Healing and Art
Recovery and Healing is part of each of our lives....
Take the time to consider what you have experienced, or continue to experience, which needs attention and healing.
* The process of Discovery, Recovery and Healing will likely be helpful to anyone affected by illness, including caregivers and family members.
* There are many paths to healing; finding ways to support yourself and renew your spirit are important elements to healing.
Healing Art, something as simple as a pen to paper, or a smudge of color on a fingertip heals the soul. We forget how to play and experience simple pleasure. When we are being challenged we sometimes forget how to feel our deep emotions and othertimes how to enjoy life, here are some ideas to explore...
- SoulCollage/Collage is a wonderful form of healing art. Collage is the art of combining images that become a new creation. SoulCollage is a more specific practice using collage techniques to create personal cards that hold the individual energy of aspects of your self and the unique things that impact you. In their SoulCollage deck many people create a "healing" suit, for their own discovery, recovery and healing. Some use images that make them laugh, some use images of spiritual and archetypal (mythic) guides, some refer to their own experience with metaphor/imagery. Many find the process of SoulCollage helps to re-frame, re-define an experience. Personal and sometimes very traumatic experience such as Cancer, Addiction, Depression, Natural Disaster, Eating Disorder, Violent Crime, and end of life transition/Hospice are all areas that have been supported, with understanding, help and healing through the SoulCollage process. A SoulCollage journey can include using the collaged cards as a journaling tool, as an alter piece, to create personal story, myth and vision for the future, and for personal card reading (similar to Tarot, but the answers coming from ones own internal wisdom through their intuitive collages).
- Painting is another way that many people express and reflect their experiences. Using paint and a large canvas, some start by feeling themselves move, a great way to explore feelings and emotions, through their brush strokes. Try painting with one color and layering paint on top of paint - experiencing creating depth and texture with the color. Others enjoy water color or acrylics - painting images and landscapes of their internal world, their dreams, their future, or things that they enjoy. Paint is fun to explore with but also try colored pencils, felt pens, crayons and pastels for a color alternative, you can work with them together also.
- In Mixed Media, anything goes! Try using Japanese art paper, paint, glue, sand and beads on a piece of wood. Within mixed media we might find insiration in different items translated into painting, found art, sculpture, mask making, clay work, textile art, costume design, altered books and paper art. Play with materials that you are both familiar and unfamiliar with, to experience how a new art expression feels as you engage. Take a journal book and some water colors, start painting the pages. Then take some images that you love and glue them in...do some journaling in colored pens and go back over a dried page with acrylic paint. Add some stamps in irridescent stamp ink, and add some poetry and quotes - a feather or a tiny shell. What is the feeling that you get when you have a finished page, or ten or a whole book of reflective artwork?
Art that heals is a path to recovery of body, of self, of a future that holds hope and vision, love and joy, release and balance. Simple pleasure that returns us to living fully through expression...
Cat Meehan 2008
SoulCollage® Empowers Recovery
Written by Cat Meehan for SoulCollage Facilitator Newsletter May 2009
For me and so many others, SoulCollage® is pure journey work, illuminating and providing recognition to those of us who engage ourselves in this process. When I teach SoulCollage® in communities focused on healing and recovery, as well as in my ongoing studio classes, I present the idea of SoulCollage® as a reflection of the “spectrum of self.” This is a wonderful way to describe the many parts of self, supportive and challenging alike, and to include the guides, family, archetypes, and totems found in the four suits as well.
SoulCollage® offers a healing path to recovery of body, of self, of a future that holds hope, vision, love, balance and deep connection. Simple pleasures, such as cutting out images, arranging and joining them together, can and often do return us to living more fully through the simple expression of what IS. Being able to identify what is true, even when it is shadowed and challenging, is a path to integration. The spectrum of self, a concept familiar to those who are in recovery, includes every aspect of that which moves us, blocks us, inspires and frightens us.
I am privileged to present SoulCollage® workshops to healing communities that address recovery and eating disorders. At the 2008 Northern California Eating Disorders Recovery Week, I facilitated a group of thirty-five young people, suffering with eating disorders (ED) and related concerns, parents struggling with their perspective toward ED, and professionals who work in the field. I had the great pleasure of presenting the workshop with my twenty-one-year-old daughter, who is in her 6th year of recovery.
Leading a hands-on workshop with this varied group, which represented different perspectives on healing and recovery, presented some challenges. Normal anxiety about choosing images and creating cards could potentially magnify or trigger recovery issues, yet the magic of the process overcame the possible negative clinical issues. The group was engaged and the energy was positive. SoulCollage® was the perfect match to each individual’s need, perspective and readiness to participate.
Individuals sat at small tables and started creating their cards. Once that amazing “third entity” emerged, there was a palpable shift, and you could hear exclamations of recognition. Every person made 2-3 cards within an hour and shared them with others at the table using the “I Am One Who…” exercise. For some individuals, the sharing process was brief, while others expressed extraordinary experiences of renewed life force, sadness, and emerging creative spark. Participants gave voice to their images – the strong woman who survives, the one who takes care of self, the one who needs others, the one who is angry, the one who withholds food, the one who finds healing in a garden sanctuary and the one who is fearful – and received healing insights. One particularly strong image revealed “I Am the One Who is the rescuer, rescuing others before myself.”
Observing the engagement of participants as they shared their cards, trusting in themselves and others, I reflected back to them the value of being able to communicate and share one’s deepest self in community, without dialogue. I shared the concept of witnessing without feedback, which provides a safe, non-judgmental communication that can open up understanding and divert impasse within a recovering family. My daughter and I shared our experiences and how we to use SoulCollage® as an ongoing weekly practice for personal growth and spiritual connection. She and I continue to create cards together, sharing our deep and ever-changing spectrum of self as we have done throughout the many years of our family's recovery and healing.
I provide SoulCollage® on an ongoing basis with people in the Eating Disorders and Recovery communities. Whether they are working individually or in groups, I have observed a great deal of integration. SoulCollage® cards can sometimes be experienced as disturbing and confusing; yet appreciating the insights of others and trusting their own progression has allowed for healing and understanding each step along the way.
Supporting individuals who often work with their cards in therapy, I focus on creating a safe space for discovery. Allowing for quiet reflection and honoring each person’s need and process are the primary elements in my healing work within recovery communities. At times I have to remind a group that the finished piece, the SoulCollage® card, is not itself a sacred product. It does not have to be “a perfect visual”, but is instead a reflection of self that provides clues, insights, and a doorway to the spectrum that lies within each one of us. The journey, the discovery of our own spectrum of self through the SoulCollage® process, is the sacred and healing practice. This intuitive and transformative process has made a tremendous impact on my life and on the lives of those I teach.
In February 2009, I was again honored to present a “spectrum of self” SoulCollage® experience at the recovery conference. SoulCollage® demonstrated itself as a valuable, soulful addition to other therapeutic approaches to eating disorders. The benefit of giving individuals in recovery a creative tool to take with them into their daily lives is critical. I had both new and returning participants, and was thrilled when one woman shared with me that SoulCollage® had added enormous ongoing healing and life affirming dimension to her recovery process,. She now has forty-five cards that she uses in daily practice. What a wonderful testimony to the healing powers of SoulCollage®!
Cat Meehan, a SoulCollage® Facilitator and Life Coach, leads classes and workshops in collage, mixed media, and masking in her Petaluma, California studio. Cat has personal and professional experience working with families and individuals struggling with illness and recovery. Her commitment is to serve community, support healing and provide outreach as a "parent in recovery."
Cat and Darcy Meehan speak about recovery within a family & guide a SoulCollage workshop at Eating Disorder Awareness and Recovery Week in Petaluma, CA. - Sponsored by Petaluma Health Care District and EDRS
Photo: Cat Meehan sharing the power and magic of SoulCollage
Article Link: http://www1.arguscourier.com/article/20080221/COMMUNITY/328700581
Eating Disorders Recovery Services link:http://www.edrs.net/
Petaluma HealthCare District link: (Resources, Information and Videos on all health and wellness topics) http://www.phcd.org/