the Studies on Hysteria (1895a), as we know, those affects that do not succeed in finding a pathway to discharge remain ‘strangulated’ (eingeklemmt) and bring about pathogenic results. In a later resumé of the theory of catharsis, Freud was to write: ‘According to that hypothesis, hysterical symptoms originate through the energy of a mental process being withheld from conscious influence and being diverted into bodily innervation (“conversion”). […] recovery would be a result of the liberation of the affect that had gone astray and of its discharge along a normal path (“abreaction”)’.

– Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bernard Pontalis, The Language of Psychoanalysis

Without knowing what factors have created certain problems in the first place we could not begin to develop meaningful strategies of personal and collective resistance. Black female self-recovery, like all black self-recovery, is an expression of a liberatory political practice. Living as we do in a white-supremacist capitalist patriarchal context that can best exploit us when we lack a firm grounding in self and identity (knowledge of who we are and where we have come from), choosing ‘wellness’ is an act of political resistance. Before many of us can effectively sustain engagement in organized resistance struggle, in black liberation movement, we need to undergo a process of self-recovery that can heal individual wounds that may prevent us from functioning fully.

– bell hooks, Sisters of the Yam: Black Women and Self-Recovery

The Body Remembers is about how trauma is internalized in the body and how we can take ownership in our healing… the piece uses projection, soundscapes, and Authentic Movement, which is moving through impulse to create the experience of release and catharsis for myself and the audience.

– Heather Agyepong, The Making of The Body Remembers by Heather Agyepong

She has been arranging objects on the floor in a wide curve by the screen behind her. The instruction on the screen asks us to notice, to pay attention to the mover, pay attention to ourselves, pay attention to what is happening in our bodies. There are chairs and floor cushions. We can sit where we like, how we like, and are invited to express what we feel in the moment; paper and pencil are provided to do so. The line of objects: a monitor with changing images; a pile of books, popular but serious books about self-healing and its intersection with a specifically Black and female political reality; objects of comfort, pillows, cuddly toys; objects of reflection, a locket, a journal, a camera. A horrifying object of discomfort, a pristine scarlet rawhide whip. I’ve recently seen a viral photograph of a blood clot in the shape of the lung passages that coughed it up: the coiled whip, with its forked ends, reminded me of this, along with other things.

– Osunwunmi, “Osunwunmi reflects on Heather Agyepong’s The Body Remembers"

In Authentic Movement you have a mover and a witness when it is used in therapeutic practice […] there is always an audience in theater, so when the audience and witness come together via Authentic Movement, there is always a strong intention to involve the audience in that way [as witness].

– Gail Babb, Co-creator (Dramaturgy), The Making of The Body Remembers by Heather Agyepong

 

It’s been incredibly cathartic in collaborating in this way… and creating a piece of art which is incredibly immersive… and at the heart of it is the audience… that’s the kind of work I am interested in, not just being a spectator but being crucial to the work itself.

– Heather Agyepong, The Making of The Body Remembers by Heather Agyepong

 

It [Heather Agyepong’s body movement] is deeply live but really held. […] There are some things that there are no words for, but the body has words […] you may not have the language to express your story or a memory, but your body has a language, that you know, and that can be shared, and be witnessed and understood.

– Imogen Knight, Co-creator (Movement), The Making of The Body Remembers by Heather Agyepong

It was night in some unknown place, and I was making slow and painful headway against a mighty wind. Dense fog was flying along everywhere. I had my hands cupped around a tiny light which threatened to go out at any moment. Everything depended on my keeping this little light alive.

Suddenly I had the feeling that something was coming up behind me. I looked back, and saw a gigantic black figure following me. But at the same moment I was conscious, in spite of my terror, that I must keep my little light going through night and wind, regardless of all dangers.

When I awoke I realized at once that the figure was […] my own shadow on the swirling mists, brought into being by the little light I was carrying. I knew, too, that this little light was my consciousness, the only light I have. […] Though infinitely small and fragile in comparison with the powers of darkness, it is still a light, my only light.”

– Carl Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections

[…] I will provide a short description of the actual techniques that can be used in [Jung’s practice of] active imagination.

The first thing is to be alone, and as free as possible from being disturbed. Then one must sit down and concentrate on seeing or hearing whatever comes up from the unconscious. When this is accomplished, and often it is far from easy, the image must be prevented from sinking back again into the unconscious, by drawing, painting or writing down whatever has been seen or heard. Sometimes it is possible to express it best by movement or dancing. Some people cannot get into touch with the unconscious directly. An indirect approach that often reveals the unconscious particularly well is to write stories, apparently about other people. Such stories inevitably reveal the parts of the storyteller’s own psyche of which he or she is completely unconscious.

In every case, the goal is to get into touch with the unconscious, and that entails giving it an opportunity to express itself in some way or other. […] To give it this opportunity it is nearly always necessary to overcome a greater or lesser degree of ‘conscious cramp’ and to allow the fantasies, which are always more or less present in the unconscious, to come to consciousness. […] As a rule, the first step in active imagination is to learn, so to speak, to see or hear the dream while awake.

In other places, Jung includes movement and music among the ways through which it is possible to reach these fantasies. He points out that with movement – although sometimes of the greatest help in dissolving the cramp of consciousness – the difficulty lies in registering the movement themselves and, if there is no outer record, it is amazing how quickly things that come from the unconscious disappear again from the conscious mind.

Jung suggests the repetition of the releasing movements until they are really fixed in the memory and, even then, it is my experience that it is as well to draw the pattern made by the dance or movement, or to write a few words of description, to prevent it from disappearing altogether in a few days.

There is another technique in dealing with the unconscious by means of active imagination which I have always found of the greatest possible help: conversations with contents of the unconscious that appear personified.

– Barbara Hannah, “Learning Active Imagination,” Meeting the Shadow: The Hidden Power of the Dark Side of Human Nature

The range of what we think and do
is limited by what we fail to notice.
And because we fail to notice
that we fail to notice
there is little we can do
to change
until we notice
how failing to notice
shapes our thoughts and deeds.

– Daniel Goleman, Vital Lies, Simple Truths: The Psychology of Self-Deception, in the form of a Laingian “knot”

Caring for myself is not self-indulgence. It is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.

– Audre Lorde, A Burst of Light