The dance

Forced to dance, I reinvented tai chi.

I tried to recall the few times I actually joined a group of senior citizens gracefully doing kung fu in slow motion at the park early in the morning. Yet unable to actually memorize anything, I just did whatever moves my stiff body could do in free flow with my eyes wide shut.

When I opened them at the end of my dance, I remembered I’m being watched by everyone else in the room who had formed a big circle around me. We were taking turns going to the center to perform our own dance without music and with eyes closed.

The shame started to sink in. It did not help to convince myself that the point of our being there was precisely for us to overcome this very sense of self-shame by willfully making fun of ourselves.

This was during a recent expressive arts therapy workshop sponsored by the University of San Carlos and a group of guidance councilors. It was facilitated by Fr. Loreto Jaque, who studied art therapy in France and Switzerland.

A big and jolly person, Fr. Jaque said he loves to go barefoot and wear costumes at his workshops. On the first day of our own workshop, he looked like a hippie in colorful imitation batik and beads. On the second day, he donned an Ifugao headdress and shawl over his shirt and pants. Good thing he didn’t come in G-string or I would have completely forgotten he is a priest.

But Fr. Jaque was, in fact, being true to the ancient role of the priest as artist and healer at the same time. Using dance, drawing and other expressive arts as part of play therapy, he tried to show the healing power of creativity as alternative to the “talking cure” of psychoanalysis.

“The soul is perfect and does not want to be cured,” Fr. Jaque said, explaining the theory of archetypal psychology, which favors the more spiritual Carl Jung over the analytical Sigmund Freud. “What the soul needs is not cure but care.”

This “care psychology” recognizes that the usual cause of stress and trauma arises from our inability to cope with too much work and the prescribed pragmatism that goes with career and social relationships.

In other words, this condition of all work and no play not only makes us dumb; it makes us crazy. And in more secular societies like America and Europe, the couch is fast replacing the confession booth as a kind of emotional escape hatch. Others window-shop for religion or simply throw themselves out the window.

The not so severe basket cases in the rat race enroll in group therapy sessions that provide them with comforting pep talk, or a one-on-one with a poker-faced shrink who pretends to be all ears when everyone knows (thanks to all those shrink movies) there’s a camera hidden behind the faux mirror.

The shrink, at least, doesn’t moralize unlike the man of the cloth. He promises no heavenly solace or eternal damnation. He doesn’t care about you. He only wants to cure you.

But void of care, according to Fr. Jaque, this cure, which often forces us to bring out that we wanted to forget, could be too much to bear.

The analyst aims to repair our flaws when in fact the soul was made perfect in itself. It seeks only to be relieved of the “normal” world of work and reason. The soul has always been expressing itself through imagination and play,  and it is in this world of pure fun and creativity that it can find true restoration.

“We need chaos in our lives,” Nietzsche once said, “to be able to give birth to a dancing star.”  We need a little madness to be able to redeem our sanity.

As healing, Fr. Jaque prescribes the joyful madness of art and play. In his encounters with patients, even those with suicidal tendencies, all he does is to indulge them in a game. Careful not to look or act like a priest, he merely invites them to play with him, make art or simply act crazy. In this sense, the priest-healer (shaman, if you may) becomes a playmate.

He resists offering any advice or prayer, unless the patient asks for it, in which case he tries to let the patient see it for himself, by merely guiding him in a series of questions as Socrates would do to let students answer their own questions.

Thus lost in the madness of play and art making, we get in contact with our inner self and find true solace. In my own tai chi, I imagined no opponent other than myself—the stiff, no-nonsense avatar that is too shy to dance.