This past Saturday the ID Project had its first ever day-long arts retreat. It was an event that I had been looking forward to for a while, so much so that I put off taking my assistant teacher certification exam until the next test date in October so that I wouldn’t miss the retreat. How’s that for commitment? (Or dorkiness. Take your pick).

I’m glad to say that it was the right decision for me. The day was like a tasting menu of all of the ID Project arts groups – just a little sample to amuse my creative palette. All of the activities throughout the day were meaningful, but I especially connected to the theatre group’s part of the day. It got me thinking a lot about drama therapy and its place in a healthy psychological exploration as well as spiritual practice.

A brief description of what went down:

In a slight food-coma after lunch, we all groaned when David and Josh, IDP Theatre Masters of Ceremonies, instructed us all to get up off our butts. What? I did not think this meditation silliness would require me to actually move! We began by walking around the room in no particular direction, noticing our bodies in space. Then we started to notice the other people walking around, making eye contact, noticing our reactions, our aversions, our attractions. Next, we were instructed to find a partner – whoever we saw first. Quick, find someone! Find someone! Don’t be alone! My eyes zoomed to my partner. Whew. Someone I know. Now we were to face our partner and just look them in the eyes, which sounds simple but is really one of the more difficult interpersonal practices if you’re not used to it. A lot of thoughts and uncomfortable feelings can come up – fears about being really seen by someone, of making someone else feel weird, of wondering if the other person thinks you’re too intense, etc. During this we contemplated selfless appreciation for our partner, what that meant and how it manifested itself.

Without disconnecting from our partner’s gaze, we all shuffled backwards or sideways and lined up into 2 lines, facing each other, and joined hands with our partner and pushed against them to create tension. We each uttered two words that came to the tips of our tongues when we thought of the selfless appreciation we felt for them – mine were “beautiful” and “conqueror.” Others popping up through the room were “okay,” “brilliant,” “cool,” and many, many others. Each pair took a turn breaking through the group’s sea of arms to get to their partner waiting on the other side. It was fascinating to notice the different words that came up, and the different ways that people chose to break through the barriers to get to their partner: some people gently pushed their way through, others chopped down the arms violently, some yelled their words forcefully, some whispered them. David noted that people handle their problems and personal barriers in various ways. How we got through the sea of arms was, in a way, an expression of how we cope.

When the last pair had finished, we stood facing our partners. Unexpectedly, David instructed each person to take a small step to their right, leaving a sudden gaping hole in my line of vision where my partner once was. I did not at all expect the loss I felt at not having my partner’s gaze to come back to. During the exercise I had come to use her the way I use the breath during meditation – as an anchor that I constantly come back to when I get lost. My partner’s eyes had been my anchor, and suddenly she wasn’t there anymore. I felt genuinely sad. It brought up some feelings about my family, and people who I’ve lost in my life in one way or another. Slowly we started to walk around the room aimlessly again, seeing our partner as just another fleeting person in a swirling mass of people, and we came back into ourselves, and back into the room, and it was over.

This exercise was an emotional experiment. What are experiments for? I believe they’re for learning more information about a subject. This was an experiment, at least for me, in the difficulties of attachment and openness. Maybe one of the reasons we’re don’t like to make sincere eye contact with others has to do with not wanting to fully connect, because we’re afraid that one day we’ll lose them. Maybe I’m reading too much into it. But I enjoyed this exercise and I’m constantly fascinated by the wild trains of thought my mind goes on. Even though it brought me to some pretty dark places, I was energized by the activity.

The arts retreat got me thinking about creative arts therapies. I took a course last semester at NYU in drama therapy, and it’s always been hard for me to explain to people what drama therapy means. This wasn’t a drama therapy exercise necessarily, but it felt similar to some of the activities we did in my class. (There are only three drama therapy masters programs in the United States – NYU is one of them). We worked our way through scenarios (based on the theories of developmental transformations and psychodrama) where we use our bodies and our language to explore a theme and let it evolve organically into whatever it wants to become. Our bodies know things that our minds don’t sometimes, and a little movement or a symbolic association can wake them up.