Part Three: COMMUNITY ART MAKING
THIS IS PART THREE OF AN INTERVIEW WITH
MARKUS SCOTT-ALEXANDER, PHD
BY PETER MAI, MD
AT THE EUROPEAN GRADUATE SCHOOL
JUNE 30, 2018
~
Q: In your teaching you introduced resonance, recognition, and participation. How are they related to each other?
That comes out of my work with philosopher, John de Ruiter. If I come into a room of people and I’d like them to participate in something, again the first thing that I sense is that I am a kind human being, not just a person who has skill. I don’t care how much skill I have. If I walk into a room and I want them to participate and they don’t get good vibes, they are turned off even before we begin. So it is for me to establish resonance in the manner with which I enter a room; that I am reachable, that they see that I see and hear them. It is first to establish a kind, open resonance in the room between me and them and between themselves.
To establish resonance is a visceral phenomenon. There is such a thing as energy and if I come in angry it’s going to be very hard, but if I come in open and soft-hearted and delighted to be given this responsibility, they will sense that and there is a resonance, sometimes for people consciously and sometimes subconsciously, but people pick up and establish resonance.
Then if I want people to participate it’s important to be clear. “What would you like us to do?” Recognition: “Aha. I see. You want us to slowly start walking backwards because you want to teach us how we don’t have to be afraid of something that’s scary. Could you say that again? What do you mean not afraid of something that’s scary?” “Oh, you know, like how kids say ‘this is scary; let’s do it’. I mean like that.”
The recognition is creating clarity. I will not assume anything just because I’ve done it before or it seems obvious. Before I have them participate, it is my responsibility that I am very clear about the frame and about what I’m asking of them. We move from resonance to recognition, and it increases the chances that when we’re ready and I say: “let’s go”, they will participate.
For me that sequence is always; it is a black and white thing. You cannot skip steps. You come as a human being, establish resonance; then you come as a practiced practitioner and show that you have the skill, and from there be clear in what you are asking of them in a linear, step-by-step way. Then when you begin the process of unfolding participation, you go through that cycle again and again and again.
If I’m going to ask them to let go a little bit more, they are sensing the resonance or they trust me again. I check that I am clear about what I am asking them to do next, for the next level of participation. So I might have ten resonance/recognition/participation cycles, one for each turn of the spiral as we go more and more fully into and toward that celebratory event.
Q: Another question came to mind about self-care of the facilitator: how do you use community art as a self-care event for people who are really drawn into their professional lives to take care of others?
For me, it’s a way of life. I cannot facilitate anything if I am a jumbled mess, if I am anxious or distracted. I cannot put on my expressive arts facilitator hat and suddenly expect to be able to create a cohesion event if I’m not experiencing stillness within myself. So that pressure to take care of myself in order to be able to do sensitive work works for me. I take care of myself; I make sure I get to bed early enough if I have community art in the morning so that I’m rested and responsive. If my energy is low, they can tell in the resonance. They can tell that I’m pushing if I’m tired so I get to bed early. I take care not to have more than one glass of wine. Very simple things. Because I work so much, I have to take very good care of myself constantly. Because I love to work, it’s the just-right pressure that I have to be in good shape.
In addition to it being a way of life, I cannot be spontaneous if I don’t have a resonance with my own capacity for the stillness where my ideas come from. I need to be playful constantly, and then return to a stillness; be playful and return to a stillness again and again. I need that dexterity to come back to the source of my inspiration deep within me and then back out in a joyful, big way – and then back to that quiet place of formulation, many, many times when I’m working, whether it’s as an expressive arts therapist, educator or facilitator. So my self-care is that dexterity to go way in and way out.
Part of my self-care is not only that I know how to go into my stillness, but that I don’t lose that stillness and I don’t lose my core when I go way out into embracing 150 people, or when I’m away from home four months out of the year. My resonance with home, within, is there. It is sustaining not only my awareness of my criteria for well-being, but it supports my simply liking that I feel well when I’m under pressure, that I like the pressure to be only true to what I know.
For example, I know not to binge in something, whatever it is, even if it is having fun. I like that I know how to take care of myself so I can do as much work as I do. More than it being a discipline of self-care, it is that I am so glad and I like so much that I can be available to my inner sanctum, commensurate with how I can be available to the world, simultaneously. It’s not a discipline; it’s a deep gratitude and enjoyment of that slowly developed ability. I just really like it. It’s one thing to love the sacredness of the inner life and to love being in the world, but it’s another thing to like that you’re able to. I think that’s what sustains it moment to moment, day to day, when I’m working. I’m just liking that I know something about self-care. I know how to feed myself well. I know how to have a balanced day.
Not only do I know how, but I like that I can give what I know a life in my everyday life. I like the balance of the extraordinary and the ordinary. My ordinary is almost always un-ordinary because of the heightened awareness that I bring to ordinary things. I like my everyday things, quite frankly, just as much as the extraordinary. I like how these extraordinary things we do enrich my everyday life. So the self-care feels pretty much the same when I’m facilitating a group of 150 people or making breakfast. It’s just the joy of being able to respond with delight at our ability to give what we are a life in who we are.
Q: That resonates beautifully in myself, Markus. I can see that you have become your own father and mother to yourself, which is wonderful! Are you able to teach that?
I often say that there’s you and then, there’s your self. Your self is a construct, and if it was constructed then it can be deconstructed. Let’s see what of the self is real and will stay and what of the self will fall away because you just developed it to be pleasing or accommodating or loveable. You are like a parent that needs to hold your self kindly and intelligently, and be the mother that sometimes says, “Sweetheart, you’re so smart!” or the father that sometimes says, “That’s enough.”
You as a self are in the care of you as you. It is to help people get a felt sense of the difference between their essence, the you that doesn’t really change, and this constantly changing self that loses center, finds center, loses direction, finds direction; this incredibly malleable self that is in your care. Strengthen your resonance with the knower, with what you know, to take care of the self which has all these thoughts and feelings. Sometimes you say, “I see, sweetheart, that you have strong feelings about that, but what do you actually know?”
For example, if I work with a thirteen-year-old child who feels suicidal, and who needs to start parenting himself because his parents are quite absent or barely there, I would say to this thirteen-year-old: “So, you say you feel worthless and you want to die. Is that what you feel or is that what you know? Do you know it’s true that you’re worthless?” (Of course, the child is in crisis and I have to work very quickly; that’s different. It’s like he is in quicksand, versus the child who is not in crisis but in kind of a fog and I can work a little bit longer.) I have to discern how quickly to work, but basically, as kindly and intelligently as I can, I help him to have a physical sense or visceral awareness of the difference between what he knows and what he thinks and feels. He can say: “I know I’m okay even though I feel like killing myself, so I’m not going to listen to what I think and feel. I’m going to go back to what I know.”
It’s quite sophisticated in one way and in another way it’s quite elemental. It’s a little scary that we’ve gotten so far from the phenomenon of knowing and trusting that more than what we think and feel. So that’s connected to parenting yourself well. The final voice is the knower which is like the parent who says: “You need to shift your focus right now because you’re in a spin.”
Q: When you talked about self-care in the class, you mentioned the intimacy of the moment.
Yes. When I’m with a client or student, it’s not about my relationship with them. It includes my relationship with them, but it’s about my relationship to the moment, the fact that both of us are sharing the same moment.
How intimate can you be? The more delicate the moment, the more delicate the manner with which we hold the moment together, the more intimate it is. I have found that people become self-conscious if I’m holding them as intimately as I can; it’s too much.
It needs to be about a much more spherical phenomenon. The moment is tiny and huge at the same time; the nano-moment as well as eternal moment. In this moment that is so exquisitely tiny and so exquisitely huge, our connection is somehow moving in that. It’s coming alive within this delicate, real, new unfolding. Our ability to track that more; that awareness of this moment feels like our relationship is growing, but I’m not working on growing the relationship. I’m working on being more subtle in my ability to enjoy this moment that includes our relationship.
Sometimes I’ll just look at them, loving the moment, and self-consciously they’ll say, “What? What are you seeing?” They think I’m analyzing them, but I’m just enjoying the delicateness of the moment as I become more aware of the nuances of their stepping in or moving back from the moment. As kindly and intelligently as I can, I help them to relax into the intimacy of the moment, rather than into the intimacy with themselves with me present, or the intimacy of our relationship, and help them to keep relaxing into a more relaxed ability to just enjoy the moment which includes our connection.
Q: Let’s look at how to teach community arts. Any special skills, any special personality qualities needed to become a facilitator?
Yes. Absolutely. If you don’t have an inherent capacity for kindness, it won’t work. I can help people to do things more intelligently but I cannot teach them how to be kind. Teaching community art must be done kindly and intelligently because it is all about taking care.
Q: It can’t be an ego trip.
It can’t be a wanting or needing for people to like the way you do it, or to be seen. It is to kindly and intelligently serve the unfolding, and the teacher of the didactics of art will constantly be faced with misunderstandings about what leadership is or what learning is or what cohesion is, and must not only respond intelligently to these questions, but kindly and intelligently. Otherwise, I will try to be patient with people who are confused, and trying to be patient is not it. It comes down to responding as kindly and intelligently as you can to any confusion or misunderstanding of what the work is and what your role is.
The other thing that I think is important in teaching the didactics is that as a teacher it is very important to know the difference between setting the frame and entering into the frame you set and; how to stay in that frame and how to step out of the frame and; how to harvest what has occurred and how to reflect on it all. So there are many aspects and facets to it, and; in order to teach it you really need to know in your body through experience each aspect of that creative process.
Q: Are there any main issues or pillars of the didactics of community arts which need to be looked at or understood?
Yes. I would say an understanding of the chaos theory is important; that is, a real understanding of the self-organizing principle and the phenomenon of attractors. In order to facilitate community art, I find it to be essential to understand how in the chaos something is wanting to happen here and how to build that just-right atmosphere where people are clearly given the message and instructions on how to let go into what’s wanting to happen; and also given instruction on how to notice the attractors.
“Something seems to be happening here.” I’ll join that, rather than trying to be creative or willful. Sometimes I’ll have an idea and someone will do something and I’ll like that and go with that. They create something that becomes an attractor. Rather than saying this is too chaotic, I give myself to the self-organizing principle that I know is real in the chaos theory. Then, I can recognize that something new has emerged. If I don’t like surprises I cannot do the work, so I would say a pillar is liking surprises, not only loving them. In the moment saying: “I like this. Wow! I had not expected this. Wonderful!”
The other pillar is liking being transparent. I would say in front of the whole group: “This is a surprise, ladies and gentlemen. Look at what just happened here with Peter. Let’s...” and invite something new. I would be transparent that I was surprised. It’s not only to model it, but it’s to live the experience of surprise, and to be transparent.
Then in the harvesting, another pillar is to talk my process; that is, to be intimate as a teacher. To say: “I was so touched by that moment” and to describe what I did. In this way, as a teacher I’m not only talking about what happens on the surface but I’m also giving a little glimpse of my inner process on how I came to make that choice. That’s a pillar: that you need to be able to describe your inner creative process in the choices you make, and to inspire the participants to strengthen their connection with their own inner process. In that way they don’t just see what you’ve done and have it become about techniques for creating cohesion. Instead, they see that it is a balance of learning the skills and needing to be consistently inspired. Sometimes the inspiration comes from something within and something from without.
That’s also a pillar: to be aware that sometimes it comes from within and sometimes from without. There is a dexterity to tracking your response to what’s happening in the room, within you, and; tracking what is happening in the room itself. To respond to what’s happening on the surface and say: “ let’s shift our focus to what’s happening over here in the room”, for example, that which didn’t come from within but came from without. Having and enjoying that dexterity of awareness is also fundamental. That’s a real pillar: where you get your inspiration from.
So there is a kind of chaos and if you have a negative relationship with chaos it will be very hard to facilitate community art. But if you can say I love the self-organizing principle and something is wanting to happen here, you can be a humble servant of where the energy wants to go.
I also need a lot of skill for how to be sensitive to all the different levels and areas of movement, and how to bring my attention to what seems the best choice at that moment for this just-right next. In a sense, I am an artist. It’s the art of choosing the just-right next and I am given that responsibility of all of the options. So I would say a resonance with the phenomenon of being a servant is fundamental: to serve what you sense would be the most delightful just-right next for this community in the opening of this coming-together on this day.
I don’t believe in perfection on the level of the self, but I do have the sense that what we are is perfect and who we are is not, so the best I could hope for is excellence which is very different from perfectionism. I do think it is possible with profound integrity not to, as you said, ‘with the ego want to make something happen’, but rather to play your part as best you can, and at the end of the time be able to say there is so much excellence in our choice-making; for all of us to just go finer and higher and deeper with the more of our humanness manifesting the beauty of what we are.
Q: I like the statement, ‘to be in service of the creative process’. To help the balance between necessity and chance. That for me is the creative process. It includes both what is intended in a way, and then what is a surprise, what comes without being intended. That’s what I feel when I create a picture, a movement or a poem. There is my intention to do something, but I don’t know what I’m doing unless there is a surprise coming. The playing with the chance is so beautiful, I find. I have to take my ego out of that, otherwise it doesn’t work.
I can say that you know what you’re talking about, Peter. It makes me happy and excited that you’re interested in the work. I’ll do everything I can to support you in moving forward in being a community art facilitator.