Friday, March 25, 2011

Healing is a Pilgrimage

Art is Powerful!

The journey for inner healing is not a straight path! It looks more like a labyrinth with many levels and peels like an onion! At least that is how my spiritual journey has been. Over the years I have felt compelled to seek help from others. And as I peeled back those layers, I could look back to see where I was being led.

The thing about a labyrinth is that you are physically turning back on yourself and just when you think you've reached the center you find yourself thrown back out to the edge. Things that don't seem very significant now come back to you when you least expect them and they add to or strip away from what Picasso called the "dust of everyday life." You know what happens when you let dust accumulate!

In one of the more painful times in my life, I sought out a spiritual advisor. Didn't know what they actually did but kept reading it in books and magazines. This lead me to a wonderful Sisters of Charity nun whom I connected with. I got to a place where I had no words for what was happening inside of me and she asked me if I could put an image(!) to the feeling. I realized that I had been given an image not long before of a snail. The snail has become part of who I am! And it describes my personality. I carry everything around with me (past, present, worries about the future) and I am slow on the uptake sometimes! Then there are those times when I seem to slip and slide my way along a path leaving a slime path behind. Just making that connection helped me be able to go on and talk about what was dammed up inside of me. (I got the image from a video where Maria Harris had asked us to find a shape in the clay we were holding. Art, of course!) I've made it part of my signature (if you look at the first blog I did you can probably see it in the bottom corner). It is an image that comes out for me as an aspect of who I am.

Movement inside the self may also take some movement on the outside or physically for anyone to access what needs to be healed! I always ask people to draw with their non-dominant hand to access what the body is calling for them to heal. Our dominant side hosts the judging/criticizing part of our brain which blocks or controls what we think. It is not always the wisest for our healing. Just that small movement from one hand to the other allows the body to free up our spirit. I also have asked groups to walk the labyrinth before they sit down to do a piece of art to help them get to a different place than they have brought with them. Dance is a powerful form of expressive art and one that people who need movement must use to help themselves to heal. I find walking the labyrinth immensely helpful when I begin my work with art and healing. My preference is with images, but I find a more well rounded response when using movement and voice (which I will speak of in another blog).

My son at 4.
Children are naturals with art, moving, and singing. They don't worry about how it looks or what color things should be! Blue noses and green feet are wonderful! Working with art and using your non-dominant hand takes you back to childhood. It frees up that child within to show what is happening inside of you. Each color you use corresponds and vibrates to a different energy center or chakra. It can help you find out what is happening with both physical pain as well as emotional and spiritual pain. I have lead one day retreats with Art and Healing, weekend retreats and used it in spiritual direction. There is something that is freed up by the use of art and I found that by understanding the process, I have been able to teach others how to work with it themselves.

Some of my work has been images, but some of it is abstract too. My son Michael offered one of the artworks I did for his healing to put on this blog! Thanks! I leave you with that image until the next time!

He calls this the All Seeing Eye!

Wednesday, March 16, 2011

New Venture for Me

Blogging is something I've been wanting to try and it took a friend of mine Pam Lee Miller to get me started. So thanks Pam!

My spritual journey began many years ago with becoming an artist in grade school (that is Catholic school!). The nuns noticed that I was good at copying the little pictures they gave us and asked me to do a poster one day. From there I began copying things from the encyclopedia. I have a cousin who is a very good artist and I thought I would try it out. I didn't have much training, although I took a couple of classes when I first went to college.

My college career ended early when I found out I was pregnant and I didn't get back to it until my second child was 4 years old (my oldest was 8). I decided to try something that I might get a job in and ended up with an English degree with a Woman Studies Minor. I took one art class: sculpture. Loved it! My journey continued with seminary where I earned a Masters of Divinity. I was expected to write my own theology as part of this program and I found this very hard to do. One of the exercises for class was to be creative and write our eschatology. (I will show this with an explanation in a later blog).

It was a revelation for me! I could paint what I had a hard time explaining in words. Writing came easier because of my artwork! I began showing my work at the Seminary. It was a great opportunity to talk about my artwork and to show what I had been doing. Then the spirit brought my life's work to me. One day while walking in Barnes and Noble, there was a book sitting on the floor facing me: Art and Healing by Barbara Ganim. I picked it up immediately.

Somehow I knew this was going to be important! I began working with the exercises in the book. But I kept getting frustrated because I wanted more information about what I was doing! I even tried using it with the spiritual direction I was beginning to do without much success. At the back of the book was a website from Salve Regina University in Rhode Island that offers an Expressive Arts Institute, a 3-weekend professional training program in the professional applications of the Expressive Arts. I drug my husband to two weekends and a friend to another!! Now driving from Kentucky to Rhode Island is a long way but it was so worth it!

I learned so much in those three weekends that I am using in my work with Spiritual Direction today. In addition to using to to create retreats and days of reflection, I have also healed many of the inner places inside of myself. The results of which I will share as we go along. This healing artwork is meant to be shared! It can and will help others heal by making them available for viewing. The above artwork is my healing sunflower.

This painting began as an exercise at one of the weekends in Rhode Island. I was surprised by a picture which I did that scared me:

I had to really work to like this dragon image. And to heal whatever this represented, I did another artwork:
 

This dragon is not so threatening!

 One of the things about healing and our inner journey that I have discovered through my work is that it is multi-layered and doesn't happen all at once. The image is more of an onion. And healing comes in many ways. I have found that doing art in this way has been more healing for me than anything I've ever done. The final healing painting I did was the sunflower at the beginning of this blog. It hangs in my kitchen and I share it here with you: