What is a healing art form?
ShapeShifting is both an art form and a kind of therapy/meditation.
How can an art form also be a kind of therapy? Both of these are modes of expression. In fact, artists often talk about their artistic expression as a kind of personal therapy. As we live and take in the world around us, we have responses to it. At certain times in our lives we feel the need to say something about what we have experienced- what it felt like emotionally, physically, how it shaped the way we think, etc.. Sometimes words are enough to express what we want to say and sometimes we need other non-verbal avenues to express our responses to life’s events.
In its most powerful form, art heals.
When your body tells its story, you are both creating an environment (art) and allowing your body to show you who you are with all of your joy, pleasure, sadness, anger, pain, love, etc.(therapy). As your body carves out a physical space in which to move, it also creates an environment for the body to express itself in ways that your conscious mind cannot approach. There are fears and pain that it knows and remembers that the conscious mind cannot face. Your body’s movement is both an artistic creation and a healing release of remembrances beyond words. Your body has its own movement language that it speaks more powerfully than any string of words. As energy moves through your movement, it allows your body to speak sentences, phrases, and stories.
Your body’s movement speaks to other bodies. Your body has its own language. The phrase “body language” is often used to describe the messages our bodies send. Turn off the sound on a video of people speaking and just watch the movement of their bodies. Watch their faces, hand jesters, and large muscle movement. Often you will get a very different understanding of what they are really communicating. Our bodies read this language and respond in return, often in ways which we are not even aware. Communication is another aspect of both therapy and art.
Your preconscious mind is the place where your body is free to remember and express what it knows about you. It is the place where you can hear and see the truth about yourself and be healed at the same time. It is the place where other bodies see and hear your body’s story which sets their bodies' stories free and they are healed as well. We amplify each others stories and heal ourselves in the process.
A spontaneous movement meditation is the specific expressive/meditative form that grows out of ShapeShifting.
Spontaneous movement
When your body tells its story, it does it through a meditative form called spontaneous movement meditation. The formal definition of spontaneous is: “acting in accordance with or resulting from a natural feeling, impulse, or tendency without any constraint, effort, or premeditation”.
ShapeShifting is all about spontaneous movement. It is about movement that comes out of your body naturally without any constraint or effort. There is a kind of flow that springs from your body. This is much like jazz musicians who improvise (who simultaneously compose and perform on the spur of the moment without any preparation) music. It is also like freestyle rappers who improvise their words on the spot. They often describe this experience as being ”in the zone” or being in the “flow”. And this zone is often triggered by responding to other musicians melodies, sounds, or words.
Meditation
Movement meditation has the same goal as traditional meditation which is to get beyond the clutter of your conscious mind and allow your true self to come through. When your body expresses itself through movement, it is performing the meditative process of awareness, of being completely present in the moment, but it differs from traditional meditation in a number of ways.
Unlike traditional meditation, movement meditation involves movement. Most meditative forms involve stillness and a quiet place. Movement is central to the kind of meditation that ShapeShifters practice. And intentional sound or silence and external stimuli are essential to its environment. This kind of meditation can happen any place on earth. In fact, the practitioner is encouraged to do this meditation in places no one would ever expect it to take place. The point is to allow your body to tell its story within ever new and unfamiliar environments on a regular basis.
Unlike traditional meditation which seeks detachment from trauma, ShapeShifting allows you to embrace your autobiographical memory. The goal of most meditative forms is to detach yourself from your thoughts, feelings, and memories that have clouded your judgment. The purpose of movement meditation is rather to relive it all through the bodily reactions that were originally present. Its point is to re-immerse yourself into those thoughts, feelings, and events so that you can express them and embrace them as part of the story of who you are. Your story gains more depth and breadth because your body remembers what your conscious mind cannot and will not remember. When we allow our bodies to relive these things, we go through them, we embrace them, we become present with them, we become aware, and we are healed.
Unlike traditional meditation, the altered state that you reach in movement meditation is your preconscious mind. Traditional meditation seeks to remove us from the physical world. This is another level of detachment. Movement meditation, conversely, seeks to immerse us more deeply into our physical selves. The goal is to be totally present in the story that your body is telling through movement as it responds to the energy flow both within your body and the environment around it. The place where this happens is in your preconscious mind. This altered state of mind is where you connect most completely with your body. You leave your conscious mind behind so that you can be completely present with your body.