Augusta Moore talks about Dance with Teens

Augusta Moore talks about how dance can help during the teen years. Watch her discuss release, expression, and direction dance can lend here.

Feel Fine? Then Blog Already! And Buy this Book...

A friend of mine's girlfriend worked on this book, now available on Amazon. All I had to do were read the reviews (below) and I was sold. I can't wait for the book to arrive! Wonderfully displayed, a review of the book explains how the authors:

...use their computer programs to peer into the inner lives of millions, constructing a vast and deep portrait of our collective emotional landscape. Armed with custom software that scours the English-speaking world's new Internet blog posts every minute, hunting down the phrases "I feel" and "I am feeling," the authors have collected over 12 million feelings since 2005, amassing an ever-growing database of human emotion that adds more than 10,000 new feelings a day. Drawing from this massive real-world stockpile of found sentiment, We Feel Fine: An Almanac of Human Emotion presents the best of the best -- the euphoria, the despair, the passion, the dreams, and the desires that make us human.

It

...combines the words and pictures of total strangers to explore every corner of the human experience. Packed with personal photos, scientific observations, statistical infographics, and countless candid vignettes from ordinary people, We Feel Fine is a visual, fiercely intelligent, endlessly engrossing crash course in the secrets of human emotion.

We Feel Fine explores our emotions from every angle, providing insights into and examples of each. Equal parts pop culture and psychology, computer science and conceptual art, sociology and storytelling, We Feel Fine is no ordinary book -- with thousands of authors from all over the world sharing their uncensored emotions, it is a radical experiment in mass authorship, merging the online and offline worlds to create an indispensable handbook for anyone interested in what it's like to be human.

Furthermore, for blogging DMTs or DMT students, the content of the book, how people FEEL, is central to our work with therapy and expression.

It is beautifully done. Feel fine. Go ahead, check it out. And let me know what you feel (or think) about it.

Self Portraits and Healing

William Utermohlen’s self-portraits reveal his descent into dementia over the span of nearly four decades. The accompanying NY Times article can be read here.

In my expressive arts therapy (movement, drawing, writing) training with Anna and Daria Halprin at the Tamalpa Institute, self portraits are introduced as an integral part of the life/art process, at the beginning of the training and at the end.
How we paint or draw ourselves is a creative and symbolic process which can create a dialogue between our psyche and soul. "...the drawing...can contain and express our suffering in ways which help us be with it and move on, finding a healthy way to reintegrate, or live differently with, our wounding experiences" (Halprin, D, p. 179).

Utermohlen's self portraits from 1996-2000:

Skeleton in the Closet

Skeleton in the Closet is a series of intimate portraits, by artist Fritz Liedtke, of people struggling with anorexia and bulimia.

Combining photographs and text, it creates a powerful narrative of what it's like to live with-–and leave behind-–an eating disorder.

www.skeletoninthecloset.net