About

KRYSTAL BARSCHIG

Photo credit: Paul Sargeant

Krystal Barschig is a somatic movement-based expressive arts practitioner. She serves as a therapeutic guide and collaborator, partnering with individuals and groups to uncover creative resources for navigating challenges, deepening connections, and enacting meaningful change in their lives. She draws upon practices rooted in the Tamalpa Life/Art Process to support artful exploration of one’s real-life material, healing, transformation, personal growth, and a more embodied integration of the full human experience.

Photo credit: Daria Halprin

As a lifelong dancer, writer, and performance artist, Krystal believes fervently in the innovative potential of an enlivened imagination and the power of creative expression, particularly when paired with empathetic witnessing and supported integration. She’s a compassionate and skilled teacher with a deeply caring heart, sharp mind, and spirited sense of play. She weaves her decades of training in mindfulness, movement, dance, yoga, experimental theatre, therapeutic trauma-informed expressive arts, and holistic wellness into her one-to-one and group offerings. Krystal leads with her ever-present curiosity and deep desire to build and foster connection to Self, community, and the natural world through creative expression.

Education + Training includes:

  • Tamalpa Teacher Training Graduate, Tamalpa Institute
  • BFA in Theatre, New York University — Tisch School of the Arts, Experimental Theatre Wing
  • Registered Yoga Teacher
  • Certified Personal Trainer

TAMALPA LIFE/ART PROCESS

The first seeds of what would grow to be the Tamalpa Institute were sewn in the 1950s by the innovative mother of post-modern dance, Anna Halprin, when through her work she began shifting the practice and modern cultural perception of dance from an elitist performing art (back) to the universal context of dance as a healing art. By the 1960s her revolutionary and interdisciplinary artistic research and collaborations were bridging the fields of dance, movement, art, performance, somatics, psychology, and education. The Life/Art Process emerged as an approach based on working with peoples’ own life experiences as the utmost source for artistic expression. In the 1970s, Anna’s daughter, Daria, who had been dancing, performing, experimenting, and collaborating with her mother and her contemporaries since the earliest years of her youth was inspired to study with Fritz Perls in Gestalt therapy. She pursued the interface between dance, psychology, and theater and brought these influences back to enrich the fertile ground laid by her mother. Together they co-founded the Tamalpa Institute. Since then Daria has worked purposefully and ceaselessly on developing the bridge between movement, art, and psychology that informs the internationally practiced and ever-evolving approach today.

The Tamalpa Life/Art Process is predicated on the understanding that there is an essential connection between art and life that can facilitate healing and change. It is an integrative, multimodal methodology that employs somatic movement, drawing, writing, and the voice to explore and express the full range of our human experience by connecting deeply and authentically to our truest selves. When we engage in the expressive arts, the ongoing themes and patterns from our lives are revealed. We partner with the expressive arts as they serve as both a safe container and insightful set of tools for encountering, exploring, celebrating, releasing, confronting, and creatively transforming our real life material. In this experience of activating our imagination and embodying creativity, we access resources within ourselves to support our personal and collective growth.

THIS WORK MAY BE FOR YOU IF YOU’RE SEEKING:

  • Connection (to Self, the world around you, others, Higher Power…). It can serve as an intimate conversation with and union of conscience with that to which you are connecting.
  • An approach to exploring and making meaning of your internal landscape, the external world, and where the two meet.
  • A source for seeing with fresh eyes and means for uncovering new perspectives and insights.
  • A creative form of both verbal and non-verbal expression and communication.
  • Self-exploration and an expansive knowing and embodiment of your whole self; a safe container for contacting, interacting with, and giving voice to parts or qualities of yourself which might not get much air time in the day-to-day or any presence in your “real life.”
  • Catharsis/Healing – processing through movement of what lives within outward onto the page and into the air.
  • A place to be witnessed and received, seen, heard, and known.
  • Compassionate community with fellow creatives.