María Luisa Díaz de León Zuloaga. MA, RSMT, RSME, REAT.

Personal Statement

“Follow your bliss”

This well-known phrase of Joseph Campbell has guided my path, even before I learned about this quote and that bliss is:
 
that deep sense of being present,
of doing what you absolutely must do
to be yourself.
 
 
What is my bliss? Cultivating the dialogue between somatic movement, dance, depth psychology, mythology and expressive arts to create possibilities for awareness, healing, growth and transformation. Always befriending the soma, the living body.
 
 
Therapist, dancer, somatic movement specialist, performer, teacher and researcher are some of the words that point to my professional path and my growth as an individual. I have always felt a deep calling to live a life where meaning, creativity and beauty are a constant.
 
 
I attribute most of my pain and suffering to the times when I have shut down, become numb, or tried too hard to maintain appearances and fulfill expectations. Somatic movement and dance lead me to an intimate encounter with myself, where I can explore who I am and reconnect with my calling. The experience of being in dialogue with my body has been one of growth, transformation and healing; an ongoing restoration and re-imagining or my life’s narratives through the practice of the expressive arts, mythology and archetypal psychology.
 
 
 My commitment is to provide people with adequate guidance so that they can live with self-agency, courage, creativity, and responsibility. Through somatic, expressive arts and creative interventions I guide my clients and groups in exploratory inquires, inviting self-reflection and continued learning. I encourage and support individuals in taking a path of self-knowledge, clear interpersonal communication, and determination to embody and live their soul’s calling. I believe that, by traveling this path, we can adventure into the endless mysteries, challenges and opportunities that life offers us.

“Without a ritual to contain and inform the woulds of life, pain and suffering increase, yet meaningful change doesn’t occur”

– Michael Meade

PROFESSIONAL BACKGROUND

My professional experience in psychology, somatics and the arts spans over twenty years and includes work in education, private practice and community intervention. I obtained my M.A. in Engaged Humanities with Emphasis in Depth Psychology at Pacifica Graduate Institute. I served as Program Director and I am currently Core Faculty at Tamalpa Institute in California and continue to supervise advanced students. I teach as adjunct faculty at SouthWestern College in Santa FE, NM.

I am the creator of Mythic Life: Embodying Wisdom, Beauty and Courage. Mythic Life is the fruit of 20 years of practice. I wrote an unpublished collection of academic essays, Somaphilia: Re-membering the Soul and the Aesthetics of Being, which is my masters’ thesis.

I am a registered Expressive Arts Therapist  through the International Expressive Arts Therapy Association (IEATA) and I am a registered Somatic Movement Therapist and Educator from ISMETA -the International Somatic Movement Education and Therapy Association. Since 2014 I have served on the ISMETA Board of Directors. Currently, I am the Board President, Co-chair of the Professional standards Committee, and Co-chair of the Communications Committee. I enjoy collaborating with the ISMETA Board of Directors to grow the field of somatic movement and advance the profession

“The body is merely the visibility of the soul, the psyche, and the soul is the psychological experience of the body, so it is really one and the same thing.”

– Carl G. Jung

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Mythic Life

Embodying Wisdom, Beauty and Courage

Through Mythic Life I support individuals and groups in awakening to their living body: soma. By experiencing the body from a first person perspective we recognize the intrinsic relationship between body, emotions, creativity, soul, and connection with others and with the Earth. Experiencing the body allows us to reclaim the raw beauty of life; that which gets arrested through the rational, logical, linear, and literal views of reality. Beauty has the potential of healing and transformation. Beauty is breathtaking. Beauty moves us and touches us revealing or evoking our innermost truths. Knowing what is truthful for us gives us a clear compass so we can orient our actions and behaviors with it. Courage is the force to show up, take risks, and behave in ways that spread the beauty of truth into the world.

Mythic Life offers guidance in connecting our life story or part of our personal narrative with a grand timeless narrative, and see our own life as a unique and necessary expression in the collective cosmology; granting meaning to our existence. 

For over a decade I have developed my work to include myths. Myths become decentering devices that open our perspective by taking us into the world of imagination so we can recognize our life challenges and struggles as heroic quests in the search of wholeness. 

For Joseph Campbell, myth has a psychological function  in which “Mythology is the womb of mankind’s initiation to life and death.” Mythic Life focuses on embodying the cycles of birth, death, and rebirth through:

  • Somatic Movement
  • Archetypal Psychology
  • Expressive Arts Therapy
  • Mythology

“When the time comes to you at which you will be forced at last to utter the speech which has lain at the center of your soul for years, which you have, all that time, idiot-like,been saying over and over, you’ll not talk about the joy of words. I saw well why the gods do not speak to us openly, nor let us answer. Till that word can be dug out of us, why should they hear the babble that we think we mean? How can they meet us face to face till we have faces?”

– C. S. Lewis