Extended Research - SIRPA
(Stress Illness Recovery Practitioner's Association)

After getting in touch over email, Georgie replied, and although she could not work with me on this occasion, she generously spent time matching me with another practitioner she thought would be a good fit for me to speak to. I have now been put in touch with Edith Vignal, a SIRPA practitioner and coach who is also an illustrator. 

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In Georgie’s reply, this was the information she provided about Edith and what her work involves,

“On top of somatic tracking, I work with body language a lot, meaning that I work with unconscious gestures or movements and bring attention and emphasis to the helpful movements that support the client’s growth.

For instance, if a client says yes with their words but no with their body, I will bring attention to what happens in the body and help the client find alignment by following their body cues.

I also work with what some therapists call the three centres of intelligence: body intelligence, heart intelligence and head intelligence. I have discovered in my work that some people lead with the head, others with the body and others with the heart, with the two other centres of intelligence as 2nd and 3rd….”

I was fascinated to find out more about Edith’s practice and believe she could be a great fit to help me with my extended research – somatic tracking and the three intelligence systems are new to me and not areas I am aware of – and I am interested to hear more about body language and the areas of unconscious gestures and movements, I feel like there could be some interesting parallels here in the process of creative making. 

As this research is ongoing, I envisage reframing my original email to be able to re-direct my focus to working with Edith and learn more about what her work involves. I hope that my findings will continue to extend my knowledge and experience, seeing what implicates or applies to my practice. I would be intrigued to undergo this version of body language tracking myself; it might be that a lived experience of Edith’s approach could be a way of understanding this subject matter. In the same way that the artist Chloe Piene states in her conversation with Drawing Room on De-Figuring the Body, ‘I…subject myself to all kinds of physical experiences in order to understand the subject matter. Everything for me is so much about lived real experience. And so, I will go and do things in order to explore something that doesn't necessarily develop into a series of drawings, but by going through experiences to try to understand something that is attractive to me.’

In terms of professional opportunities, I feel like this exchange is a great starting point to put me in good stead to build on more collaborations with industry professionals in therapy, medicine, or science. I hope this will be the initiation of a snowball effect in building my confidence to work with these professionals as well as give my research and practice the beginnings of honing an impetus, so I really get to know what exactly I am interested in, what do I want the answers to, and what is it that I am trying to find out?