We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Kelsay Myers. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Kelsay below.
Alright, Kelsay thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Do you think your parents have had a meaningful impact on you and your journey?
Now that I’ve grown up, I recognize how much my parents did right; especially since I work with so many clients whose parents weren’t able to be present for them and who didn’t allow them to be who they are. My parents supported me in figuring out who I am: what I love, what I like, what I don’t like, what is interesting and of value, what I don’t believe in and find boring. When I wanted to do gymnastics, ballet, soccer, basketball, tennis, singing and piano lessons, art classes, improv and acting classes, study astrology, study philosophy, be a fashionista, they bought me all the books, clothes and resources I needed, encouraged me to share my thoughts with them, and when I wanted to quit or lost interest, they supported me in the process of letting it go. They didn’t force me to stay with something I didn’t want to do or make me do anything I didn’t believe in, even if they disagreed. I’ve come to see that kind of respect for children as individuals with their own personalities, inclinations and desires is actually pretty rare.
When I wanted to take ballet from a dance school that wasn’t local to my small hometown because teenagers taught those classes, my mom found a teacher from France who had a ballet school about 30 minutes away and drove me to all the lessons. At some point, I didn’t want to go so far from home and got bored with the steps I didn’t practice on my own, so my mom let me quit. She told me when I was older that the French teacher yelled at her for letting me stop because she saw a grace and talent in me that she felt should be cultivated and trained. But my mom listened to me and what I wanted instead. In my twenties, I thought my lack of discipline was because I was allowed to quit activities and interests when my desires changed. However, I now know that consistency and discipline aren’t in my personality and way of being. I am creative, expansive, experiential, instinctual and self-assured, among many other things. And I have the confidence and knowledge of myself because I got to experiment and try out what appealed to me as a child and young adult.
My mom told me that she doesn’t have a lot of self-esteem, and it was important to her that I have high self-esteem as a girl and an adoptee, so part of why she listened and let me have the freedom to choose the things I wanted to do was to raise me to be confident and empowered. She also paid attention to what I was naturally gifted at and drawn towards. My dad taught me how to sketch and draw portraits, and as my interest in the arts grew, my mom asked one of my elementary school art teachers what she should do to help nurture my talent. My teacher told her to always point out what’s beautiful to me, so she did. And now I surround my home, my environments, my work, and every aspect of my life with beauty, artfulness and self-expression.
Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.
I’ve spent my entire life uncovering more and more facets of who I am. I look at myself, others and the world and try to create something beautiful from the composition, and sometimes, from the wreckage. Among my many facets: I am a woman, a lesbian, a millennial, a Korean adoptee, a writer, a mixed media artist, a dreamer and a multimodal expressive arts practitioner who works along the edges of the mythic self, trauma resolution and compassionate change.
With dual M.F.A degrees in Creative Nonfiction and Poetry from Saint Mary’s College of California and certification as a Tamalpa Institute Life/Art Process® Practitioner and Teacher, I’m now a Ph.D student in Transformative Inquiry at California Institute of Integral Studies where I’m using arts-based research, existentialism and narrative approaches to psychology to explore trauma healing and wholeness. I have 12+ years experience teaching, researching and collaborating in integrative somatic trauma therapy modalities, ways of understanding the self, what makes a meaningful life and using the arts for healing. I bring that breadth of experience and knowledge into my offerings as a Transformative Coach.
My clients are completely engaged in their own process of healing and growth. Unlike old models of life coaching and personal development that can be prescriptive and directive, my coaching is trauma-informed and custom-designed to meet each person where they’re at and guide them in their own unique process. I don’t follow a script written by some renowned figure of what’s been done before and force you to follow someone else’s steps to transformation. Those transformations won’t last anyway. I offer cutting edge personal empowerment programs and courses through my business, Dialogical Persona Healing Arts, where I provide a portal for you to experience a profound journey of self-discovery.
I work with imaginative, compassionate people who have become out of touch with who they are underneath the roles they fulfill for others in their daily life. They struggle with putting themself first, knowing what part is leading their behavior, and some don’t even know themselves at all beyond these disconnected parts, feelings and a desire for inner healing and wholeness. My work focuses on the embodiment of dialogues between different facets of the self using creative practices like mindfulness, drawing, self-reflective writing, freeform dance and intuitive movement, performance ritual, and found objects to help you change, grow and transform your life for a deeper sense of purpose. The benefits of working with me are:
1) I look at the unique and individual person and guide you into your own inquiry, so you can uncover the essence of what fills you with joy, passion and meaning.
2) I teach you how to find inner resources and embody them, so you can be all of who you are with more confidence, trust, and clarity.
3) I support you in exploring and reflecting on how you currently express yourself in your personal and professional relationships, so you can communicate more authentically from your own authority.
4) I help you discover new ways of defining what is most important to you, so you can live your life and complete your projects with renewed excitement and creativity.
5) I guide you in embodying your personal power, so you have an expanded understanding of what you’re capable of personally and professionally, and you feel safe enough to express it with others and in the world.
If you’re holding back any aspect of who you are, and you want to bring more of yourself into your roles and relationships, let’s talk! I’d love to get to know more about you.
Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?
Being able to finally hold my grief, feel it and give it a liberated expression required me to unlearn a lot of lessons that I held to fiercely, some of them I learned as a newborn baby relinquished at birth. One of the most painful things about adoption for an adoptee infant is that there’s no choice in our circumstances. We are completely powerless and have to adapt, persevere, adjust and be creative about how we come to know ourselves and heal from the trauma of being separated from our birth mother and all we’ve known at the time of our birth, or we’ll continue to suffer and grieve the loss for the rest of our lives. As an infant in foster care the first three months of my life, I learned that no one would come when I cried, and so I grew up numb and completely cutoff from grief. When my aunt died, followed by my grandmother and then all of my grandparents died by the time I was 19, I didn’t cry. I could count the number of times I cried about anything real in my life until the time I was 32 on one hand (and it wasn’t a full hand). Instead, I cried at books and movies.
I believed all the falsities that our Western culture has about grief: crying is weak, grieving should be done alone and in private, if I couldn’t handle things, then I wasn’t strong enough. . .but even deeper, I had no relation to my body and couldn’t feel my heart. I had to learn to open my heart, to be present to my feelings, to be able to feel each of my body parts from my head down to each toe of my feet. I had to learn the stories held inside of my body in order to see myself as I am rather than filtered through books and movies. I had to learn to accept my feelings as they are before I could hold them. I had to learn that I could grieve, and it would not last for hours, and I would go on living. The grief would not envelop me, and I would not die.
When I experience a loss now that triggers my abandonment and dissolution of home and the beautiful in life, I trust my grief because I can hold it, give it shape and expression in my body and allow it to naturally ebb and flow with my dance and movements. When I feel strong emotions, I naturally make fists: hard fists in anger, soft fists in excitement, paw fists in strength, and both gripping fists and open fists in sadness. I initiate movement in my hands, and it is the first place I turn to in my grief. My hand dance can be just for me or reach out to collective grief, collective tears. The last time I did this, as I was dancing with my whole body led by my hands, I felt the tears come and did not try to wipe them away. I stared out my open apartment window into the parking lot for anyone who was passing by to see as I wept, and it was okay. Grieving the loss of my birth mother and birth culture will continue through my whole life, but the suffering does not because my hands hold and touch and allow me to grieve without those early life wounds being reopened in the present.
Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?
At 39, I have already had three careers. Rather than seeing my two former careers as a pivot, I see them as stepping stones to the career I am truly passionate about. My first career was as a mixed media and found object installation artist exhibiting around the San Francisco Bay Area. Once in a blue moon, I still send out installation applications or do an art show, but the background of working with found objects in a particular space and blending materials to give shape and expression to something are skills I bring to my work as a multimodal expressive arts practitioner. I encourage my clients to be highly process-oriented and use whatever they have around to express what they’re feeling or holding in. I also invite them to use objects to help anchor and remind them of certain psychological material they’re working through.
My second career was as an adjunct American Literature and Writing Composition instructor. I taught at a community college, a culinary school and some online programs, but it was not fulfilling, especially for the low pay. I learned that I prefer working 1:1 or in small groups with people who are interested in learning about who they are, what motivates them and the stories they are telling themselves. I love mentoring and teaching about identity, trauma resolution and the whole self, and now those are the things I teach to my clients and in small group workshops or events.
My work as a Transformative Coach and Integrative Somatic Expressive Arts Practitioner isn’t so much a pivot as a widening or expanding of what it’s possible to do with writing, art and identity, and that expansion does fill me!
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.dialogicalpersona.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dialogicalpersona
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/DialogicalPersona
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/dialogical-persona-healing-arts
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/thebowlerhat
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@kelsaymyers
Image Credits
Stephanie Mohan