“As you teach so will you learn. If that is true, and it is true indeed, do not forget that what you teach is teaching you.”

A Course in Miracles

My Journey to Somatic Expression

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I was born into this world a bright being: light, expressive and energetic. Over time, the rules of society and my life experience began to squelch this effervescence. The kindergarten teacher worried when I played house with the girls. (I enjoyed being the Daddy and the center of attention!) She made me play by myself, like the other boys, with blocks and trucks. And after two traumatic blows to my skull at the age of 5 (being hit with a baseball bat and falling from a tree), I retreated from physical risk-taking. The rough and tumble world of boy’s play became even less appealing, and enjoyable activities, like skipping rope, were considered inappropriate for boys.

These bodily and expressive events were all symbols of an emerging psychological and energetic pattern. Personal impulses – whether for expression or connection – were ignored or thwarted, leading to emotional resignation and isolation. I learned and embodied a core pattern of acquiescing and giving up, rather than asserting and fighting back. It was as if I was frozen in time. Fortunately, I had access to the natural world as a child. I found freedom and movement in nature, whether exploring my grandparents’ farm or playing in the water for hours at the beach.

These were also the most harmonious times in my fractured family of five children and two incompatible parents. In the outdoors, we bonded in a unique way. Like many families with little emotional intelligence in the Sixties, we were connected, but not securely attached. There was little physical affection, and we all took solace in food. I became an excellent student and a good boy, earning attention through straight A report cards and helpful behavior. I also found ways to escape bullying boys by becoming a choirboy and an altar boy. My sanctuaries from the world were the Church, the world of books, and my bedroom.

Life changed with the onset of puberty. A growth spurt, a new school with other boy geniuses, and disillusionment with the Church all coalesced at the same time. The righteous anger of the counterculture gave me a forum for my own adolescent rage. My parents didn’t know how to deal with my turbulence, as they had no idea how to deal with their own. By then, my father was working all week out of state, putting pressure on an already crumbling relationship with my mother. Since I didn’t have any physical outlet for my energy, or guidance for dealing with my feelings, I poured myself into creative writing and used music to escape. When I discovered drugs at 14, the world opened up to me in a different way. Sharing a joint in those days created instant camaraderie; I was not isolated anymore. In the altered state, I was not a prisoner of my family story or my own fear. Yet, no matter how free I felt internally when I was high, I was still bound up in my own physical inhibitions. I certainly could not imagine myself dancing!

When I went away to college, I woke up from the trance. All of a sudden, I was on my own, with no one else’s plan mapped out for me to rebel against or follow. In coming out of adolescence, I had no idea of who I was or what I wanted in my life. I began the journey of self-creation by exchanging my pot habit for meditation. I also dropped out of school for a year, wrote poetry, read many books, changed my diet, and rode my bicycle halfway across the country. When I returned to school, I joined a karate club. The discipline began to connect me to the power of my body.

Periodically, the class would go out together to a disco and dance in a circle, one person at a time going into the center and improvising. This was my introduction to the circle and dancing as a community. The bound, explosive movement of karate, though, began to affect my psyche; I would become easily angered. I knew nothing about the connection between movement and emotion, and was surprised by this force erupting in my body seemingly out of nowhere. I also felt increasingly limited by the karate vocabulary, and wanted other ways to move.

Friends recommended a dance improvisation class at the University. After the limitations of karate, I enjoyed the freedom of exploring a wide range of movement and creating my own dance. By coming to dance this way, rather than through a technique class with all of its rules about how one “should” move, a tone was set in my soma and psyche: dance was for personal exploration and creative expression, with everyone a choreographer rather than only a chosen few.

During this time of discovering freedom of movement and imagination, I was working two part-time jobs: as an aide at a facility for retarded adults and as a pre-school teacher. Working with these populations inspired me to devote myself to play, creativity and movement as recreation, or "re-creation". I created an independent degree program and took many dance classes as part of my study to become a recreational therapist. This period of being a dancer was an important antidote to the years of bodily suppression and encoded fear. It was as if I was “born again”, finding my way back to the early years of movement exploration that had been truncated by my traumas.

I went on to teach creative drama and movement in public schools. The lessons of technique class seemed irrelevant there, as children were already gifted with so much movement intelligence. The dance and theatre improvisation classes gave me enough structure to begin developing my own method. I found a model in elementary school art. Teachers gave students materials and a theme so they could create whatever they wanted, resulting in some of the most interesting abstract art. I approached movement in a similar way, and began creating improvisational performance pieces with my students. Particularly helpful were the writings of Barbara Mettler, who developed dance as a creative art activity for people of all ages. (1)

I worked in public schools for eight years, primarily at the elementary level, first with support from the school district, then from the Wisconsin Arts Board. I became a crusader for dance in education, and the right of all boys and girls in public schools to experience creativity in movement. I did not understand at the time the cultural obstacles to what I was doing. When I presented a workshop once on creative dance for the elementary classroom, each teacher that came took me aside ahead of time to make sure we were only going to “talk”. You would have thought I was offering a sex education seminar!

During those years, I struggled to find my own way of being a dancer. Dissatisfied with traditional systems, but not yet ready to let go of them, I began to investigate other forms. I explored the Alexander Technique, Contact Improvisation, Butoh, Todd Alignment, and other bodily approaches. I was influenced the most by the Alexander Technique due to the unique teacher. (2) Marjorie Barstow had been part of Alexander’s first teacher-training group in England, and was 86 when I first studied with her. She was more than a teacher of a technique; she embodied and lived the principles of the work. The Alexander Technique uses self-awareness to inhibit movement habits and subtle movement to organize the body in a new way. The teacher gives both verbal and tactile direction. I remember hearing the change in the resonance of a vocalist or in the timbre of a violin when she would work with students. I learned from her how to subtly communicate intention and direction with my hands.

Yet, the delicacy of the Alexander Technique did not satisfy a more pressing need. I had been orchestrating all-school festivals as an Artist-in-Residence, with large groups of children and adults dancing together. I wanted more guidance to further that vision. Then I met Anna Halprin, a world-renowned dancer who had inspired many postmodern choreographers and then had become a pioneer in the field of dance as a healing art. In my first workshop with her in 1985 (when she was 65), she showed me how basic movement such as walking, running and standing could have power and meaning. As we were not struggling to learn the mechanics of complex movement - which happens in most dance classes - personal feeling could more easily come into the foreground. There was also no concern about an audience; we were simply moving with awareness of our experience and each other, just like my early experiences in improvisation. Anna’s passion about the power of dance for all people inspired me to leave my work in the schools and study with her at Tamalpa Institute in California. (3)

After a year of study, I decided not to return to the Midwest and my work in the public schools. I began to assist Anna in community classes and workshops, and started teaching in the Training Program. I taught Anna’s Movement Ritual 1. (4) This series of movements performed on the floor focuses on the full range of spinal articulation with breath support and minimal muscular exertion. Movement Ritual 1 is a fluid Yoga with an emphasis on exploration. This daily movement meditation became a pathway to take me directly into the language of the body and out of the ramblings of my mind. The more I practiced this language, the more secure and centered I felt in my own body. This is when dance became less of a performing art and more of a healing art for me.

In 1991, I attended an intensive with Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen, creator of Body-Mind Centering, which covered the body systems and the developmental pathway. In the developmental pathway (the movement progression all human infants progress through early in life), I saw connections between this natural phenomenon and Anna’s intuitively formed Movement Ritual. In this and subsequent workshops with Bonnie, we sang the glands, touched the organs, moved the fluids, and became still in the bones. (5)

These various languages of the body and its expression were becoming more familiar. My meditation practice was also changing. Steven Levine, in his workshops on death and dying, introduced me to Vipassana meditation. (6) This gave my meditation a more body-centered focus, as attending to sensation is central to the practice. I first encountered the Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh at a Vipassana center. I was so impressed by this man who, despite what he had endured during the Vietnam War, could proclaim that life was beautiful. His teaching was simple and profound: be aware of and enjoy your breath to create mindfulness, and smile into life to create peace. Over the years I have experienced his presence and appreciate him as a profound teacher of Somatics. (7)

In 1993, I participated in a seminar with Jungian innovator Arnold Mindell for people with chronic physical illnesses. (8) The intention was to support healing by discovering the message and meaning of symptoms as reflections of unconscious processes. Two themes unfolded in the seminar: to live my intense, passionate nature more and to channel that into being a performer once again. When I came home, one of my clients died of AIDS at the age of 27. Mixed in with my grief was outrage over the life he wasn’t able to live. Two weeks later, I used Arnie’s process in a ten-minute improvisation at a studio opening. I was as stunned as the audience by the physical and emotional power that emerged as I embodied the repeated question, "Who will live? Who will die? And why?"  The next day, I committed to creating a solo performance-ceremony. “Alive at the Edge: Field Notes from an Endangered Species” premiered on my birthday. For the next three years, I performed in churches, conferences, and colleges in the United States and Europe.

In 1994, I attended the first of many Continuum workshops with Emilie Conrad. Continuum is based on the multi-dimensionality of the breath, and its impact on movement. What hooked me was the work with specific vibratory sounds. When people chant or sing in groups, the emphasis is on getting sound out into the room. In the Continuum process, sound is directed inward to become a form of subtle movement. One sinks deeply into the interior as the trance-like sound dissolves barriers to feeling and perception. Continuum gave me a new approach for working with my breath and voice, and Emilie has become a loving mentor and friend over the years. (9)

I became increasingly curious about the nature of the body. What is the body really? Since our thoughts, feelings, actions, and interpersonal interactions all influence our organism, isn’t the body more malleable and fluid than we think? Many of these questions were amplified by meeting George F. Solomon, one of the fathers of psychoneuroimmunology. Being exposed to his vast wealth of knowledge, and collaborating with him on several seminars, brought me into contact with the world of scientific research on body/mind healing. The world of somatics gave me a practical “owner’s manual” for my body, and the world of PNI research gave me a theoretical springboard for more investigation.

I lived in Switzerland for two years, teaching workshops and trainings throughout Europe and discovering the universality of somatic and expressive work. When I returned to the United States in 1998, I saw our culture with different eyes. The country was deeply divided about the President’s affair. The discomfort with sexuality, and, by extension, the body, was a strong reminder of the great healing our culture needs. The Columbine massacre in 1999 was a similar reminder. The alienation that had brought these teenagers to such desperate lengths stimulated memories of my own adolescent history, and my own collaborative work with youth in schools. It reminded me: physical expression and the creative process, the somatic and the expressive, are powerful mediums for generating life rather than destroying it. This “medicine” can help heal the great discord in our own bodies and in the body politic.

In 2000, I set off on an extended sabbatical to reflect on the world of somatic movement education and therapy. Living by the ocean and immersing myself in reading and writing solidified the essence of my work, and “Somatic Expression”- the soma expressing itself through breath, sound, touch, movement and stillness - came into being. (10)

In the seven years since then, I have had many opportunities in the United States and Europe to use this approach with different audiences: gay men, people with HIV and cancer, students of holistic health and expressive arts therapy, and many others on the path of embodiment.

My journey has come full circle, from the early work with children to my current work with adults. Coming back home to the sanctuary of our bodies is essential in these modern times of rapid change and chaos. In a post-911 world, with images of terror bombarding us more frequently, I see more clearly how somatic expression is an antidote to unconscious fear and a pathway to peace. My own practice of the five languages continues to develop, supporting my own health, healing and maturation. I offer you these tools and methods for discovering the nature of your own body so you too can more readily find peace, security and freedom in your life.

Notes:

1. Barbara Mettler: www.barbaramettler.org

2. Alexander Technique: www.ati.net

3. Tamalpa Institute: www.tamalpa.org  Anna Halprin: www.annahalprin.org

4. The Movement Ritual 1 book and CD are available through Anna Halprin.

5. Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen/ School for Body-Mind Centering: www.bmca.org

6. Vipassana Meditation: www.spiritrock.org

7. Thich Nhat Hanh: www.plumvillage.org

8. Arnie Mindell: www.aamindell.net

9. Emilie Conrad/ Continuum: www.continuummovement.com

10. Jamie McHugh/ Somatic Expression: www.somaticexpression.com

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Jamie McHugh.