About Liz Smith
The great thing about aging is that you can look back across the decades and start to see the thread (and wisdom) that holds all the seemingly disparate bits together. Starting out my adult life I studied a B.Com in Economics and was drawn to the business world before meeting and falling in love with Eurythmy and the philosophy of the Spirit that it embodies, completing an artistic training in my early 30s. I would dearly love to have performed Eurythmy as a stage art full-time but family life and small children set me on another course. Together with a variety of talented and interesting people I participated in designing, developing and building all manner of community living and work spaces, both physical and social, my building ancestry and quest for community coming to the fore. The guiding principles were respect for nature, human scale aesthetics and the social needs of the human being. Of course, young idealism often falls far short of reality and I learnt much about the challenges of creating community and mastering the art of working together.
Teaching kindergarten Eurythmy in Cape Town for 12 years enabled me to experience first-hand how the young child learns and develops. I observed that development/learning/change is both a process of internalisation - taking the world into oneself and becoming increasingly independent of that world through making it one's own; and a process of externalisation - finding one's particular way of expressing oneself in the world and by so doing learning about and becoming more who one really is. A process that is on-going throughout life.
Meeting and training with Annemarie Ehrlich, who pioneered Social Eurythmy and founded the Institute for Eurythmy in the Workplace in The Hague, enabled me to bring my love for movement, community and human development together and explore this reciprocal relationship between self and the world more deeply. I worked closely with the Community Development Resource Association for many years and am currently part of a committed and growing global community of social development practitioners loosely centred around The Proteus Initiative, grappling with the riddles of human development and eco-social transformation out of a Goethean perspective. I am a member of the boards of both The Proteus Initiative and the Centre for Creative Education, where I do some teaching on their B.Ed. and Kairos Eurythmy Training programmes.
Formal Qualifications:
B.Com
Eurythmy Diploma
Certificates in Educational Eurythmy and Eurythmy in the Workplace
Graduate Certificate in Business Coaching
M.A. in Reflective Social Practice