Living Whole with Beverley A'Court
What you will find in this interview:
Beverley Art Therapy and how she has developed it;
Living in a grouded way: the spiritual value of gardening and cleaning;
How to consciously create your own life.
Beverley is an artist. She uses her art both to express herself and to support others, mostly through an art-therapeutic methodology she has developed over many years.
At the core of her approach to Art Therapy is the idea that words of our everyday mind and speech are a product of the past, because they are usually generated by thoughts we have already formed and replayed many times over.
For this reason, if they are used to describe an experience, they can stimulate and reactivate what we felt on that occasion and influence how we feel in the present moment. It can happen differently when we use art:
‘You can do a painting about something painful and then sit and talk about it and at the end you can feel really messed up. I thought there is something not very integrative happening here. If you make an art work and then you look at it and you receive back from it, in a full-bodied, sensory way, and then you embody the image, its form, energy and qualities, and you take it into slow, mindful movement and then you do more art and you move more ... and then you go for a walk in nature and pay attention to what your organism notices and attracts, you find something to add, to shake up or enlarge your original view.
You kind of move with it and it is a much more integrated process, not all enclosed in a verbal context. You are not just reporting what you know but you are on a journey into the unknown, discovering and creating a new concept to act on. It is a ritual, it is like an initiation. It involves body and imagination. It can awaken ancestral memories, stir up mythic resonances, and weave them all together in the actual ecology you are inhabiting.
This is what I have been exploring in the last 30 years.
As described above, what distinguishes the way Beverley uses art in therapy is the integration of the body and the surrounding field of Nature, including wildlife – birds, animals, trees, weather... - in the creative process.
It just felt so painful and uncomfortable trying to live in a materialistic paradigm
As in other interviews, my curiosity is particularly attracted to the way Beverley arrived at understanding who she is and how to move in this world. From the way she talks about her path I perceive her ability to move with fluidity from one experience to another and the strength and courage to follow what she is passionate about. Nevertheless, Beverley doesn’t agree with this:
‘It is not about strength and courage. It just felt so painful and uncomfortable trying to live in a materialist paradigm, when my experience was that everything was in communion with everything else - what my education and everyone around me viewed and dismissed as ‘paranormal’ or ‘extra-sensory’ was in face very earthy and normal, very sensory! The evidence was from my sensory experiences. I just had to relax into myself and trust my own perception. I didn’t decide to make art but I had a compulsion towards it. I can’t think other than doing it in this grounded way, visually, physically.’
She understood she should become a therapist when she was preparing her dissertation in Architectural Psychology: she was interviewing architecture students when she realised that the simple act of focusing their attention on the environment they were in, and asking questions about how they experienced it physically, somatically, emotionally was starting a process with a therapeutic effect. It catalysed changes in their perception both of themselves and the environment. Attention disturbed the status quo for them and woke up new pathways for perception and response.
‘At the end I felt more like a therapist towards these students’
After her degree and research she worked for a period in a women’s prison where she held an Expressive Art class which she developed in collaboration with the detainees. This experience reinforced her desire to help people, and she then started a Course in Art Therapy.
When she describes her everyday life Beverley acknowledges that her art, her therapeutic work, the work she does to prepare the workshops to teach her way of doing therapy, are all integrated one into the other, as well as with the other activities she does during the day, for example spending time in Nature, or collecting wood for her stove or her sculptures, cleaning her house. Moreover her job as a therapist gives her the possibility to work on herself and reflect on her life and spirituality. And this is the life style she would choose, even if she hadn’t had to earn money.
Beverley loves to have a life grouded in material reality
Beverley loves to have a life grounded in material reality, in the earthed life: she likes gardening, cleaning her house and working in her garden, no matter how the weather is.
She starts her days in a very active way, usually spending some time cleaning and washing the floor, with particular attention to the entrance and the porch of her house, the threshold. She has noticed a similar attitude and tradition among other women worldwide and she thinks that cleaning can become a ritual, a spiritual practice:
‘It is like cleaning the energy that comes in and goes out of your house’.
After cleaning she can spend some time meditating and getting in contact with herself, Nature and Animals. But in any case, whatever she is doing, she often takes breaks to spend some time outside or go for a walk.
Another aspect that I usually explore in my interviews is how people who are inspiring to me take their decisions and understand what they desire. Beverley told me that she prays a lot, she does invocations, watches attentively for communications from Nature around her and writes, also describing what she wants to reach. She is not afraid to ask what she desires to manifest in her life. She explained that she follows what is attractive to her, what she really loves and makes her feel passionate. She also directly asks to some Buddhist Teachers:
‘This is what I’m asking for; let me know if it is not a wholesome thing. I want to be in harmony with my longer term goal and what is best for all beings.
I ask help to align my desire with that.’
In this way she tries to align her desires with the rest, with the ‘whole’. She tells me that she feels part of it as if she was part of a network: when she moves, everything else moves with her and conversely. When she is experiencing some difficulties she does her best to live in trust, reminding herself that it is her own mind creating the problem, or defining a situation as a problem, a puzzle to solve rather than a process to be lived and to bring love to.
Her message for those who are reading this Blog is an invitation to relax and listen, trust what it is calling them:
‘Sometimes what it is inspiring and feels absolutely right – wholesome - can look crazy, and you can feel vulnerable and isolated. But you always have yourself and that’s a lot!
Following that direction is a risk, but it is worth it’.
Is it challenging for you for you to relax? I would love to support you to find your own special way to release any tension from your body and mind. Book a free 15 minutes call: Carolina’s Calendar.
If you want to know more about Beverley A’Courte you can visit her website: painthorse.