A Deeper Look Into Expressive Arts – Interview With Kelsay Elizabeth Myers

Kelsay is a professional author, artist and registered somatic movement educator with the International Somatic Movement Education and Therapy Association. She helps creative individuals who are ready for transformation embody resources and integrate deep psychological material through her business, Dialogical Persona Healing Arts. Kelsay brings a decade’s worth of experience teaching, researching and collaborating in intepgrative somatic trauma therapy modalities, ways of understanding the self, what makes a meaningful life, and using the arts for trauma healing and wholeness.

Kelsay Elizabeth Myers, Expressive Arts Coach & Somatic Movement Educator at Dialogical Persona Healing Arts

Would you tell us some more about your areas of expertise and your own experiences in Expressive Arts and Somatic Movement Education, so we can get to know you better?

I’ve been trying to learn about who I am and what my place in the world is through reading, writing, art, philosophy, psychology and spirituality from a very young age. That openness and curiosity for self-reflection led me to get dual M.F.A. degrees in Creative Nonfiction and Poetry from Saint Mary’s College of California and explore found object art installations and mixed media collage through the Asian American Women Artists Association and the healing arts exhibition, A Place of Her Own.

But it wasn’t until I learned how to be in my body and move with what it has been holding for more than thirty years that I felt like a whole person. And by whole, I mean a person who is in touch with my somatic awareness and attuned to what I feel in addition to what I believe; a person who experiences sensations, tingles, warmth, numbness, coolness, bubbles, gooeyness, and energy shifts in different parts of my body, sometimes simultaneously, and sometimes still nothing at all. Having access to who I am at an embodied level opened up entirely new avenues for me which led me to become a Ph.D student in Transformative Studies at California Institute of Integral Studies where I use arts-based research methods to explore trauma integration. As an emerging scholar-practitioner, I have also trained and completed research in expressive arts with Tamalpa Institute in the Life/Art Process®, Clean Language facilitation, Presencing and Holding Space through The Academy for Soul-based Coaching and have experience in many integrative somatic trauma therapy modalities.

While professional art and writing still are important to me, my focus now is on the ways the arts can serve healing and self-expression whatever that looks, sounds and feels like. I’m currently Editor for the international Transformative Power of Art Journal and co-hosting the third season of the podcast, What I Didn’t Tell My Therapist: REBOOT, which will be launching soon.

What kind of services do you offer through your business, Dialogical Persona Healing Arts? I offer individual and group coaching programs and online courses that use transformational processes to help you discover and reclaim your creative flow, experience more joy in life, and feel more settled in your whole system. My coaching uses the variety of modalities and approaches I’ve studied and trained in to meet each client where you’re at in your own life experience. Our work allows you to meet, move, dialogue, release and grow different parts of yourself for trauma healing and wholeness. I have two 3 and 6 month coaching programs called Write Embody Heal and Mirrors of the Soul, as well as two self-paced online courses in expressive arts and embodied writing. I’m also offering monthly membership subscriptions through Subkit that are focused on nourishing the mind, body and soul, advanced communication skills, and being fiercely you. Tell us more about your business. What exactly is dialogical persona? I see my business as a site for creative change. I use cutting edge embodiment and dialogical practices to hold space for my clients to activate the change and growth they want to have happen in their lives. We can be feeling and experiencing multiple things in different body parts at different levels: emotionally, mentally, physically, soulfully—and all of it is true. Using the different mediums of writing, moving, drawing, or creating through art, bringing that back into the body, using a combination of Clean Language questions and transformative inquiry, and teaching my clients how to express themselves with more resources and skills, allows them a safe space and brave container to get to know what these voices and personas within them want to have happen on multiple levels as well. Then by enacting and embodying these dialogues of the soul, body, mind and feeling sensations, integration and a deeper trust in their own wisdom and voice naturally occur.

I’m still developing, learning and living into what dialogical persona is exactly, but it comes out of the Dutch narrative therapy modality, Dialogical Self Theory founded by Hubert Hermans, integrative somatic movement traditions, and the transformative processes in Annemiek van Helsdingen’s Soul-based Coaching and Anna and Daria Halprin’s Tamalpa Institute Life/Art Process work. It’s important to me to live and embody what I teach and ask my clients to do, so while I see my business as site for creative change in others, it’s also a site of creative change in itself. In that way, it stays responsive to what my clients need and is constantly growing and dialoging with the times. That’s really interesting. Is there anything else you’d like to say about that? Trust and surrender were not easy concepts or qualities for me as a Korean adoptee relinquished at birth, but I know from firsthand experience that change is possible. I’ve learned that embodied multimodal arts are essential to the process of conversing and integrating the multifaceted parts of the self, and that integration is not linear. I’ve experienced the process as flowing in, out, and between ideas of solidarity, connection, empowerment, self-expression, and the many qualities they also contain. It’s been a journey, and all of it has been incredible in showing me the true depths and range of what human beings are capable of. It’s a real honor for me to witness and guide people in becoming who they have always been and wanted to be, but because of fear, doubt and traumatic experiences, maybe they haven’t felt safe or brave enough to be until doing this work together.

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