Mortification meanderings: Contemplating ‘vulnerability with purpose’ in arts therapy education

I am prone to bumbling, to miss-stepping. In my efforts to stay present in the living, fluctuating, tremulous moment-to-moment-ness of the therapeutic/educational encounter, I am sometimes not very fleet of foot. I have learned, once I have stumbled, to engage in a staggering recovery dance of rather vulnerable-making honesty. My slog to become humanly available and embrace ‘vulnerability with purpose’ by stepping intentionally into these ‘rupture and repair’ moments continues to be slow and nettlesome. I have explored this tangled tango in my work as therapist but a recent teaching experience tripped me over the threshold into travelogue-ing about this phenomenon within my role as educator of therapists. Here I contemplate the question: What of the wounded-educator – what happens when an educator reveals their own vulnerability as part of the educational encounter? In this quest, I privilege creative ways of coming-to-know by blending arts therapeutic processes with arts-based research plus autoethnography – a mash-up I call abr + a. This allows me to use story-telling, solo and bricolaged poetic writing, collage and dialogue to make sens/e of vulnerability by engaging my five physical senses to evoke an implicit sixth soul- or felt-sense thereby offering a new life-forward ‘sens’ of direction.