Is all art therapeutic?
This is another question that people continually ask me. If
creating art is not an activity that slows down your mind, causes you joy, allows
you to lose track of time, or makes you feel settled and grounded, then no it’s
not therapeutic for you. Art making is only therapeutic if it brings you into a
more aware awakened state, calming down your nervous system and making you feel
positive emotions. Any activity that activates positive neurons and allows you
to relax is therapeutic. That could be fishing, cooking, gardening, writing, or
making art.
I have worked with clients who feel stress when they try to
do art. It is not a fun, relaxing, centering activity for them at all. So, it
is not therapeutic at all.
But, for some people using their hands has a calming effect.
Women and men throughout time have
knitted, sewed, painted, practiced pottery and have found that it benefited
their overall health and well being.
Kelly Lambert,
author of Lifting Depression writes that:“… when you knit a sweater or plant a garden, when you prepare a meal or simply repair a lamp, you are bathing your brain in feel-good chemicals and creating a kind of mental vitamin.”
Creating helps you feel productive and achieve mastery. By focusing your cognitive and emotional energies on accomplishing making something by hand it becomes a wonderful use for our neural networks as research has repeatedly proven.
Learning new crafts
and art processes results in improvements in cognitive functioning and enhances
brain plasticity. Because the brain is designed to actively respond to novelty
and external enriched environments, it is forced to grow new cells and those cells
are forced to make new connections. In making art, we use all our sensory
organs.
This month in the studio we have been playing with knitting.
French Knitting.
Circle looms provide easy way for children to create toques.
Knitting with thick bamboo needles.
