This weeks Dance First Member Insight is from Dialogical Persona founder Kelsay Myers!
My name is Kelsay, and I am a professional writer, artist, and somatic movement educator living in Marin County, CA. I’m passionate about personal and social transformation through embodiment and expressive arts. I stand for self-expression in all of its forms: embodied, spiritual, written, and living.
Born in Busan, South Korea, and relinquished at birth, I was adopted by a close and loving family and raised in West Michigan. Often, I write and speak about being a Korean adoptee because it is the space I exist in at all times. It can be painful having one’s initial entry into the world be an unendurable sense of abandonment and loss: of a mother, a home, a country, and a culture, even of my original name, Jin Jung Mee. Sometimes, I can feel that sadness envelop me, and I will look down at my hands. All I can grasp is the emptiness as a lifetime’s worth of sorrow slips through the spaces between my fingers. Conscious dance, writing, soul work, and self-inquiry through the embodied healing arts have allowed me to claim a space for myself where I can feel whole again.
I founded an online practice called Dialogical Persona Healing Arts, LLC, at the end of February 2020, right before the pandemic began. As a Millennial, I had been trying to create a work-life balance primarily based on at-home and online work for nearly a decade. When I finally took the plunge, my expressive arts coaching programs and workshops ended up reaching more people across the globe than I had ever imagined, given the lockdowns and immense need for embodiment, metaphor, integration, and regulation in a worldwide crisis.
And I needed all of that too. I needed the integration and resolution of 5 years of deep psychospiritual work in various modalities of conscious dance, therapy, and my training with The Academy for Soul-based Coaching and Tamalpa Institute happened during a time when the world was literally burning around me.
And what I’ve discovered this past year during Covid is that love, connection, and nourishment are vital for us to thrive. My Tamalpa work has allowed me to open my heart to a deeper connection with myself and others and to find greater intimacy in all of my relationships. For the first time in quite a few years, I am celebrating my whole self and truly feeling proud and resilient as a lesbian, as a woman of color, as an artist, a writer, a researcher, and most significantly, as a leader for those who also want to move through trauma or are invested in self-growth and healing. My work is particularly beneficial to those who long for embodiment and a fuller sense of self-expression.
Combining a background in professional and expressive art, creative writing, literary theory, performance, psychology research, existentialist philosophy, trauma-informed coaching facilitation, and teaching, I am currently offering coaching programs and workshops that guide others through their own self-inquiries using movement, dance, writing, and art-making. The mission of my work is to hold space for the full expression of a living, vibrant and multifaceted self through these arts-based practices. If our society and the ways we construct identity in these times have you feeling fragmented and unable to celebrate all of your multifaceted layers, I encourage you to keep your own life and art process alive and keep growing! All of you deserves expression. And if at any time you need some extra support or want more clarity on what you would like to have happen, I invite you to check out my current workshops and offerings at DialogicalPersona.com.
