Spontaneous art and writing offer a mirror of your inner world and can help you to express, release, see, and heal your emotional pain. For self-healing expressive art and writing classes, I invite you to visit my online classroom HERE
For a free tour of 100 of my free resources, I welcome you to sign up for my Expressive Arts Learning Library.
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Over the years, my creative practices become simpler and simpler - sometimes to the point of sometimes just picking one image from a magazine a day, and meditating upon what it means to me.
The Simplicity of Gluebooks
Have you heard of gluebooks? I have been making gluebooks for over 20 years - before I knew that they were called gluebooks! Gluebooks are different from collage journals in that they are simply a book that you glue things that you like into.
If you would like to cut, collage and glue in a more elaborate way, I have written an article on How to Create an Intuitive Collage HERE.
I like to create "visionary gluebooks" in a very simple way. I choose just imagery that helps me lean into something that helps me to feel wonderful.
Materials:
Anything can be turned into a gluebook. You can use a new blank sketchbook. You can also use an old book and glue on top of the pages. Your gluebook is a place to honour your fascinations and interests.
As I mentioned, you can simply choose an image or two that inspires you each day, and meditate upon it. If you want to document your life through personal photographs, fun stickers, concert tickets, random pretty papers, napkin, and anything else that inspires you in your daily life.
A glue book is not a collage journal, it is a diary of what inspires and intrigues you. It is a collection of visual items that bring you joy.
Here is a guide on what kinds of images to look for:
How to Deepen Your Positive Feelings
Choose at least one "good-feeling" picture from a magazine per day, and glue it into your gluebook. Spend time with your image to anchor the goodness you feel deeper into your brain and nervous system. This practice is inspired by neuroscientist Rick Hanson. See my full article called: How to Deepen Positive Feelings >>>HERE.
Look For The Good: Find at least one image a day that helps you to feel wonderful, and glue it into your journal. Sense into the good feeling-tone of your image. Take in the good a little deeper than you normally might. Try to look at your good-feeling image at least ten times a day. Each time takes just a few seconds to do. You can do this throughout your day when washing dishes or driving in your car. Or look at it at specific times, such as just before falling asleep or upon waking up, when your brain is especially receptive.
Savour the Good. Most of the time, a good feeling or experience passes by in a blink. But this savouring practice invites you to sustain or stay with what is good for 30 seconds in a row instead of getting distracted by something else.
An easy way to do this is to find something to appreciate in your chosen image, and feel the appreciation intensify in your body, mind and emotions for 30 seconds. Encourage your appreciation to flood your body, making it a deep, rich and beautiful experience for 30 seconds.
Research has proven that the longer something is held in awareness and the more emotionally amplified and stimulating it is - the more the neurons fire and wire together.
Soak in the Good: Now, let your good experiences - real or imagined - register more deeply in your emotional body for ten minutes or more. You can do this in various ways. You might feel a good experience as a warm glow spreading through your chest. And with practice, you might choose to bring this warm glow into old places of hurt or old holes of loss and grief.
As you do this extended practice of bringing your good feelings of warmth, safety, happiness or joy into old wounds, your neurons are firing and gradually wiring together to create more happiness in your brain and body. Every time you practice taking in and extending the good, it will make a small cumulative difference. And, over time small differences in your brain add up, reshaping you into a happier person!
Video Demonstration
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For as long as I can remember, I have longed to feel joy. In my twenties, I created "joy journals" by cutting and pasting beautiful things that sparked joy for me. Eventually, my life started to shape around my consecration to joy. The old fell away, and the new arrived.
Imagine a new emotional reality that you would LOVE to create. Now, imagine NOT being able to create this reality. The negative thoughts and emotions that come up will reveal your limiting beliefs. If you have no negative reactions, you will have no blocks to creating your new reality.
Now, imagine your dream of a new reality has come true - BIG TIME. Then, see what conflicting thoughts and emotions come up. If you have no negative reactions, you will have no blocks to creating your new reality.
When you have negative reactions to your envisioned reality, write down all the thoughts, memories and associations that come up. Once you have brought your negative beliefs up to the light, view them with acceptance.
Your negative core beliefs are your limiting opinions about life, yourself and other people that were formed during adverse experiences. As you "root out" your negative beliefs and start to doubt their validity, you will create a vacuum. Then it is time to fill up the emptiness with your new affirmation practice!
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Depth therapy is a warm relational process that supports you to accept, express, regulate, make sense of, and transform your emotions, so you can become who you really are. READ MORE...
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What is Intuitive Painting?
Do you know what intuitive painting is? Intuitive painting for the process instead of the end result.
You can choose to suppress your emotions or accept and express them so that they can transform. Emotions hold tremendous energy, and when you paint your emotions out intuitively, you release them from your habitual control.
The intuitive painting of your emotions neither burdens other people with the unskillful expression of your emotions, nor does it force your emotions deep down into your body to create dis-ease.
Emotions are never permanent. They are energy in motion and they constantly change. When you capture your emotions in paint, you will move and release right before your eyes, and you will grow to trust your intuition!
How To Paint Intuitively
In this 30-day intuitive painting course, I encourage you to set up a painting station in your home or studio with your watercolour paper, paints, brushes, and a jar of clean water close at hand. Every day, I invite you to create one small, spontaneous watercolour painting without thinking - just feeling.
1. Close your eyes, breathe deeply. To help you move out of your mind, place your non-painting hand on your heart.
2. Listen to yourself internally for a few moments, and then pick up your paintbrush and load it with the first colour that catches your eye.
3. Paint your first stroke, and then without thinking add more paint your brush, perhaps in another colour, and add to your first paint stroke.
4. Continue painting from feeling instead of thinking until you feel complete.
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Week 52: Healing Collage - Festive
Quote:
“The light teaches you to convert life into a festive promenade.”
~ Dejan Stojanovic
Poem:
Living in the light.
Living in the light.
A festive promenade!
A Year of Healing Collage!
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Over the years, it has been my honour and pleasure to share my expressive arts practices and principles with so many wonderful people all over the world.
And, I have created a webpage of all my interviews and art demos for you HERE!
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Week 51: Healing Collage - Fortunate
Quote:
"You have to fight for your dream, but you also have to feel fortunate for what you have."
~ Cesc Fabregas
Poem:
Feeling fortunate for what I have.
And,
Always dreaming big.
A Year of Healing Collage!
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I recently sent this lesson from my e-course 100 Days of Art Journal Therapy to someone I care about, and I thought this lesson should be more widely shared.
An Emotional Approach to Healing Illness
The emotional struggles that you cannot work out consciously will often work their way through your body in the form of an illness. The emotional component of an illness can be explored symbolically through spontaneous painting, followed by sensing into your body and meditating on direct questions in a journal writing process.
The body uses illness to express emotional wounds that have not healed yet. Many of us have an "illness journey" as part of our life path, but in my experience, working with people at the end of life, illness and decline are not always as predictable as I once thought.
Aging and illness do not always imply a straight downhill decline. There is an emotional quality of life that can be uplifted at any age despite physical or cognitive limitations. You are not just your body that sometimes hurts and suffers.
Emotional Healing
Over a period of nine years, working in a therapeutic art studio with hundreds of older adults in their eighties and nineties, I witnessed several emotional and physical "healings" with my own eyes. I observed older adults fall into a deep depression, have long bedridden illnesses and hospitalizations, with the end of life seeming very near.
Then, on several occasions, I was surprised to see those same people back in the art studio again, ready to create for another period of their lives. It amazed me to observe frail elderly people heading in a death direction reverse quite spontaneously and become robust, cheerful, and full of life again.
When these frail elders came back to life, my direct sense was that they felt emotionally lighter. I saw them laugh and smile more. They started to paint, sculpt and weave again. They connected with others and expressed more love. They often exclaimed gratitude and joy. And, I always intuitively felt that something emotionally heavy had cleared away to make room for a fresh experience of life.
A Journal Meditation on Illness
1. Begin your meditation by resting in stillness and listening within to the place where your physical pain resides. And, deeper than any physical pain that you are feeling, see if you can find a place in your body that holds an acute feeling of emotional pain.
2. As you rest in the particularity of the emotional pain in your body, it might have a story to tell you about how it feels apart from your love in some way. It might, for example, feel bitter, lonely, mistrustful, or angry.
3. When you have a feeling-sense of a part of you feels separated away from love, intuitively paint this particular "feeling tone" in your art journal.
4. Allow the pain of your separateness to move into your hand, into the brush, and onto your paper. As an image emerges, welcome it. Your painting might be elaborate, or simply be lines, colours or shapes that do not make rational sense at first.
5. When you are finished with your painting, say "hello" to it, and sit with it for a while. Keep it company. Realize that this painting might express a part of you that you regularly ignore. Perhaps your painting has a direct message for you. It might be saying something like, "Pay attention to me. I need love. I am angry. Stop hurting me. Stop ignoring me."
6. Perhaps the symbols in your painting have words. You can consciously dialogue with your symbology through free-writing. You can write about the symbols in your painting, in a free-associative way, like this: "Red: I feel anger streaking through my body. Circle: I want to open up to a higher way of thinking about my life. No mouth: What are you trying to say?"
Love and Pain
In the illness healing process, the aim is to heal the aspects of your mind that are separated away from love. Healing the roots of illness involves coming out of isolation and joining with other people, as well as rebonding to your younger hurting selves. Healing illness also involves connecting to the spiritual love you experience as your Higher Power for extra support.
You might have to deal with the physical fallout of illness, old age, or disability, but it is also possible to feel deeply connected to love, whatever your health situation. Even in the midst of body pain, you can find great presence, peace, and appreciation for what is.
Journal Questions
As you gaze upon your painting notice what wants your recognition right now. Let your thoughts inform you of what parts of you feel separate from love. Ask yourself the following questions in your journal.
- What am I afraid of?
- Who in my life do I dislike or feel separate from?
- Is there an inner aspect of myself that I dislike or feel separate from?
- Is there someone I need to accept or forgive?
- Is there an inner aspect of myself that I need to accept or forgive?
- Is my illness helping me to avoid something? What would that be?
- Is there something that I feel that I need to complete, do, or become that my illness is keeping me from doing?
- Is there some higher quality of being that I am afraid of growing into by being ill?
- Is there something I need to be responsible for or someone I need to be accountable to in order to heal?
- Is there anyone or anything that I am trying to control through my illness?
- What "good things" do I "get" from my illness? What are the reasons that I might not want to heal?
- Is there an inner or outer problem that I do not know how to solve that is being expressed through this illness?
- Who would I be if I were healed and whole?
You may not yet deeply understand the buried aspect of your mind that expresses its alienation by being sick, but you can send this particular "vagueness" love, ask for its messages, and rest in the warm "healing-tone" that arises from listening to yourself on a deeper level.
Rest in unknowing before you close your journal, and write down anything that floats into your mind. Allow yourself to rest on the edge of what you do not know instead of what you think you know about your illness. Allow new healing information to come in.
Ask for a Healing Idea
Healing is a gentle, intuitive process. Healing ideas will arrive into your conscious awareness one step at a time. Just before closing your art journaling session, ask your higher mind, "What is the next step for my healing?" The answer might feel obvious or surprising. It might be a simple word, like "rest, stop, love, or relax."
Once a healing idea comes into your mind, you may enjoy sending the same healing idea out to everyone in the world to amplify your experience of it. You can send your healing idea out into the world with words such as, "may all be well," or "may all be loved."
Or, you might pick a particular person to send healing energy to. "(Name)....may you be well." Magnanimous blessings open up a larger frame of compassion for yourself. You may even sense that certain individuals are being placed in your mind to send healing to, perhaps even total strangers who suffer in similar ways to you.
As you do your intuitive step-by-step healing work you might want to focus on this healing idea from A Course in Miracles: "When I am healed I am not healed alone. As I bless everyone, I am healed with them, as they are healed with me."
An In-Depth Art Journaling Course
The above lesson is an excerpt from my 100 Days of Art Journal Therapy e-course. I think that this is one of my deepest courses to date. I spent many years grappling with my deepest questions about severe anxiety, depression, core wounds, trauma, illness and more. This expressive art and writing course is the result of my deep questioning.
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Week 50: Healing Collage - Jubilant
Quote:
"She was worshipping under the blue sky, to the jubilant chanting of the birds."
~ Jean Webster
Poem:
Blue sky,
Birds chanting,
Jubilant.
I am.
A Year of Healing Collage!
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As our world shifts, changes and recalibrates, I have been aiming to design expressive arts directives that can be done with whatever most of us have on hand at home.
Here is a video art demo that I did with artist Amanda Mauk during the first worldwide "sheltering in place." Together, we are creating quirky, quick, fun and imperfect "collage landscapes" with minimal art supplies.
In this interview, I also share how and why I design my various creative practices.
You can watch my art demo HERE.
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Week 49: Healing Collage - Liberated
Quote:
"For to be free is not merely to cast off one's chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others."
~ Nelson Mandela
Poem:
Casting off my own chains.
And, respecting.
Other's freedom to create their own reality.
A Year of Healing Collage!
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"Creativity involves breaking out of established patterns in order to look at things in a different way."
~ Edward de Bono
Are You Feeling Stuck in a Trauma Loop?
Are you feeling stuck in repeating trauma patterns from the past that you cannot seem to think or feel your way out of?
The good news is that your deeper creative unconscious mind wants to give you messages for healing. You just need to learn how to access it.
Pain Pattern Interruption
I love intuitive art as a "pattern interruption" process because trauma loops are so pervasively repetitive. So, a few years ago, I created a very simple course on trauma healing for the emotionally overwhelmed. It is a collection of 30 different expressive arts directives that can easily be done in under 15 minutes a day.
A trauma loop is a brain and body state that has created a pain repeating pathway in your nervous system. As you repeat similar ways of closing down your body, heart and mind in fear - over time it gets stuck in a difficult to change trauma loop.
Instead of further embedding a trauma loop in your body, mind and heart, you can find ways to invite the truth of your intuition to interrupt repetitive patterns of pain.
The emotional healing process, in my experience, occurs through pain pattern interruption because all healing occurs in the present moment, and healing insights can be accessed through your intuition.
A Simple Course for the Emotionally Overwhelmed
This course is suitable for those of us struggling with stuck imprints of event trauma, developmental (attachment) trauma, and inherited trauma. If you are in the process of healing recent, acute or complex trauma, I encourage you to seek support from a trauma-informed therapist.
Because trauma can become frozen in the body, in this course, you will be encouraged to get in the flow of your body's wisdom through daily spontaneous creative exercises that are simple to execute, and do not require artistic talent or skill.
As you meditate upon your intuitive drawings, paintings, collages and poetry, your higher wisdom can give you the messages that you uniquely need to release, resolve and heal stuck pain patterns from the past.
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Week 48: Healing Collage - Sunny
Quote:
“Laughter is the magic that dispenses clouds and creates sunshine in the soul.”
~ Richelle E. Goodrich
Poem:
Laughter and Sunshine.
Magical Soul.
A Year of Healing Collage!
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"Eventually, you will come to understand that love heals everything, and love is all there is."
It has been such a strange year, hasn't it? A year ago I was invited to present my approach to Depth Therapy at the Mind Body Spirit Conference in Toronto Canada, and I was planning on taking a fun business trip across the country.
I ended up not travelling due to restrictions. So, I presented my training on Love-Based Psychotherapy online. And, now I have packaged it up as a reasonably priced course that details 13 love-based therapy skills as well as the 6 stages of love-based psychotherapy,
In this training, I also offer you a personal window into my own self-love practices through the expressive arts. I share how I use my practice of intuitive drawing to witness and love my neglected aspects of self so that I can be more present and whole as a therapist.
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Week 47: Healing Collage - Serene
Quote:
"You cannot perceive beauty but with a serene mind."
~ Henry David Thoreau
Poem:
Calm body,
Serene mind,
Beautiful life.
A Year of Healing Collage!
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Week 46: Healing Collage - Surprised
Quote:
"Expect nothing. Live frugally on surprise."
~ Alice Walker
Poem:
Living on
Surprise.
Not knowing.
Yet.
A Year of Healing Collage!
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Now, more than ever, our intuition is needed. Nothing feels certain. The world feels chaotic. I sense it is time to bring our creative ideas to the New Earth that is emerging.
I loved talking about the intuitive unfolding of my business with artist Joyce van der Lely. I shared how I have always trusted my new paradigm business ideas, and how I have followed my intuition step-by-step along the way.
We also did a fun, quick intuitive art exercise together, and we both enjoyed several surprising insights which is the fruit of spontaneous art!
I would love for you to join us HERE!
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Week 45: Healing Collage - Trust
Quote:
“As soon as you trust yourself, you will know how to live.”
~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Poem:
Trusting
That I know
Trusting myself.
A Year of Healing Collage!
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I had such a great conversation with artist Joyce van der Lely about how to creatively move forward in these uncertain times. And, I look forward to sharing some of my personal stories with you about how I have followed my intuition step-by step over the past ten years to bring me where I creatively am today.
Because I love to create intuitive art, Joyce and I also did a fun visionary collage exercise together that can also support you to sense into your next step in life. I invite you to grab a magazine, a pair of scissors, and a glue stick so that you can play along with us.
The exercise that I share in this interview is so simple, and yet so profound. I love collage because it takes me out of my normal cognitive mind and it leads me toward the green growth edge of my next intuitive step.
Please join us for this free interview and art exercise HERE.
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Week 44: Healing Collage - Enthusiastic
Quote:
"Nobody grows old merely by living a number of years. We grow old by deserting our ideals. Years may wrinkle the skin, but to give up enthusiasm wrinkles the soul."
~ Samuel Ullman
Poem:
Enthusiastic.
Soul bright
Ideals!
A Year of Healing Collage!
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