One client I worked with was a heart doctor. During movement in a session one day she discovered that her own heart hurt. After ascertaining that there were no physical issues, I asked her to place her hands on her heart and tune into it. I then asked her what she felt and saw. She replied that her heart felt like a desert that had been abandoned.

I used Jung’s theory of amplification, taking images – vocal, aural, lyrical, visual, or kinetic – in order for her to know more fully that which was inside. I asked what she saw when she tuned into her heart as a desert. She saw images of herself as a small child witnessing her father being forcibly taken during Mao’s Cultural Revolution. She had been 4 years old, and in the fifty years since had never seen him again. With her hands on her heart, I invited her to give voice to her feelings upon encountering those images. While sounding, tears flowed as she acknowledged the terror of the child seeing her father taken. It is a cultural maxim that we should wipe away our tears. Instead, I encouraged her to continue sounding out the feelings rather than wiping them away, to let the fluidity and liquidity of the tears into her voice as she continued singing; singing which to some ears may be indistinguishable from crying yet which had melody, tempo, affect and presence. She sang her abandoned child-self in both sounds and words, singing grievous pain. I supported her in amplifying the musicalization of these sounds so that they did not fall into undifferentiated grief. Her own body’s melody helped to carry and shape the fear and terror of her sense of herself as a lonely abandoned desert.

Singing, the desperation, fear and pain decreased as she began to tell the desert landscape that she would leave it behind. It was a multifaceted session and, after expressing her despair, she began to want to take care of the child that had emerged. She sang to comfort the child, to let her know she was safe and did not need to be scared any longer. As she sang, her images began to change. After tending to, witnessing, and comforting the terrified child, she then planted seeds for new life and said she could see roses begin to grow. Her song bloomed as roses sprang up, populating a previously abandoned, scarred landscape.

Lyrics have significance as a way of holding the alchemical process. They can create a location for feelings and thoughts which may have originated from the melodies of speech and the amplification of sighs, sounds, or words spoken. Use of the voice took her into the unconscious, into decentered emotional places, while her words were able to articulate the emptiness and silence which had filled her and also to make new worlds. In breath, voice, lyrics, and movement, she expressed memories, feelings, and fears using the innate musicality of her body’s rhythms and the beat of her heart; the artistic process of giving voice to and shaping her inner world was a primary way of understanding and examining her experience.

During this process, she honoured a part of her which had been silent a long time, making meaning from inside as she comforted and welcomed her child home, providing nurture and support and giving birth to and owning the song which emerged. I encouraged her to sing several times the song of the roses blooming until the melody and words were also blooming both within and without her. I used repetition as a way of grounding that which had been discovered, thereby creating a memory which allowed it to be brought back at a later date so that she could take the solace of the song with her. At times I joined with her in singing so that she felt the support of another voice and the awareness of not being alone, journeying with her as she welcomed the images which had emerged into her whole self and heart. Her heart, no longer a barren desert, had become a place where roses bloomed.

Upon reflection, she found it interesting that her life’s work was attending to the ailing hearts of others, believing hers to be fine, at least structurally. Once she felt her own heart, however, and realised how desperately painful it really was, she surmised that perhaps she cared for the hearts of others in the belief that there was nothing to be done for her own. She was astounded also that after many years of familiarity with the structures of the heart that she had found such painful and then beautiful images within her own heart. She said it gave her a whole new perspective on her work and that from now on she intended to work with her patients on the images they could find within themselves, rather than relying purely upon medical processes.

Journeying vocally into forgotten or discarded landscapes of the voice through sounds freed from linguistically imposed restrictions, she wandered in the expressivity of non-articulated sounds, in wept singing, before images in the form of words found her which allowed her to structure the experience. Creating a song based on her own feelings and experiences enabled her to express and sculpt her emotions. In this session, initially she discarded the significance of her aching heart as not important because there was nothing physically wrong with it. I, however, had felt the emotional significance of her words as she unconsciously contracted around her heart to protect against what she was feeling. The creation of a container which provided a multi-layered understanding of body, voice, emotions, and words, permitted her the freedom to wander, to dare to be lost, to be in the unknown, and to create from that. Sufficient containment is essential in order to enter into arenas in which images of the psyche are evoked and for transformative work to happen. She felt safe enough within the body of this VMT work to explore her heart differently; responding in the moment to that which occurred allowed her the possibility of creating an artistic manifestation of significance, in this case a song.

Towards the end of the session I encouraged her to take out her telephone and record the song so that she had the melody and words which she could take with her into the future. Although the session was over, the work was not. For homework I asked her to transcribe her words, place them upon the wall of her room and draw images provoked by the lyrics. I asked her to bring these back with her to the following week’s session, but that is another story.

© Christine Isherwood