Renee
Levi Interviews Dr. Natalie Rogers and Janet Chilton
Collective
Resonance and Creative Connection
Natalie
Rogers, Ph.D. REAT, is a pioneer in expressive arts therapy taking
her training to Europe, Russia, Japan and Latin America. She is
author of The Creative Connection: Expressive Arts as Healing
(Science & Behavior Books 1993) and Emerging Woman: A Decade
of Midlife Transitions.(1980) and many articles and chapters.
As Distinguished Consulting Faculty at Saybrook Graduate School
she is offering a Certificate Program in "Expressive Arts for
Healing and Social Change: A Person-Centered Approach". She
received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Expressive
Arts Therapy Association. (IEATA) www.IEATA.org
ABSTRACT
In June of 2002, Natalie Rogers held a four-day intensive course
in person-centered expressive arts therapy her home studio for fifteen
Saybrook graduate students. In the first section of this article,
Janet Chilton (one of those students) talks about her thoughts and
feelings walking into the introductory class held the evening before
the intensive began. Natalie is talking to the group about the concepts
of the upcoming program. Janet then explains the first day of interaction
and her volunteering to be the client in Natalie’s counseling
demonstration. The final topic is Janet’s feeling response
to the counseling session. Renee Levi has interviewed each of them
separately about the topic of "collective resonance" during
those four days. She adroitly intertwines their comments to create
this holistic picture.
*******
JC: It was the night we first met as a group. We were to meet
on Thursday night and then the workshop would be four days –
Saturday through Tuesday. I was driving in from San Francisco with
another student and the whole time I had been on the phone with
my sister getting the news of her cancer diagnosis. So by the time
I rolled in late to the meeting, I was rattled, distracted, and
anxious. Natalie was standing in the front and there was a circle
of participants around her.
NR: I was introducing the group to my process,
the Creative Connection, which is a transformative process that
combines and integrates movement, art, sound, journal writing and
person-centered type sharing. As facilitator my role is to say,
"Anything is okay. I will hold it. We’re all here. We
can do this for each other."
JC: Within minutes – and I’m talking
less than five minutes – I felt so calm and safe. It was a
dramatic shift because I wasn’t expecting it. And I thought
to myself, what is it about this woman that she can create this
kind of environment instantly? You see, I’ve walked into other
groups at Saybrook that were not like that. For the most part I
didn’t know these people. It was as if I had walked into a
space and there was this hush of safety. I was very present and
not distracted and it was as if everything I walked into the room
and just melted. I was really taken by that at the moment it happened.
NR: The process does, indeed, connect us to our
body, mind, soul, and spirit because it uses all aspects of ourselves.
We’re not just talking about our process, we’re embodying
a process of getting acquainted with our feelings.
JC: It was as if things that had been swirling
and agitated became calm and smooth. Things were spinning when I
walked in but the centrifugal force of this spinning kind of spun
out and then suddenly there was nothing left other than just this
calm presence. And I was totally able to focus on what we were doing
right there in the room. I was pretty stunned.
NR: So all of this comes alive, our bodies really
resonate to our own self and to others. That’s part of the
process I’m talking about.
JC: We went to the intensive on Saturday. In
the afternoon Natalie had us working on an exercise that was focused
on the war – the potential for war in Iraq – and the peace
movement that was going on in San Francisco.
NR: We were talking about war and peace and injustice
because it was January 18th and that was the day that a lot of my
colleagues were at the San Francisco anti-war rally. I decided to
try to bring the rally into the classroom here in my studio, which
is a beautiful, big space for movement and art and sound. First
we just talked about what was going on, the facts as we knew them,
and then our feelings about them. All these feelings came up about
despair, anguish, hopelessness, fear, grief, terrible injustice,
and powerlessness. One woman said she felt hopeful and she made
a good point. She thought that all this debate about peace and war
worldwide would indeed change the consciousness of the world about
the justification of war and the total devastation that war causes.
So there was one hopeful person, but the rest of us were feeling
terrible. The rest of us had all these feelings rising up in us
against what our administration is about to do. Then I said that
rather than just talk about it more, I want us to move on it. Move
our bodies to express it. I asked people to get up. I put some colored
scarves in the middle of the floor so they could use them to dance
with, to move with their eyes closed. I told them to let out any
sounds that they wanted or to enact what they were feeling in any
way that they wanted. I put on Marvin Gaye’s piece called "What’s
Goin’ On?"
JC: I couldn’t get into that. But I didn’t
want to detach from the group, I wanted to stay part of it, so I
decided to just go ahead and focus on stuff with my sister when
we were doing movement, and the then the art and the writing. And
when it came time for the group to discuss what went on with the
war, I waited until the very end to share. Everybody else had done
the war exercise and I didn’t want to disrupt the group process
by interjecting the fact that I hadn’t done the project.
NR: So I’m a witness to all of this, holding
the container. Holding the space for people to feel safe, to really
be authentic, to be their real selves. And the other important thing
is not to judge people, not to analyze them or interpret their work.
(to top of next column)
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Interview
with Natalie Rogers and Janet Chilton, page 1 of 1
JC: At the very end I said, "I didn’t
do the project." Natalie looked at my work and she said, "Well,
obviously you did something. Tell us what you did." So in the
process I explained what was going on with me, with my family, and
my sister. One thing led to another and I volunteered - actually
Natalie offered – for me to be the first participant she would
use to demonstrate her process. I would be the client and she would
be the therapist in a demonstration for the group.
NR: By then we have 15 or 18 people who have
all been through an hour and a half or two hours of deep inner journey,
separately but together. And that’s what seems to create the
sacred space where people really find a deep spiritual sense of
who they are and, sometimes, which was true for this group, what
the collective spirit is. This is where the collective consciousness
of the group - or the collective unconscious, I don’t know
which, maybe the resonance, as you say – emerges. It’s
as if you can cut this sacred space with a knife, or hold it in
your embrace.
JC: And it was on the basis of the environment
the group created on Saturday and also what had happened Thursday
night when I felt so safe, that I volunteered for this role. I thought,
‘I’m safe enough to do my work."
NR: The experience of collective resonance I’m
describing was a counseling demonstration, which I do often. A whole
circle of people are around me because it’s a demonstration.
This Saybrook group were therapists trained, for the most part,
in person-centered therapy, the philosophy of me and my father.
NR: I give them practice in empathic listening,
so they know how to hear someone deeply. Then, because we listen
to someone very carefully and empathically, they can open to their
next inner step, go deeper with what their real inner truth is.
When they thank me, I say, "Let’s talk about how we did
this for each other."
JC: In this situation I knew I was going to be
very vulnerable. This is getting into the experience of collective
resonance. I was being the client and Natalie was sitting across
from me on the floor, on cushions, and she started doing a person-centered
process she calls the Creative Connection. But as she led me more
deeply into the experience I started having this sense. At that
point there were fifteen or so people sitting in a circle around
me, and I’m not sure I understood that this was going on as
it was happening because I was very focused on Natalie sitting right
in front of me and she was very focused on me. There was this blur
of people sitting in a circle around me. And it was only after the
experience, after I plunged really deeply into the work, and she
just took me deeper and deeper and deeper and then brought me back
up safely, that I was aware of what she calls witnessing. Other
people are witnesses and they have a job to hold the energy for
the group.
NR: The students are surrounding us at a decent
distance so they can hear but still be the container. And I tell
them, "You know, you are the container for this, the witnesses,
as we go on our work together. You’re welcome to take notes
and observe what the process is between us but also be aware that
your energy field is like a magnifying glass for us." You know
how when you put light into a magnifying glass it focuses on one
spot?
JC: I realized later that somehow I was able
to… It was like they were holding me. Oh boy, this is going
to be hard to describe. I have a very clear sense that I have what
I call bark outside of me that kind of holds me together and the
inner core is very vulnerable and soft and tender. And I’m
aware that you can’t go through life like that, you’ve
got to have bark. The bark protects you. So I have this sense of
this bark. And I realized after I had thought through what had happened
in this experience that somehow Janet expanded. And I didn’t
need the bark anymore. The group sitting in the circle around me
became the bark. All I had to deal with were the soft, tender, vulnerable
parts of myself. I could get at the pain and the anger and these
experiences. They were much more accessible to me because this group
was holding the energy for me.
NR: What it feels like to me is all of those
15 pairs of eyes on us. I’ve done demonstrations in groups
of 50. It’s an energy field that brings us strength and ability
to actually go together in our relationship into a deeper altered
state of consciousness. So the group energy is used to help us.
JC: Then, at some point I contracted back and
I was in one piece again. I got up and moved around and I was functional
again. That was a remarkable experience. It was as if I expanded
out to the group and these individual people who were sitting around
me were no longer individuals. They were just part of my safety.
In fact, they were part of me. I don’t mean to be quite that
grand about it. They were a blur, they were a safe blur. So maybe
I was in a little bit of an altered state there.
Now I’m going to flip to another experience I had in that group,
another demonstration where I was the witness and there was another
client. I experienced the same thing. I was holding the energy for
this other person. And in fact, at one point she got so angry and
was expressing her anger so intensely that - she happened to be
facing my direction - I leaned back. I felt like a balloon or an
elastic band, like I was holding it for her. And I was aware that
physically, bodily, I was moving back. Then I sat back up when she
finished doing what she was doing. Now that we’re talking about
this I realize I had it from both experiences, both sides.
NR: It’s interesting that this understanding
of the power of the collective has become part of my work and it
was never anything I intended. When I first started the program
at the Person-Centered Expressive Therapy Institute in 1984, I thought
our work was really individual therapy within the group because
this is transformative for people. But what became apparent from
feedback from the participants was that this is a spiritual journey.
The collective creates a transformative space, a space to really
connect with higher powers.
JC: Taking this intensive course has totally
changed what I intend to do in the future. Just being there at that
moment in history, to be able to work with Natalie one-on-one, I
felt like I had been guided to do that. One foot in front of the
other, but not knowing, necessarily, what the destination was. But
I kept making choices that led me there, so I felt very much like
that was a true thing. It was truly a remarkable experience.
***********
Renee
Levi, Ph.D. is founder and director of The Resonance Project,
a foundation dedicated to furthering research into and practice
of collective resonance, the subject of her seminal doctoral research.
www.resonanceproject.org.
Trained
as an organizational consultant, she is also principal of Resonance
Consulting, a firm specializing in individual and organizational
transformation through collaborative decision-making processes.
As speaker, writer, facilitator, and researcher, Dr. Levi’s
hope is to help amplify collective resonance toward positive action
in the world.
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