No Place Like Home

I work with a lot of children who live in foster homes. Some of my children have moved multiple times. In my art therapy studio, we make a lot of homes. Homes for animals, us, and dolls.  Is it necessary to feel ‘at home’ where you live in order to evolve? Can our roots grow anywhere? Can we feel ‘at home’ in any environment, with any people, in any conditions? Home often has cultural, societal, familial, political connections characterized by family, and memories that translate into feelings of safety and love. When moving to a new place, one often feels in a state of limbo; both excited about the new possibilities and alien in the new home. One  could feel like tourist, imposter, outsider, or exile. Salman Rushdie in Step Across This Line (2002) writes “the human dream of leaving. a dream at least as powerful as its countervailing dream of roots . . is the tension between these two dreams.” (p. 13) When we move to a new place we live in this tension. Will that tension turn into a trauma, or new possibilities for growth and healing? It could go in many directions: ‘How does living in a city that does or does not feel like one’s ‘home’ affect you?  Can people thrive in countries, cities, houses in which they do not feel at home? What does it mean to be without home? Is it necessary to feel ‘at home’ where one lives to be ‘at home’ in one’s life experience? What is a home? What is home to you?

Reflecting on Prayer Flags

I have used the process of making prayer flags with groups in many different ways over the years. A prayer flag is a rectangular cloth often found strung along mountain ridges and peaks high in the Himalayas to bless the surrounding countryside or for other purposes. These panels are wood-blocked printed with words and images. In our Archetype Group we made Prayer Flags as our art response to studying the Sun and Moon Archetypes.

The cloth pieces can then be hung in a covered outdoor place or inside. I have made prayer flags with clients in grief and loss groups, addiction groups and other process groups. It is a beautiful way to send a prayer out into the universe.

Rainer Maria Rilke: “Go into yourself and see how deep the place is from which your life flows.”

"We promise according to our hopes, and perform according to our fears."
~Francois de La Rouchefoucauld

Suggestions for doing a Moon Collage:
One way you can do a collage for this archetype is to think about your relationship with it and try to find images and words that reflect it. Do you include the Goddess in your Spiritual expression? Is she not yet discovered or feared in your psyche? How familiar or foreign is this realm? Another approach with this archetype is to do your collage centered around your relationship to nature. Show your feelings and thoughts about what you love, need to feel peaceful, and whole. How do you communicate with nature; is it by walking, staring at the ocean, swimming, or through your love of animals? You could fill your collage with images of Moons. Portray how this word affects you. Does it conjure up images of beautiful shimmering moons, mysterious half moons, waning, waxing, or new moons? Do you plant by the moon phases or do you bleed by the cycles of the moon? You could also approach this collage by showing a reflection of your psychic abilities. You could also center this collage around your mystical experiences and insights. Maybe you will want to do it in the light of the moonlight. Enjoy.

Focusing and Expressive Art Therapy

This weekend I taught a Level Four Focusing and Expressive Art Therapy workshop. One of the exercises we explored through art making and Focusing, started with an attunement to lightly, gently touch in with a part of us that may be holding traumatic memories, sensations and or feelings. The group experienced through Focusing, the regulatory capacity to be there for this part of them. Staying Present for themselves, staying with the experience as it unfolded moment by moment and developing the capability to give complete, unconditional regard to their wounded or traumatized part or parts helped regulate and allowed these parts to move into fresh experiencing. Our neurobiology and our interpersonal relations create a sense of our well-being. 

In Focused Centered Art Therapy we are working with attuning our relationship with ourselves and our parts and healing our attachment that may have been severed due to trauma.  The interpersonal attunement that is felt and experienced during Focusing then can be witnessed when it is expressed and carried further in art making. The attunement and resonance that happens in a Focusing Session between a therapist and client, as well as the attunement that the client feels with him/herself is carried one step further when the client expresses this attunement through paint, clay or other means. The attunement which is integral to healing is now also felt in the creative expression that the client has experienced. This consonant relationship between therapist/client, client/self, client/creative self provides stability and safety, such that the client can be with difficult, painful feelings in a way they have not experienced before.  They are able for the first time to feel a sense of “Self” and “Someone There”, as well as, but separate from, a sensation or feeling.  There is a “Me” and a “Something.”  Where once they were merged with the experience, there is now a refreshing sense of a whole person and an experience.  In the attuned therapeutic relationship, there is also the sense of alliance with another who can simply “be with” our experience in Presence, which allows life forward movement to occur.

 Art work done in workshop by students.                                                                                                

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Making Peace With Our Bodies

                           For years I have taught body image workshops. Growing up in our culture causes the majority of us to have a distorted view of our body image. We are bombarded by images in the media of beauty that do not reflect our own image in the mirror. Society has set impossible standards that have left most of feeling that we are not acceptable as we are. Air brushed images of women that are super thin face us everyday. We don’t see images of ourselves, we see a body type that is impossible to achieve or maintain.

   Seeing comes before words. A child looks and recognizes before it can speak. It is seeing which establishes our place in the surrounding world. Women are looked at. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. Throughout time women have been objectified and looked at in art. The first nudes in Europe portrayed women’s bodies in a way that appealed to male sexual preference. In the art form of the European nude, the painters and spectator-owners were usually male and the persons treated as objects, usually women. This unequal relationship is deeply embedded in our culture. Today this tradition is continued in advertising, journalism, and television. There is still an ‘ideal’  image which usually reflects one body type.

         As women, we are taught that there is a ‘supposed to be’ in bodies. Size and shape are more important than feeling, sensing and intuiting. For women to be powerful, healthy and strong we need to ‘reclaim’ our objectified image.  We need to love the body we live in. Enjoying and accepting our bodies is a fundamental aspect of accepting ourselves as women. We need to listen to our bodies to hear what shape and size they need to be. We need to reconnect with the wisdom of our bodies.

What is your relationship with your body?                 

Body image is     ~ a perception we have about ourselves

                       ~ how you feel about your body

                       ~ the way you move, experience and sense your body

                       ~ messages you received about your body

                       ~ how your body is seen and experienced by others

Your body is    ~ feelings, sensations, memories

The body uses its skin and deeper fascia and flesh to record all that goes on around it.  Like the Rosetta stone, for those who know how to read it, the body is a living record of life given, life taken, life hoped for, life healed.  It is valued for its articulate ability to register immediate reaction, to feel profoundly, to sense ahead... The body remembers, the bones remember, the joints remember, even the little finger remembers.  Memory is lodged in pictures and feelings in the cells themselves.  Like a sponge filled with water, anywhere the flesh is pressed, wrung, even touched lightly, a memory may flow out in a stream... To be thought ugly or unacceptable because one’s beauty is outside the current fashion is deeply wounding to the natural joy that belongs to the wild nature.

         - Clarissa Pinkola Est’es

                                                              

         Your relationship with your body is the sum total of the visual, emotional, physical, and historical aspects.  Women become dissatisfied with their body image when they feel negatively towards their body or parts of their body.  Women with eating disorders may hate their body so much that they wish they were invisible.  Many  woman hide in baggy clothes, retreat from social interactions or choose not to participate in activities that involve wearing revealing attire such as bathing suits.

         Your relationship to your body affects your behavior and self-esteem.  Body image develops as a person develops.

What is your relationship to your body? 

Is it a: ~ reliable companion

          ~ mediator of your experiences of the world

          ~ vehicle for transformation

          ~ temple of God, Goddess

          ~ something you dislike

        

         Our body image may be congruent with or distorted from our actual body. Examples of distorted body image include feeling fat when one is thin, feeling ‘satisfied’ when one is hungry, feeling comfortable when one is in pain. Examples of healthy body image are feeling tired after exercise or staying up late, feeling hungry if one hasn’t eaten, feeling ‘in one’s body.’ 

How to regain a congruent body image:

1. Get to know yourself; your emotions, your social life, your body.

2. When you ‘feel fat’ ask yourself what is going on in your life.

3. Get to know your body from the inside out. Get to know yourself as a kinesthetic being, an emotional and tactile being.