Bringing body and mind together to make contact, elicit connection, and promote integration – a personal account of a workshop led by seasoned Satir practitioners Dr. Carolyn Nesbitt and Julie Gerhardt of the newly released book with fellow authors Dr. Nitza Broide-Miller, Leona Flamand Gallant, Mary Leslie, Anastacia Lundholm, and Jennifer Nagel titled Virginia Satir’s Evolving Legacy, Transformative Therapy with a Bodymind Connection in Duncan BC, Sept. 15 2024
By Maureen Manning, MA, RCC, ACS
“Awareness of our body and energy within us and around us is integral to transformational change. The abundant resources of our body and energy system give us a treasure box to create new possibilities.”
Gerhardt, Julie from “Recognition of Who We are Through a Body and Energy Lens” in Virginia Satir’s Evolving Legacy, Transformative Therapy with a Bodymind Connection, 2024.
Attending to sensation, movement, and the myriad ways in which the body expresses, records, and makes sense of emotions, memory, thoughts and beliefs to encourage and elicit body-based wisdom was a key outcome of the workshop Voices in My Body: Virginia Satir’s Evolving Legacy that I attended in Duncan BC Sept 15th, 2024. Seated on chairs or cross-legged on mats that filled the inside of a large Yurt located at the end of a grassy field on a rural property near Cowichan Bay Vancouver Island, I joined a contingent of seasoned Satir practitioners, trainers and authors who were present to both lead and participate in this workshop that followed the release of the book titled Virginia Satir’s Evolving Legacy: Transformative Therapy with a Bodymind Connection. Led by Dr. Carolyn Nesbitt and Julie Gerhardt, fellow Satir practitioners and co-authors Leona Flamand Gallant and Mary Leslie were also present at the workshop to support what is hoped to be the start of many more trainings stemming from this book that features chapters from fellow author/practitioners Jennifer Nagel, Anastacia Lundholm, and Dr. Nitza Broide-Miller.
To begin the workshop, we were invited by Carolyn to ground ourselves in this space, making contact with ourselves, and with each other by sharing, with one word, what each of us wished to bring to our experience. I choose curiousity. For me this is both a word and a way of being. It cues me to be open to what’s happening inside, and outside of myself — to take in what is being offered by way of wisdom, love, possibility, connection, and compassion. As each of us took our turn sharing words carefully chosen and spoken, I experience our circle contracting into a smaller, more connected space as the collective hopes and intentions for the day emerge. Before starting the first experiential exercise, Leona was invited by Carolyn to help us orient to the four directions of our shared space: north, south, east and west. Using gestures, words and soothing voice, she oriented us to the meaning and purpose that each direction evokes for body, mind, heart, and spirit, and how each presents possibilities for growth both within and outside the circle. Leona was followed by fellow author/practitioner Mary Leslie who generously offered her synopsis of the tenets of Satir’s model and approach, for the benefit of both practitioners, and non-practitioners attending this workshop which welcomed dancers, writers, business owners and others with a common purpose of tapping into and making use of body wisdom.
In keeping with Satir traditions of working with both intrapsychic and interactive systems, the workshop included both mindful and experiential exercises as well as a family reconstruction demonstrated skillfully by Carolyn, with the help of eager volunteers drawn from the circle, each playing a part of the star’s (the client) unique experience. For the mindfulness exercise, Carolyn’s steady, soothing voice brought life to the poem I AM YOUR BODY written by Satir practitioner, SIP trainer, and author Anastacia Lundholm which opens the Legacy book. Read aloud by Carolyn, each verse brought a new dimension to the shared space of the circle – one where we were invited to explore, with supportive images evoked by this poem that I experience as a clarion call to listen, to respect, and to respond. Spoken aloud the poem draws my attention to sensation, to memories held and released, to parts that take the brunt of my own psychic load on a day-to-day basis. Words evoke powerful feelings. The image of the personal iceberg emerges in my mind’s eye, and I consider what lies beneath the waterline — pain in its many forms: emotional, physical, spiritual, psychological. I feel an urge to retreat back up into thoughts, things to do, to finish, to plan. But Carolyn’s voice gently guides me back to sensation. First, to my extremities: feet and hands. Next to my limbs: legs and arms. All places where I land, pivot, extend, reach, touch and create. I notice that I’m judging and rating each for the work they accomplish. I feel gratitude and notice a slowing of my thoughts. Soreness makes itself known in these places, and I feel both sadness and fear as I lament a loss – a longing for strength I once I had in spades that finds new limit now. Next, my mind turns to places where I most hold responsibility: my shoulders, neck and jaw. Anastacia’s poem urges me to recognize how these things I feel, think, and believe find a home here – whether permanent or ephemeral. It feels safe to feel everything now. The terrain I’m invited to explore is my own, Afterall. Then, a paradoxical thought: all this territory is mine, but not all of it is pleasant or comfortable. I notice I’m tentative about what I might next experience. More pain? I recognize an invitation to open up to what’s beyond the acts of thinking, reasoning, remembering. Facing new depths of uncertain parts of myself I’m helped by remembering the four corners (north, south, east, west), and that I’m shoulder to shoulder with other willing and experienced, and humble explorers here. As I am in all the training groups I’ve participated in since first completing my Satir Transformational System Therapy Level 1 back in 2018, I’m feeling supported to proceed further in this exploration.
I notice the stiffness in my neck, shoulders, the tension in my upper left leg – the one rebuilt from a ski accident many years ago. I feel change everywhere in my physical body. It’s present in the soreness of my low back from the hour-long drive to the workshop this morning. And, from within my own body I’m grateful to find a remedy. My own mindfulness practice reminds me to send a deep, cleansing breath to my low back. Invited by Carolyn’s calm voice I breathe even more deeply and do my best to settle more solidly into my frame. Then, I start noticing a weariness. I take this as I sign of my own impatience with myself, my tendency to overfocus on and find reasons for the aches, pains and tensions which lay claim to an unreasonable amount of territory in my north-of-50 body. As Carolyn speaks the next verse: “When you feel down, sad or lonely, it is because we crave to be connected and loved. I know how to pull those strings so hard it hurts.” The poem continues: “Because you need love. I always want to motivate you to do anything it takes to remember you need love and connection.” My weariness and impatience give way now to a new realization. These parts that ache and stiffen are not just parts. They’re also not just joints. These parts are connections. Connections! This is an unexpected and joyful reframe of parts that enable me to extend, move, and join with other parts of myself, or with others, by way of movement, however stiffly or slowly that may be at any given time. I recognize and share with the group that I feel I have an opportunity to view every response from each part of my body as a means of connecting to love, to longing, and to resources that include patience, understanding, and appreciation for what I’ve had, and what I continue to have in this life. Instead of treating these parts as a growing nuisance — the way I might feel about the squeaky brakes on my mountain bike — I laugh at myself and recognize that I’m experiencing essential parts of Satir practice: humility, humour, and playfulness.
With the help of this circle, the evocative verses of Anastacia’s poem, the mindful orientation to the four corners, and the support of a confident and gentle leader, I’ve made a meaningful reframe of common places I’d come to associate negatively with progressive pain, stiffness, and declining mobility. I can accept the stiffness and the slowness, so long as I see them as necessary parts of connection in all its forms. I can appreciate these connections that exist throughout my frame and carry me through each day. I can make sense of the stiffness in so many more ways now that I’m encouraged to draw my attention in a positive way to these spaces in my body that are points of connection, representing important events and relationships I’ve had the privilege to live. For clients I work with who suffer chronic pain, chronic illness or the somatic responses that accompany trauma and loss, I feel I bring a new way of seeing and sensing within a vast terrain of resources represented by the body. I’m inspired once again by this training to make use of my own body’s voice. I recognize that my own reframe of painful places that once evoked feelings of loss and resentment can be transformed to represent precious archives of experience (of self and others) that evoke longings for love, for belonging, and connection.
This beautiful day of exploration continued with a guided exercise in the afternoon led by Julie Gerhardt. She guided us to move our bodies in this space in ways that were not prescribed but intuited. Encouraged by her energetic appeal to our playfulness and willingness to let ourselves safely explore within this circle, we chose from postures that included standing, sitting, or laying down in the space. We were supported to take risks and let fly our limbs and torsos into a generative language of movement. After sharing images and sensations evoked by the exercise with the larger group, we were invited to move to parts of the large space where we felt most pulled by those four corners which Leona helped us once again to recall, and respond for our own reasons conjured during the exercise, connecting mind and body to the circle, and to the broader context outside the Yurt where the calls and movements of Ravens, herons, and songbirds enticed us to see beyond ourselves to the resources offered by the natural world. I was drawn to the east, to the place representing my larger family and their location on the wider continent across the Salish sea to the prairies. By doing so yet another Satir element – the role of the family-of-origin — is evoked. I stand facing groves of silver birch trees whose branches sway in the breeze, leaves aglow in the late afternoon sun, with a few of my fellow participants who also felt drawn to this easternmost point of our shared space. Feeling the pull from mind and body outward, eastward, connecting to my two adult children now living in the Fraser Valley, to my stepson, his wife, and their new baby in southern Alberta, and to my extended family and in-laws in the Okanagan and Alberta. I breath in and let myself feel the force of this eastward connection to my family, and watch as a single heron takes its first awkward strokes of flight, pulling it’s long arrow-like shadow across the sunlit grasses from the edge of the forest to rise above our heads, soaring over the Yurt, making our big circle feel smaller again, to claim its own journey to the end of this day.
Maureen Manning, MA RCC-ACS is a Clinical Member of Satir Institute of the Pacific and a counsellor and clinical supervisor in private practice. She also serves as board secretary for the Satir Institute of the Pacific.
I AM YOUR BODY
By Anastacia Lundholm
Together we have seen and done so much. Inseparable
throughout life. Everything you have felt, I have felt, we have felt.
I have experienced all the emotions, the painful ones,
the beautiful ones and those you were not aware of.
I have absorbed the repercussions of your thoughts, assumptions
and beliefs. You can hear this in my tone, see it in the way I move,
in my shape and how my parts work together – or don’t.
I have suffered and thrived as a result of your choices.
So many times you have been unaware of me, punished me
for my limitations or rewarded yourself at my expense.
Many times I have been in the way of what you wanted to do.
I have screamed loudly or help my part in silence, but
that does not mean I didn’t feel anything. I hold the memory of
every fall, accident, near-miss, disappointment, fear, worry, hope and longing.
I have been the witness and companion to everything that ever happened to you.
My tissues are the crystallized matrix record of everything you think
about yourself, about life, relationships, and about the world.
I would like to tell you how this has been for me. I understand you.
I know you so intimately. You have no secrets from me.
Through me you experience yourself and your life.
I hold all the secrets, the things you don’t dare tell yourself.
Sometimes I feel you don’t understand me.
I would like to serve you in the way you wish,
but without a few changes this will be impossible.
I am afraid we will be doomed forever to work against each other,
even though I am doing my best to serve you. This causes me great pain.
I would like to tell you about life from my perspective
so we might know each other better. Through knowing me,
and my experience, you will better know yourself.
That will be good for both of us. For both of us.
When you feel down, sad or lonely, it is because we crave
to be connected and loved. I know how to pull those strings
so hare it hurts. Because you need love. I always want to motivate you
to do anything it takes to remember you need love and connection,
but sometimes you go the other way, into isolation and self-pity.
It is not my intention that you go there, but it seems to happen a lot.
I wish so much good for you. It is my duty to keep you safe,
warn you of danger and help you cope with life. It is my job
to make sure you survive. Most of all I crave that you feel you are worthy,
that we are worthy, that you feel loved and accept yourself, accept us.
I admit, sometimes my ways of communicating are complicated,
and it seems I am saying the opposite. Making you feel bad is not my goal.
I am trying to help you remember. That’s my job.
I only want the best for you, for us.
I am you and you are me. We continue to be inseparable.
How do we heal together? How will we heal together?
Sources:
Broide-Miller N., Flamand Gallant L., Gerhardt J., Leslie M., Lundholm A., Nagel J., Nesbitt C., Virginia Satir’s Evolving Legacy: Transformative Therapy with a Bodymind Connection. Agio Publishing House, 2024.
Gerhardt, J. Recognition of Who We Are Through a Body and Energy Lens in Virginia Satir’s Evolving Legacy: Transformative Therapy with a Bodymind Connection (ref. above)
Lundhom, A. I AM YOUR BODY in Virginia Satir’s Evolving Legacy: Transformative Therapy with a Bodymind Connection (ref. above)
Transformational Systemic Therapy Level I, Satir Institute of the Pacific
Lum, Wendy Personal Iceberg Metaphor (Therapist/Counsellor Self)
Four Directions – First Nations Pedagogy. First Nations Pedagogy Online https://firstnationspedagogy.ca > fourdirections
