Tamalpa Life/Art is not a method to be learned
Everyone knows how to do it
Look
We do that all day long – on the cell phone, on the watch, on the screen, on the street. . . . . .
Looking – at yourself – forces you to take responsibility for accepting your being. But it also gives you the power to act, to change what is inconsistent. This means more joy in life.
Tamalpa Life/Art provides us the tools. You just have to do it. Done – done. The change happens when you do it. So easy.
How we are . . . .
Life leaves its impressions since conception. Whether we wanted it or not, upbringing, what experiences the parents had during childhood, in relationships, with upbringing, in the environment of existence and work, with their own values and patterns.
As we grow out of childhood, as adolescents, there are new influences, friends, cliques, the family environment that is still there, relatives. Everyone has an idea of how we should be. Unconsciously or consciously we try to do justice to the different ideas – or go in opposition to them. As young adults, life partners come along, sexuality, own children.
We are always and in every phase influenced – and often act out of these influences. We are often externally controlled
feel that we have so little opportunity to take our lives into our own hands. We create our world from beliefs, adopted ways of acting and ideas with which we encounter the world.
Who am I?
What do I want?
Where am I really – what makes me special?
What are my real needs?
What is important to me in life?
What values do I want to live?
In the general noise of the environment, of daily business, we rarely get to ask these questions – and certainly not to find answers to them.
The three main levels that make up our personality are our body, our thoughts and our feelings. These three react to each other in complex control behavior, with each other – against each other. When one changes, the others change too.
All influences have a home within us. For the trauma it is the body, for the values it is our thinking and everything together affects our feelings. We perceive it in our daily dealings, in everything we do. We realize, sometimes with amazement, that our actions are not what we want, that our words are not really our words. In short, that we would rather have it different. And yet we are trapped, limited, cannot change it. Can we really not change it?
My experience is: We can!
The important thing is – we can start at all three main levels of our personality. The effect is greater if we include several levels at the same time. Moving on an issue is like the soil from which change can grow. When we move freely, giving our body the opportunity to express itself, feelings and thoughts come.
It is not necessary to localize the “problem”, assign it, look at it closely. It is enough to identify what behaviors are hindering us in our lives to start. Whether it is a trauma or a belief, it hardly influences the method of resolution. Because traumas also lead to beliefs, experiences from the application of our beliefs can be traumatizing.
The method? I use the Tamalpa Life Art Process as a mentoring method. This process, initiated by the American dancer Anna Halprin, structured and documented by her daughter Daria Halprin, uses art as a link between the movement and the emotional and mental processes. Painting and writing lead directly and quickly to hidden topics and provide access to the subconscious. If now thoughts come like – I can’t paint and write – or I can’t dance – then we already have a first belief to start!A peculiarity of this method is that it is non-judgmental. There is no such thing as a beautiful or ugly picture – or good or bad text – it is what it is. An expression that arose in the moment. We work with it, react to it with means that do not allow for evaluation. But feelings and thoughts, movements and words.