emotionalarcheology

By: emotionalarcheology

Oct 03 2011

Category: Art Therapy

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I will start with myself as a way to explain what happens in an art therapy session.

A friend of mine, who didn’t smoke cigarettes, ate very a healthy diet, enjoyed life, and was an athlete, was diagnosed with cervical cancer.  She went into remission, but the cancer returned and ultimately ended her life.  Before she died, I was thinking how powerless I felt and I wished I could do something to help.  Buying a get well card was not strong enough, and praying was what I was already doing in my mind when I thought of her.  I wished I had the magic to heal her.  I also knew that the outcome was not mine to control.  But I had all of these feelings about it.  They had to be turned into some kind of action.  There was energy I needed to move out of me and into the space around me.

In my altered book, which I call, “Existentially Me…Finally, a book that asks more questions than it answers’, I did a page on Crow Medicine.  Spirituality is a core subject for me and I have spent my present lifetime thinking about it.  The Crow symbolizes ceremonial magic and healing rituals for many Native Americans.  Crow is also Shapeshifter, but in a way that tells you to shift your perspective and change your world; a change in consciousness that brings about a new way of being.  A shapeshifter is a master of illusion, and in a healing ceremony, the shaman might frame the illness as illusion; one that the afflicted person could spiritually and mentally have the power to change.

A crow is cawing outside as I write this.

I sat with all of my thoughts and a build up of energy and was moved to make a small Crow Medicine box.  It was a get well card and a prayer in one.  I do remember the power and the passionate feeling I had when I made it.  Not the power of ‘heroics’, but the power of my fear over the possibility of her dying.  Images, sculpture, text, dried leaves, mica-encrusted stones, and paint went into the piece.  I gave it to her partner to deliver.  I don’t know if that ever happened, and it doesn’t really matter.  What matters is that I used art to sort out my feelings over a friend dying.  There were many things I had to face in this process.  The Reality of other States of Existence beyond our conscious experience is a big concept to digest, and that it may be the outcome intended by my friend’s soul.  I had to face that, and the fear around losing my own loved ones.  I was feeling fear and it needed an outlet.  Art making was my outlet and I felt like I accomplished something when I was done.  My prayer was organized and visible.  I could see it.

At first, I had great anxiety and fear.  I released these feelings by pouring them into a small work of art.  I turned my energy into a Visible Prayer, and it felt good.  A stronger prayer.  I couldn’t have gotten the physical benefits of released feelings from simply talking.  I moved energy as I moved myself through this hands-on making process.  The art product is a side effect of the making/therapeutic process, although a delightful one to be sure.   The healing is in the making.  The artwork serves as a container for the feelings that I poured out of me, invisible to the eye, that are now crystalized for all to see.  There is a real, shamanistic magic in it, as I think about it.  The Invisible is made Visible.

After the making piece comes the sharing piece.  I thought of my friend’s mother and father, to whom she was very close, and I could feel desperation.  Here is the place to say how sad and scared I am of losing one of my children, as I empathize with my friends who have lost a child.  I know too many.  It is my greatest fear.  Naming our fears is a valuable piece of work, and standing shoulder to shoulder with someone’s support is better than standing in front of the monster all alone.

This is a good example of what someone can do with their feelings in an art therapy process.

Working this way can get deeper sooner.

And this is just the first example of a story and its artwork.