Creative Arts as Spiritual Practice

Interview with Stephen Podry, by Rebekah Near

Steve Podry is a graduate of Glass Lake Studio NYC and the post graduate program in Expressive Arts Therapy at the European Graduate School,(EGS) Switzerland. For fifteen years he facilitated arts-based literacy and parenting programs at women’s correctional facilities in upstate New York. He is currently in private practice offering arts-based support for developing spiritual practices unique to you. If you’re interested in a complimentary introductory Zoom session, reach out: spodry@hotmail.com

When and how did you get into Expressive Arts Therapy?

Since childhood I seem to have always been making things: pictures, forts, robots, inventions, songs, stories - but it was mostly in solitude. As a therapist in the '80's, I was fascinated with talk therapy, especially with the presence of images as they emerged in the conversation, but ultimately even the non-ordinary talk of a therapy session seemed inadequate to what a human being really is. I spent years on a project exploring the connection between what we do with our imaginations and what happens in our life. I then wanted to find a way back into doing therapy but I knew it would need to include the arts somehow. On April 19, 1998 I went to an introductory Expressive Arts Therapy workshop given by Markus Alexander. His spiritually focused, non-psychological, intermodal approach seemed to be the kind of therapeutic practice I was born for. I was “home.”   I trained with Markus for three years and then later went on for the CAGS at EGS.

What drives you to do this work?

When I look around, it seems to me the universe is not quite finished. At every macro and micro level, creation goes on and on, and, whether we realize it or not, human beings are participants in this creation – along with everything else. The particular gift we burning mammals seem to bring to the table is this strange thing called “imagination.”  When I am working in the arts, especially in the company of others, I quietly thrill to the sense of life’s perpetual, kaleidoscopic disclosure coming through us. I love feeling life and psyche unfold. Expressive arts provides a way to be in the thick of life’s mystery and emergence.

In what capacity have you used expressive arts?

I use the arts personally, with friends and family, and used it for many years as the foundation of a parenting and literacy program at a women’s prison. This program existed as a place where therapy and education overlap. We used the arts for academic learning, for self-knowledge and personal development, for career exploration, group therapy, parenting, and community-building. I consulted also with other parenting programs in the prison and provided arts-based staff development opportunities as well. Several times a year I also gave expressive-arts training workshops for college students doing volunteer work with children and adolescents afflicted with various kinds of challenges. I now use the arts, including contemplative and ritual arts, to give support for people undergoing a spiritual quest, and for developing one’s own unique and effective spiritual practices.

What was it like to learn how to work intermodally?

I had scratched the surface of such a thing before, particularly in spontaneous experiments such as drawing pictures of a song I was hearing and describing the music and its effects in words, but the incredible range of possibilities had never occurred to me until the workshop with Markus. Working intermodally made complete sense to me. It opened whole new dimensions of therapeutic process and art-making.

What is your personal philosophy about Expressive Arts Therapy?

My answer to the second question above suggests much about my philosophy. We are participants in Creation and feel “healthiest” or most alive when we live that way. Expressive Arts makes that idea concrete and experiential. Gadamer says, “The power of the artwork suddenly takes the person experiencing it out of the context of his life and yet relates back to the whole of his existence.”  Artistic process inevitably eases us out of our little boxes:  We become more related to our total selves, to each other, and to Creation at large. By sensitizing us to realities beyond the scope of our habitual narrowness, the arts deepen and inform our capacity to respond, to interact with, personal, social, political, and natural Creation. As responsive aesthetic participants in Creation we become more ethical, more cognizant of our mutual dependence on everything that exists, for there can be no artistic process, no ongoing creative unfolding, without contact beyond our constricted selves. In this way, the arts serve a wider ecological purpose. Art too is part of nature’s homeostatic dialogue with itself. Art is Nature - with a human touch.
 
If you were to give future Expressive Arts students advice what would it be?

Explore using the arts for every personal challenge, no matter what it is – physical, emotional, mental, spiritual, political. “Poiesis is always possible,” says Stephen Levine, one of Expressive Arts therapy’s founding philosophers. So, too, the arts’ specialized form of knowing-through-making (poiesis) can be used to establish profound relational consciousness or “creative rapport” with any phenomenon that exists. Never underestimate the range of people, situations, and “objects” (and “spirits”!) with whom we can open a fertile relationship using the arts. Explore this every chance you get and your universe will crack wide open.