When to use it?
This practice is a form of sharing and further investigating experiences. It works well to explore experiences participants had during a previous practice. It is a form of elaborating the experience and working further with the feelings that arose through it.
It is more adequate towards the second half of processes, and after participants have been engaged in sensorial, body-oriented or emotional activating dynamics. It fits well if the pairs doing it, also have done the previous exercise together.
How to do it?
In this practice, you are invited to draw (with) the feeling of an experience you had (could be related to the previous practice). Each participant starts on one opposite corner of the paper.
You are invited to evoke your feelings and sensations and put them on paper by means of gestures, lines, colors, forms. You don‘t need any drawing technique and you don‘t need to worry if the others are „understanding“ what you are drawing. Let your hands and the pencil move and mark the paper in resonance with what you are feeling and sensing.
At the first moment, concentrate on your drawing. Then, gradually, while your drawings expand on the paper and meet the traces of the other participants, direct your attention also to the forms, contours and colors of the others. Let your forms of feelings, your gestures, and movements, be influenced by the others, enter in dialogue with other lines. You can let yourself be taken, set limits, watch, and respond. Be aware of what you feel and sense and how those feelings change during the exercise.
Combine with
Sources
The basic structure of the exercise is inspired by an exercise offered during a body-oriented conflict mediation workshop by Dr. Jana Schildt at the Somatische Akademie Berlin, which I attended in 2016.The way I am formulating the instructions here – as well as the title I gave to it – are influenced by the concept of the “forms of vitality” put forth by the psychologist Daniel Stern.