Abstract
As a Korean adoptee, I spent thirty years of my life feeling fragmented and broken; abandoned, rejected, yearning for love and belonging and searching for it in romantic entanglements with older women who mirrored back the original wounding of my adoption. Expressive arts provided a space for me to dialogue, embody, express, learn, transform and come back to feeling like a whole person again, with all of my multifaceted layers of identity. In studying integrative somatic trauma therapy modalities, a form of narrative therapy called dialogical self theory, and the healing arts, I’ve gained valuable tools and skills to guide others in embodying resources for transforming their lives through my coaching practice, Dialogical Persona Healing Arts, LLC. In January of 2022, I began a fieldwork study guiding 3 other Korean adoptees through the Tamalpa Institute Life/Art Process, an expressive arts approach for transformation that includes embodied movement/dance, art-making, writing, and performance-based ritual using the arts-based research method of A/R/Tography. The study includes 6 months of 1:1 coaching and monthly group workshops exploring the themes of solidarity, empowerment, and self expression to provide each participant with tools to integrate personal stories, identity politics, and psychological material through multi-modal arts practices engaging myself as an artist/researcher/teacher in relationship with the other participants and to my own life/art process. Although, my research study goes through the end of June 2022, I’m already discovering the personal metaphors and psychological process of each participant mirrors my own experiences in the life/art process in significant ways.
Presenters
Kelsay MyersStudent, Ph.D Student, California Institute of Integral Studies, California, United States
Details
Presentation Type
Theme
The Arts in Social, Political, and Community Life
KEYWORDS
Transnational Adoption, Expressive Arts, Embodied Arts, Dialogical Self Theory, Life/Art
