SPT session in Healing Day in Villa Grimaldi

We received the invitation to join an initiative to carry out a Healing Day at Villa Grimaldi in Santiago, Chile. Villa Grimaldi was a torture and death detention center during the military dictatorship in Chile, which with the return of democracy was transformed in a park for peace. https://villagrimaldi.cl/
The organizers of the event were intended to contribute to re-signify and heal the place, turning it into a therapeutic space for a day, with health services and healing sessions both individual, group, and social, and we along with Viviana Galdames and Julio Reyes wanted to join this initiative by offering a Social Presence Theater experience to the community called to the event.
For Viviana, since the invitation began the interesting questions of the methodology and the way in which we approach these works. First, they asked us if the activity was individual or collective. Interesting Do you have individual and collective parts? How do we catalog it? Finally talking to each other, we decided to leave us some hours in the space that was defined for collective activities.
We conducted a session with the essential exercises of the SPT, beginning with the Meditation and the 20 minutes Dance continuing with a Duo, to end with the exercise of the Village. Juan Marco, wants to focus on the latter since from his own experience it was the most significant.
Session Development
In the first place and as a result of our learning of the practice group that we have in Chile two years ago, we try to start any session with meditation and dance of 20 minutes, this offers the opportunity to quickly build a social container, an emotional bond, and an energetic space among the participants, very favorable of empathy, compassion and kindness, qualities that greatly facilitate the development of the other experiences, then we invite the participants, who were about 15 people, to explore the “Ma”, the creative emptiness, in pairs through the Duo exercise, and finally we turn to the experience of the collective of the social field, with the invitation to co-create and explore the exercise of the Villa, a very relevant symbolic aspect is that the exercise has the same name of the place where we were “Villa”, which is a place of life, meeting, … which during the dictatorship was transformed into a place of pain, death, detention, and suffering. We invite attendees to explore a new space, to co-create a new social field in this place, honoring its history but allowing a new emergence.
For Juan Marcos the most significant thing was to listen, in the feedback of the participants after the experience, their feelings of freedom, the joy of simply being, the possibility of movement, the experience of kindness, meeting, and joy, according to their story they could emerge in this place all those experiences that for so many years were denied, repressed and curtailed. This is how a place marked by suffering and pain can become a social field to experience freedom, happiness, and kindness if we are able to create emotional, mental, spiritual and relational conditions that favor an emergence of the highest; an appearance of the properly human, from the creative emptiness, from stopping, pausing, and turning our consciousness towards ourselves, our body and our relationships and using a language of basic and simple movements. The greatest learning of all this experience is that returning to the essential allows us to reconstruct meanings and experiences, helping us discover new positive potentials both in our personal space and in the place of the collective, the social field, offering us the opportunity to learn, change and move to new places, both internal and external.
For Viviana: the most surprising part of the experience was to reflect and ask myself: how much emotional “load” do the spaces have in themselves or are we the ones who grant them? When we made the village, a part of me was a little scared about how “loaded” the experience could be. In my personal case, one of my children’s grandparents was detained there and my son was with me participating in the activity. He is 10 years old and did not know cognitively that his grandfather had been detained there. When we started the village, there were several children and the space began to have some lightness. A lot of games and rhythm changes proposed by the same children to which we adults added as a “balm” for the soul. It was a beautiful and deeply healing experience.
Juan Marcos Aguirre, psychologist, SPT practitioner.
Co-Host of the SPT practice group of Chile.
Viviana Galdames Wilson, actress, coach, advanced SPT practitioner and organizational development consultant. Co-Host of the SPT practice group of Chile.
