Shelley Klammer

A Divine Romance

Week 4: Healing Collage - Romantic

Quote: Romance

“If I love myself
I love you.
If I love you
I love myself.”

~ Jalaluddin Rumi

 

Poem: Romance

I love you.

and myself. We are equal.

 

A Year of Healing Collage

Join me for a year of Healing Collage! 

 

Expressive Arts Exercise

To deepen into the word of the week, choose a quote, that for you, emotionally reflects the word.

To anchor the healing power of your weekly collage, write a short spontaneous poem that personally reflects your collage and chosen quote.

 

Understand the Symbols in Your Expressive Art

The more expressive art I create, the more I think and dream in pictures.

When I began creating spontaneous art over 20 years ago, I had to study the language of my creative unconscious as if it was a foreign language. I would mull over what the symbols in my collages meant - often for many months.

Now, when a picture spontaneously comes into my mind or into my field of vision, I almost always know what it means for me.

I love to study dream interpretation as a doorway into the creative unconscious. I see spontaneous collage as a way to dream while I am awake.

You might ask yourself, " Do I want to study my own symbolism?" If the answer is "yes" you will enjoy this month's featured course.

Course Spotlight - Symbolic Journeys

I wrote this course because people confide that they do not know how to "read" their art on an intuitive level. In my opinion, it is best to write your own symbol dictionary in order to understand what your expressive art imagery means to you. 

In Symbolic Journeys, I offer 45 lessons that invite you to explore your personal response to common symbols through poetry, collage, writing, drawing and painting. You could think of this as a way to begin your own symbology dictionary. And, this course is also great for children and teens. You can view the course HERE.

 

The Heart of Tenderness

Week 3 Healing Collage - Tender

Quote: Tender

"The emotional wisdom of the heart is simple. When we accept our human feelings, a remarkable transformation occurs. Tenderness and wisdom arise naturally and spontaneously."

~ Jack Kornfield

 

Poem: Tender

Simple. 

The spontaneous tenderness of my heart.

Brings such emotional wisdom.

 

A Year of Healing Collage

Join me for a year of Healing Collage! 

For this challenge, I invite you to do this companion expressive arts exercise to deepen and anchor the healing power of your weekly collage.

 

Expressive Arts Exercise

To deepen into the word of the week, choose a quote, that for you, emotionally reflects the word.

To anchor the healing power of your weekly collage, write a short spontaneous poem that personally reflects your collage and chosen quote.

 

Free Support Group for Expressive Arts Facilitators

If you regularly create expressive art to further your creative freedom and emotional wellness, you might be considering facilitating the expressive arts for other people at some point in your journey. 

I am a REACE (Registered Expressive Art Consultant and Educator) with the International Expressive Arts Therapy Association and I am an avid encourager of Expressive Arts Facilitators!

Having facilitated expressive art and writing for many different populations for many years, I now guide a free Facebook peer support group for Expressive Arts Facilitators at all stages of practice.

This peer learning group is for expressive arts facilitators of all backgrounds and experiences. I warmly invite arts facilitators to share knowledge and experiences in a way that is encouraging and inclusive.

Join us HERE!

 

Becoming Friendly with Life

Week 2 Healing Collage - Friendly

Quote: Friendly

“Do I want the present moment to be my friend or my enemy?" ....Become friendly toward it, welcome it no matter in what disguise it comes, and soon you will see the results. Life becomes friendly toward you; people become helpful, circumstances cooperative....But that one decision you have to make again and again and again - until it becomes natural to live in such a way.”

― Eckhart Tolle

Poem: 

Play with life. Just as it is. Today.

Friendly within and without.

A Year of Healing Collage

Join me for a year of Healing Collage! 

For this challenge, I invite you to do this companion expressive arts exercise to deepen and anchor the healing power of your weekly collage.

Expressive Arts Exercise

To deepen into the word of the week, choose a quote, that for you, emotionally reflects the word.

To anchor the healing power of your weekly collage, write a short spontaneous poem that personally reflects your collage and chosen quote.

Cultivate Play with Expressive Art

Cultivating Calm

A Year of Healing Collage

I invite you to join me for a year of Healing Collage! This free challenge begins in January 2020 but you can join anytime HERE. 

For this challenge, I invite you to do this companion expressive arts exercise to deepen and anchor the healing power of your weekly collage.

Expressive Arts Exercise

1. To deepen into the word of the week, choose a quote, that for you, emotionally reflects the word.
2. To anchor the healing power of your weekly collage, write a short spontaneous poem that personally reflects your collage and chosen quote.

Week One Collage Contemplation - Calm

Quote:

“Rushing into action, you fail.
Trying to grasp things, you lose them.
Forcing a project to completion,
you ruin what was almost ripe."

~ Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching

Poem: Calm

Remain calm.

No rushing. No forcing.

Trust all will come together when fully ripe.

Cultivate Calm Through Intuitive Mandalas

A Year of Healing Collage Prompts

I invite you to join me for a year of Healing Collage for 2020! This free challenge begins in January 2020 but you can join anytime!

Method:

1. Consider the healing word for the week and see where it lands in your body. 

2. Once you have anchored the good feeling from the word of the week, start to intuitively look for imagery that matches your thoughts and feelings about the word.

3. Create an intuitive collage. To find out how to make an intuitive collage go HERE.

4. You can download the list of prompts HERE.

 

Companion Expressive Arts Exercise

For this challenge, I invite you to do this companion expressive arts exercise to deepen and anchor the healing power of your weekly collage.

Expressive Arts Exercise

1. To deepen into the word of the week, choose a quote, that for you, emotionally reflects the word.
2. To anchor the healing power of your weekly collage, write a short spontaneous poem that personally reflects your collage and chosen quote.

 

Facebook Group

 Join me in the Discover Intuitive Collage Facebook Group HERE.

Instagram

If you prefer Instagram use the hashtag #collageforself-discovery and tag me @shelleyklammer.

The Specificity Principle

"The more specific we are, the more universal something can become. Life is in the details. If you generalize, it doesn't resonate. The specificity of it is what resonates."

~ Jacqueline Woodson

As a creative person, it is so easy to get distracted, and lost in many things. Yet, I think we can only have one main passion, and maybe a few others on the side. There is so much to learn about even one thing. And, even if we do many things, at the root of everything that we do - there is likely just one main theme. 

The Specificity Principle states that exercising a particular skill primarily develops that skill. It is good to choose to be devoted to one thing and then get onto the job of focusing on it intently.

For a few years, I have been observing many genius-level spiritual and spiritual teachers online, and I have noticed that each one is very niche-oriented in their true work. Each genius-level teacher basically delivers one thing to the world, specifically and excellently.

I have long pondered how little time we actually have to do even one thing really well on a genius level. When I think about the spiritual teacher, Michael Beckwith, as an example, he really only has one message - Visioning.  And, he focuses on delivering that one principle in every sermon, on every radio program, in every book and article that he writes.

When I think about my specificity, I am clear that, for me, all roads of fascination lead to "the art of emotional healing." I am intrigued by the somatic, psychological and spiritual mechanics of deep emotional healing. I am a therapist that supports people to emotionally heal. I create and facilitate expressive art directives to invite emotional healing.

This is such a powerful day to contemplate your specificity. On this 12th day of the 12th month of the year...I wonder...what is your specificity?

 

Ten Minute Intuitive Collage Practice

Self-Reflection on the Go

I created this ten-minute collage practice when I was working full-time as an art facilitator in healthcare. Feeling emotionally overwhelmed. I did not have much time to tend to my inner life. And I know, after years of teaching this course that artists and non-artists alike can find surprising emotional freedom of expression through this simple daily creative practice.

Many of us tuck away and accumulate difficult emotions in the interest of properly functioning in our practical life. In the process of growing up, you likely did not learn how to properly process your emotions in the first place, and unknowingly you could be accumulating heavy emotions with each passing year.

My creativity has always provided a way for me to see, accept and process all parts of myself in a loving visual way. For many years, I personally have used the practice of spontaneous self-expression to help me honour what I was not allowed to express when I was growing up and also to process the untended emotions that accumulate in a busy, stressful life. 

Symbol Release

For most of my teen and early adult years, I depended on my private creativity journals to help me feel better emotionally. Unknowingly, I was implementing the process of what psychologist Carl Jung would refer to as "symbol release."

While I did not understand the emotions I was releasing through my creativity, I nonetheless was allowing a daily emotional clearing of my body and unconscious mind. I knew that if I was spontaneously creative each day I would feel clearer, lighter, and freer.

This course was created during a period in my life when I could no longer fit my extensive expressive art practices into my life. When I began to work full-time, I found that by the end of my working week, I would feel heavy with emotional accumulation. So I began creating a ten-minute "morning collage" with my tea very early each morning, before getting myself off to work.

An Easy Creative Practice

To make your experience almost effortless, I invite you to have a stack of old magazines, books, and colourful patterned papers on hand so that you can make a ten-minute collage in the morning before you start getting ready for your day.

Even if you are going to be home for the day, make yourself a cup of tea or coffee first thing in the morning, and create your collage immediately after you wake up so that you will be as closely connected to your unconscious mind as possible. 

Two or three torn images spontaneously chosen, a word, or a phrase or two is all that is required for your collage to reveal something new. I prefer to work with imagery but if you simply want to play with coloured papers in spontaneous, abstract ways, do.

This is an excepted from my course Intuitive Collage for Emotional Insight. If you have already taken the course - be sure to go download the updated e-book at the end of the course.

 

Why I Created 365 Mandalas

"Each person’s life is like a mandala – a vast, limitless circle. We stand in the center of our own circle, and everything we see, hear and think forms the mandala of our life."

- Pema Chodron

For three years I created intuitive mandalas as my morning meditation practice. This is the longest creative practice I have done to date. Usually, I aim to finish one sketchbook or journal that is dedicated to a particular medium or modality. This practice took much longer than I expected, as I rarely finished a mandala in my 30 minute morning meditation practice. 

I always set a healing intention with every creative practice. My intention with this creative practice was to calm my mind and heal my adrenals after years of overworking in the big city. Daily mandala making seemed like the perfect meditational practice for emotional calm and spiritual deepening.

What I Learned From Creating 365 Mandalas:

This was a particularly long practice....and 6 mixed media journals later, this what I learned:

1. Creating for 15-30 minutes a day is doable. It was both fun and challenging to create within the container of the circle each day. It made my creative practice a simple, structured thing to do the first thing before I went to work. (I work as a therapist in private practice.)

2. Concentration creates calm. Having done much deep catharsis through expressive art in the past, I am now at the regulations stage of my emotional journey so drawing and colouring in small, concentrated ways were very calming to my nervous system.

3. Playing with patterns is fun! I have always loved playing with intuitive patterns, so the pattern lover in me was very content in this process.

4. Repetitive creating supports a positive affirmation practice. I was able to regularly practice soothing mantras and repeat affirming new truths because my chosen creative practice was quite repetitive.

5. Releasing emotions into a mandala is possible: A mandala represents who we symbolically are within the structure of the circle. Some days, especially when I was feeling emotional, I simply released my emotions through an intuitive drawing within the structure of the circle. 

6. Mandalas are a way to focus inward: The circle offers a way to intensify focus on the inner self. I enjoyed consecrating my 15-30 morning minutes on honouring the shades and shapes of my inner world.

7. A long creative practice asked me to dig deeper: I got bored with my mandalas at times, as is common with a long dedicated practice of any kind. The boredom incited me to dig deeper into my own process and to experiment with new techniques like the collage mandalas that you see here.

8. A mandala can be left unfinished for a while: This was a pressure-free creative practice. I did not ever pressure myself to complete 1 mandala a day. Some morning I felt like drawing a mandala and some mornings I felt like meditatively colouring a mandala - I usually had 5-10 unfinished mandalas in process at all times.

9. A mandala practice is a spiritual practice: My ultimate aim was to deepen and calm into my spiritual life. As with all of my creative practices over the years, I deepened through my daily dedication to a regular practice

10. Setting an intention for any spiritual/creative practice creates change: My intention to calm my mind and nervous system were achieved. I deepened my focus considerably during this three-year practice and I really enjoyed this practice.