Current location:	Milwaukee, WI
Current mood:	excited
Current music:	k.d. lang: Wash Me Clean (live)
Entry tags:	art therapy, spirituality

Each Time a New Breath: Buddhism, Art and Healing
The essay for this week's Art Therapy class is called Each Time a New Breath: Buddhism, Art, and Healing by Bernie Marek. And I feel compelled to write about it because I had such a strong reaction to it. I was tired and just trying to get this thing finished when I started reading but after a few pages my hands, feet, second (sacral) and seventh (crown) chakras were tingling. I was actually moved to tears by the ninth page. I'm not usually a very emotional person, especially reading textbooks from school, lol, but the subject of this essay is very meaningful to me. He was speaking about art making as a way to heal and about it being very much a discipline of the body...that, "the image is energy that moves inside you, alive, dynamic, always changing. The image challenges you to feel and express its vitality. Images are always ready to communicate with you." I was just so moved...incredibly happy to be reading about this body/energy connection to art that I've always instinctively felt and so, so sad that we've all lost so much of our body/mind connection and have to feel the pain of that loss.

I just can't believe the strength of my reaction. It was immediate and very powerful. Studying yoga has made me very aware of how breathing affects the energy moving through our bodies...I'm trying to bring that mindfulness of the breath into my daily life. It's very exciting to connect the breath, that way of being, to art making, too!

Alright...some quotes from Marek's essay and my two cents worth:

At one moment we are in control and comfortable with our usual frames of reference; in the next we may plunge into relationships with others and our world that do not make sense. There is, in some very fundamental way, a rhythm of building up and breaking down, of construction and collapse, of breathing in and breathing out, of touching and letting go at all levels of experience in our daily lives. This rhythm is ordinary, but we have lost touch with the importance of the deconstructive and impermanent aspect of our experience.

I find that to be very helpful. I don't always have to know and I don't have to fear not knowing.

What is healing? It is knowing who we already are, complete and whole.

Again, healing is about the movement of energy. Knowing you are healing brings about a certain movement of energy and so you heal. I love that :)

The practice of art therapy is very much a discipline of the body; it is about seeing, touching, and allowing the energy of our imagery and our perceptions to move through our body.

Yes, yes, YES! I'm beginning to see where I belong in the Art Therapy world. Now the fun is in getting there, lol.

My work as an art therapist has to do with cultivating people's ability to first resonate more immediately and intimately with their bodies, with their sensations and feelings in their moment to moment experience. We have to come home to the body. We have to come home to the earth...The body is our medium, our paint, our clay; the art process is the extension of our body in relationship to the world.

And my favourite tonight:
Through our breath, we exchange with the world; we take in the world and let go of the world, take in the world and let go of the world.

I never thought of it that way in all my yoga classes struggling to just observe my breath. I love it.

Marek also quotes Mark Epstein, a psychiatrist and Buddhist meditator:

we don't really understand the extent to which our emotional states are physical experiences...We try to turn our feelings too quickly into thought, which means the bodily aspect of emotion is being pushed away.

I'm thrilled this essay found its way to me. My hands and feet know what I'm supposed to be doing on this earth :)