Body Poem is a therapeutic tool designed to illuminate the unknown and unspoken aspects of the self through spoken words, which are received by a listener who then writes them down. 

Words are like bubbles and water droplets; they may look the same on the outside, but contain unique content that is often beyond conscious, reflective awareness, specific to the one self expressing and the listener. 

Another's self-expression might resonate with the listener's affective and conceptual symbolic representations in multiple ways, influenced by both implicit (unconscious and not consciously recognised) and explicit (consciously recognised) affective or conceptually mentalised memory associations. 

Or another's self-expression and words might also fall on deaf ears. The listener might not resonate if there is experiential blindness (i.e., no symbolic reference to the other's experiences), or if defences to recognition are activated that inhibit this. Either way, in the course of ordinary conversations, another's self-expression may or may not be recognised or attuned to.

The structure of Body Poem has specific rules of engagement that facilitate the harvesting of projections into digestible poetry. In moments of gratitude, when previously repressed parts are resonated with and acknowledged, there is the potential for receptivity into the threshold of presence; much like how attuned caregivers transform and bridge an infant’s somatically felt experiences into a shared reality. With a shared niche of attention, through symbols and metaphors, we learn to recognise; we are not alone in the soup of undifferentiated realities that otherwise disable us from playing and co-creating relationship agreements to meet our needs.

The listener, in various pauses or after the self-expression has come to an ending, reads back what they have written in spontaneously emerging poetry, beginning with the last words expressed and creatively moving attention between each passage of phrases or words.

As the listener reads back the words or phrases of the Dreamer, these may be carried in the chords of the listener's voice, with embodied (affective) or conceptual (flat) affect, in a dance between the listener's remembered, forgotten, or absent associations.

This is a process of differentiation of the raw ingredients of life experiences from the soup that renders them lost. Each ingredient that is symbolically referenced, witnessed, and validated empowers our ability to participate in a co-created shared reality and gain access to informed, referenced decision-making, which can support our liberation from the disability of being unconsciously driven by repeating prediction errors.

The discipline of writing down the exact words of the listener without paraphrasing or reframing offers an opportunity to limit the listener's bias.

We can understand that the process of emerging from loneliness into a shared, congruent social reality involves our self-expression being witnessed with compassion, or at the very least, with acknowledgement. What is not symbolically referenced or recognised remains lost. 

At the very least, the Dreamer's symbolic references to their unique experiences are recognised, regardless of whether the listener is experientially blind or attuned to them.

Listening back to our own words being accurately validated can support us in coming out of hiding from ourselves, releasing us from the cloak of shame and inhibitory inner dialogue that once secured our belonging, but perhaps at the price of crippling our vulnerable or exuberant authenticity. 

Body Poem is a practice that facilitates illuminating unthought unknowns and unspoken parts of the self into spontaneously emerging poetry that brings alive exiled aspects of the self which become somatised when not acknowledged through symbolic representation. 

This process is relational, the world of one person being received into the chords of the heart and voice of another. 

The simple act of reading the exact words and phrases back to a dreamer, with both non-hierarchical phenomenological and hierarchically creative choices of attention, is a dance that co-creates an authentically shared social reality and a sense of belonging in it, through a unique alchemy between both the Body Poet and the Dreamer. 

The Dreamer's unique metaphors may come alive with enhanced, viscerally felt granularity, offering recognition of aspects of the self that may have been rationalised out of awareness or out of the range of acceptance, harvesting projections that are passing on revenge for the loss of acknowledgement. 

The Body Poet becomes a human instrument, transforming these communications that may have lost their belonging into poems that serve the function as do works of art in re representing aspects of experiences into forms of beauty that can be shared. 

The role of artistic self-expression in all cultures is to transform rationalised, suppressed aspects of self into a shared experience of beauty. Meaningless symbols of nothingness can spontaneously become embodied, illuminating aspects of self, calling for felt recognition. 

This allows tension from the pole positions of our heart’s chords to be simultaneously borne and transformed into something digestible and harmonious.

At this precipice, we might live or die. The metaphor of a poem holds us safe, like the banks of a river, containing and allowing the flow of what might have been dammed, unresolved resentment, and making what might ordinarily be unbearable, bearable, even beautiful and harmonious; like a love song transforms the lament of loss into a song we can weep with together.

This powerful modality can be added to your professional practice, co-creating transformational shifts in a truly client-centred way.