More Deeply Real

I'll Give My Life to What Gives Me Energy

Years ago, I wrote about a gas meter. I was 34, a new mother, working part-time. During the first year of my daughter’s life, wanting some way to listen to my imagination despite the complex stresses of that time, I gave myself the assignment to write monthly about one small square foot of earth in a narrow strip of land between the driveway and my house. I felt a loss of freedom for time spent other than at work or caring for an infant, and I hoped that this writing exercise would affirm for me, that even in the smallest, most ordinary, most easily overlooked of spaces – and moments – I would find a simple connection to the surrounding universe. These hopes were realized with each month’s writing. I wrote about a pansy that bloomed there mid-winter, frozen water in the downspout, a pomegranate that rolled from the compost pile, the gas meter against the side of the house, morning glories sprouting from last year’s seeds, my daughter’s first steps tottering toward me.

Yet these writings also always contained painful acknowledgements of how exhausted and poorly nurtured I felt. And when I wrote about the gas meter, I imagined, with longing, a meter connected to my heart, that measured precisely the physical and spiritual energy that I expended and that was – or was not – replenished in my relationships at work and at home. I heard the gas meter say to me fiercely, “This is what is being given away! This is what it costs! This is how much you receive! And this is what you truly need!” In my imagination, I saw the gas meter transform from a rusty, inanimate object into a wise and loving creature that touched my heart with compassion. And, while I could not say what it was that I truly needed, I began to understand that I was giving away more than was healthy for me, and that I needed far more than I allowed myself to want, let alone claim.

Writing about that gas meter was a powerful experience of how strongly the archetypal beings of the imagination call us to right what is out of balance, to serve what is truly valuable, and to not waste our lives. After writing about the gas meter, I entered a period of life in which I gradually came to accept what most of us come to know as we turn toward midlife: that our energy is limited; that how we chose to spend our lives will demand of us just that, the spending of our lives; that life is a precious fuel, a limited resource, only partially renewable; and that such renewal of our life-energy can only come with care, conscious effort, intentional living, and commitment to a generous spiritual practice. For me, carefully listening to and responding to the archetypal imagination is the most generous spiritual practice I know.

As I wrote about the gas meter, I did not know that what I truly needed would require me to leave, first, a job at which I was burning out, and, then, my unhealthy marriage. But, as I did those things, I sensed in my heart a wise and compassionate presence through which I learned I could gauge my spiritual, emotional, and psychological energy.

I know now to listen to this presence, this “inner gas meter, and have come to trust it. If some opportunity feels too taxing, too depleting, too draining before I even begin it, I say no to it. If something in my life starts to feel deadened or out of balance, I find ways to rebalance, or to let go of what is finished. If I feel energy for other pursuits, even if they do not seem immediately practical, I follow my excitement for them and give them space in my life. And through these choices, I find, and trust I will keep finding, relationships, ways of working, ways of living that nurture and energize both myself and others, that protect and inspire imagination.

Art meditation suggestions: 1) Choose one square-foot of land close to your home and write periodically about what you see there. 2) Draw an energy map of your life, showing how your spiritual, emotional, and physical energy is being spent and renewed. 3) Sit next to your gas meter. Write a dialogue between it and some part of yourself, such as your heart.

2010wfriday workshops

2010wComStudioWorkshop

The above links will take you to two beautiful new brochures about upcoming programs at my studio!  (Made by Gary Schmitt, Indy’s best graphic designer!)

Once a month, on Friday, come to the studio to slow down, create, reflect and renew by exploring specific art forms (such as storytelling, masks, dream tending, poetry, music, mosaic, printmaking, etc.) in a community setting.

Or, once a week, on  Monday evenings, come to the studio to create, reflect, and renew by practicing a variety of art meditations with others!

Looking forward to more music and warmer weather

Now is the time of year that we hear talk in the media of New Year’s Resolutions to loose weight, stop smoking, exercise. This is all well and good, but I often feel that talk about resolutions often includes focus on faults, guilt, and superficial appearances. To me, being healthy includes living with compassion, creativity, and in rich relationship with myself and others. And so, instead of making resolutions to change my flaws, at the beginning of each year, I like to think about what my creative life is calling me for and to give myself the gift of following that longing in some small and attainable way. For instance, one year I realized I had been reading only non-fiction about the environment and that this had been enlightening. But I was hungering for more playfulness and hope in my reading, so I chose to devote a year to reading fiction again. This choice wasn’t a rigid choice. If a non-fiction book that was truly inspiring came across my path, I read it! But I also had a great time reading fiction, exploring new authors, and found that my own creative writing came alive in new ways. Last year, I decided to take some risks playing my harp and singing – in front of other people, no less! I am still limited by “stage-fright” musically, but last year brought some progress and I am more in love with music because of it. This year, I am feeling pulled toward poetry and journaling again, and I especially want to explore creating a multi-media journal with images, writing, music, interwoven.I feel unsure of how to do this, so haven’t started yet. Hopefully, some of what occurs in this effort will make its way onto this blog.

What are you feeling creatively drawn toward? What are some of your creative resolutions for this year?

The Studio Space

With less than two weeks until Christmas, all my time and creativity is busy with holiday preparations!  But my thoughts are also turning toward the new year and what Enbarr studio can provide for those seeking a place to create, grow, deepen, and come home to their longing.

Another Studio View

I have heard from several readers of blog that they are eager to come to one of the upcoming programs at the studio in 2010.  I am excited about sharing the studio with you!  Here are some pictures of the studio space, ready and waiting for us to come together again in January.

There's Room for You!

When I have more time, I plan to write next about beginning the new year not with last year’s uncompleted resolution, but with creative openness to renewal and change.  Over the holidays, if you have any thoughts about how you might honor your creative life in the coming year, post a comment on this blog. Maybe we can get a conversation going that will inspire and encourage us all!

Happy Holidays!

Artist Trading Card

I have observed countless times a surprising potency and energy that awakens in people when they participate in community studio art meditation and spiritual reflection.  Sometimes this renewed vitality inspires outer changes related to jobs, physical health, home environments.  Sometimes the big change is internal. Either way, there is a swiftness, an inner quickening, an instinctive knowing that those old choices that weren’t working anymore no longer need to be maintained. New choices, new ways of living are possible.

This energy, this potency is the soul’s innate creative strength,  strength that is with us all the time though we become disconnected from it. It is frightening. We feel it as an ache, a longing and mistakenly assume that we need to get rid of it – fill it with something external, something that will finally satisfy it and silence the longing.

Years ago, I read the  book Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom by John O’Donohue and was deeply touched.  He says:

If your soul is awakened, then you realize that this is the house of your real belonging. Your longing is safe there. Belong is related to longing. If you hyphenate belonging, it yields a lovely axiom for spiritual growth: Be-Your-Longing.  Longing is a precious instinct in the soul.

Real longing cannot be resolved, brought to a conclusion, finished, explained, understood, or completely satisfied because then it ends. It dies. The longing of the soul is meant to live.  When speaking of longing, the verb “be” is essential. Being means living. To be longing, we live longing.  We long for longing. We allow longing to be an open question, a fire within us, the indescribable emotion that stirs in us when we touch upon the mysterious life at our core.

This longing is what is awakened in us in the community art studio process.  The products we create together might look like nothing more than a small and humble doodle or an unfinished experiment. But they are actually doorways that open our hearts and lead to our longing.

Finding Beauty in Brokenness, collaborative mosaic

I have been making mosaics with communities since 1997. In those 12 years, I have seen how the art form, which creates beauty from brokenness, offers not only a symbol of healing, but a rite of creating renewed wholeness for those who make the mosaic. I have made mosaics with groups dealing with domestic violence (either as victims or as those working to help the victims). I have made mosaics with students in preschool, elementary school, secondary school, college, graduate school, even seminary. I have made mosaics with teens and adults in prison. For the past three years, I have overseen and facilitated The Cancer Mosaic Workshops for Indiana University Simon Cancer Center and have created mosaics with cancer patients, their caregivers, and doctors and nurses at IUSCC.

In all these experiences, I have witnessed people acknowledging their feelings of being shattered by illness, violence, abuse, loss, grief. And I have also heard people describe how the pain of these experiences gave them the  gift of being broken open to deeper love, fuller living, authentic healing.  I have come to understand that we “… must be broken open and remade, perhaps many times, to come to awareness,” as art therapist Pat Allen says in her book, Art is a Way of Knowing.

On this past Saturday, November 14, 2009, as part of Indianapolis’ Spirit and Place Festival, a group of people experiencing major illness and/or life changes gathered at the IU Simon Cancer Center to  create mosaics. We began the day with introductions, writing, and storytelling about our experiences of job loss, a rare bone disease, lung cancer, breast cancer, loss of loved ones, long-term physical disability. We then wove the healing imagery within these stories into collaborative mosaics.

At a Mosaic Workshop, November 14, 2009

In the photos shown here, several of the workshop participants are piecing together a mosaic of a lighthouse. The lighthouse symbolized to this group  the ways in which, in the midst of their own sea-changes and rocky  journeys, there have been people and places that shone a light for them, guiding them, helping them find their way.  The lighthouse also symbolized for the group the ways in which they have given a guiding light to others.

As the mosaic took shape, I observed much laughter, eagerness,  and enthusiasm in the faces, voices, and interaction of those creating it.  I knew that not only myself, but everyone in the room was feeling a surprising joy.  Community artist  Lily Yeh, who has made art and mosaics with such people as genocide survivors in Rwanda, describes what we were experiencing in this way:  “It is really through the depth of living, the chaos, the brokenness that I find peace.  Joy is rooted in the depth of our suffering.  It is out of my own brokenness, and the brokenness of others in the darkest of places, that I find that sense of joy.”  (Lily Yeh, as quoted by Terry Tempest Williams, in Finding Beauty in a Broken World, page 270.)

I sometimes imagine no longer having to haul numerous heavy boxes of tiles around the city, even the state, in order to bring mosaic workshops to interested groups. But there will always be suffering in the world, in my life, in yours.  And rather than trying to trying to ignore the pain of living, or to deny it, or defend myself against it, I chose to live and work in a way that both does not create unnecessary injury , and also compassionately accepts the pain that is here, now, offering us growth, change, healing.  It is because of this choice that I continue to provide community mosaic workshops.

I will be facilitating Cancer Mosaic Workshops for cancer patients and caregivers on March 6, May 1, July 10, and October 30, in 2010. Additional information about these workshops and how to register can be found http://www.cancer.iu.edu/mosaic.

For information about scheduling community mosaic workshops for other groups, please contact me directly.

Colors of Longing, pastel on paper

Group Creation, mixed media on paper

Recently, five women gathered at Enbarr Studio for an eight week course –  Beyond Burnout Prevention: Creative and Spiritual Renewal for Social Service Professionals.  Over the weeks, we talked about our work as therapists, social workers, school counselors.  We acknowledged the grief, the frustration, the worry and the exhaustion that comes from such work. And we acknowledged our own dreams, our need for nature, our search for what is wild and  alive inside ourselves, our deep longing.

Reaching for a Star, mixed media

Every night, after checking in and talking about readings related to depth psychology, art therapy, and eco-psychology, we made art. And we began to see that our images are alive, with much more to tell us than could be grasped in only eight weeks. We met in our art work women with wings, birds, animal people, moving colors, mountains, rain and trees.

Who is This? - chalk on paper

On the last night of our time together, we brought to the studio everything we had made and we spent the evening looking at it again, seeing connections in each others work and our own.  More than one person said that the greatest gift of the group was learning that creating things together in community holds a power that is missed when trying to create alone.

Opening the Door, acrylic on canvas

After everyone carried their art back out into the night and drove home, I stood in the studio feeling how full it was with life. Here are some of our living images.

In the Rain, oil pastels on paper

Enbarr from Irish Mythology, oil pastel on black paper

In case you are wondering, Enbarr Art Therapy Studio is named after a horse from Irish mythology who carries riders from the immortal land of Tir na nOg to the land of men.  Enbarr means imagination, a fitting name for a wild being who travels between two worlds. Such travel is what  imagination does. It connects the world of dreams, images, soul to our  waking world, our  ordinary consciousness.

I have always been drawn to  Irish stories, music, and mythology.  This spring, after  having a dream in which a musician skilled in Irish music gave me a horse for which I needed to make a home, I began immersing myself in the story of the harper Oisin and his travels to and from Tir na nOg. It was through studying this story that I learned of the horse Enbarr.

My studio has recently gone through a few major moves in the wake of my own travels, and so it was in need of a new name to honor the new home I have made for myself, my work, and for imagination in the world.  I hope to see you soon at Enbarr Art Therapy Studio!

Responsive Tree - mulit-media collage

I want to describe what happens in what I consider an ideal art therapy session. My hope is that visitors to this blog, and potential new clients, can glimpse how I work. The following story is an account of one session with a fictional client named Claudette. Although Claudette comes from my imagination, she is based on what I have experienced working with women like her for over 20 years. She is fictional in order to protect the confidentiality of my clients while also describing, in story form, what could really happen in an art therapy session.

Claudette’s Story

Imagine Claudette, a divorced woman in her mid forties, seeking therapy from me after a relationship ended. In our first sessions together, we talk about her feelings of being unsupported and unnourished in most relationships, especially after her mother died when she was 16.

We are currently exploring how she under-supports and under-nourishes herself through restrictive dieting, and not pursuing career goals. For homework this week Claudette has journaled about what needs to be fed and supported within herself.

Today she comes to therapy with a written description of a dream which she had after writing about her nourishment needs.

The dream (as written by Claudette):
In a dim, dusky place, there is a solitary tree with a large hollow cavity, like a small cave. The tree is old and dying. I feel drawn to it and realize the tree wants me to enter it. As I do, I realize the tree is – at heart – young, feminine, and very sad. The tree needs me to cry because it can’t. My tears fall on the ground within the hollow place and the ground changes from hard and dry to soft and alive. The tree drinks in moisture now and grows younger, filling in with new wood. I am afraid that I will be trapped inside. But the tree tells me to wait. I feel a glowing, warm energy and strength. The tree’s new heart begins to undulate, like muscles gently pushing me out, and I step from the tree into a bright day-lit forest.

The intensity of the dream frightens Claudette but she feels unable to forget it. She had vivid dreams when younger but over the years her dreams seemed to fade.

Claudette wants to create the tree in the dream because she knows it is her. She feels old and dying on the outside but young and deeply sad inside. The weeping in the dream is what scares her the most. But she wants to feel the energy and strength that she had in the dream and the new born hope with which it ended.

She works intently, quietly, urgently using paper, collage materials, oil pastels, to piece together her tree. I create a tree also. As I work, I think about how often trees occurr as healing symbols in client’s art, and in my own. I am struck by the dark center in what we both have made. This dark hollow makes the image more powerful, just like truly grieving connects us to the soul.

Claudette describes her tree as “coming back to life” and points out the “old, grey haired woman” side of it next to a younger, colorful self. She wanted the hollow place to remain unfinished. We talk about how she is becoming conscious of her own sense of emptiness and loss and that it will help her stay present to those feelings by allowing the tree its hollowness. We also talk about the tears she will need to shed as she becomes more accepting of her own grief. Claudette acknowledges that she feels ready to “go there” in our future sessions. We talk about how we can use the imagery of going inside a hollow but also motherly tree to help set the stage for her grief work in future sessions. She takes the tree sculpture home with her with the intention of setting it on her desk and writing a dialogue with it before our next session.

Welcome to my blog.  This is my first post, and my first venture into blogging.  The creative possibilities of this excite me and my goal is to create a place where anyone who is interested in living an authentic creative life can find inspiration, guidance, and affirmation.

I have entered my 21st year as an art therapist.  When I reached my 20th anniversary in this work, I knew that I would need to create something that would help me both reflect on, and honor, the 20 year process of working, living, and engaging with community and world as an art therapist.  Originally, I thought that creative reflection would be done in one of the art forms I have come to know deeply during these 20 years – mosaic, printmaking, poetry, storytelling. Instead, the creative process has totally surprised me.

It began with a total reorganization of my studio, inspired by a series of dreams calling me to give my work a larger, more generous home.  That lead to renewed excitement for the business work of promoting my practice – creating brochures, marketing workshops, etc.  A deep tending and self-validating of my work.

I also sat down at the computer to begin writing what I called my “art therapy memoir”.  So many transformative moments with so many amazing people have been part of my ongoing work-life, with never adequate time to write about them, reflect on them in the here-and-now as I am living them. My thought was that I would go back and reclaim them in this “memoir” process.

But something kept stopping me. Memoir writing energy just wasn’t there.  The last time I sat down to work on this I found myself writing, “I don’t want to go back over the past. I want to write about the present. To live a new, immediate process, not direct my creative energy toward what has already been.”

I also realized that even my methods for writing are based on old practices.  Sitting in the college coffee shop with my spiral bound notebook worked 25 years ago.  Writing at the computer in solitary hours to slowly compile a book that I would send out to publishers has been another way I have often worked. But now I want to combine my own doodles, writing, art projects, photos of others healing art experiences, community interaction, dialogue, story, poetry all in one place.   A living journal, a creative process that does not ever have to be finished, completed, finalized. Something organic. Something that will engage me in a new creative process.

And so this week, when a friend suggested I try a blog rather than update my old, and sorely out of date, website to market my current work, I realized that the blog medium opens up all kinds of new ways of creating for me.  And presents the opportunity for me to share with you the here-and-now life changing events that art therapy, and engaging with unexpected living images, offers us all.

I am very much looking forward to sharing with you the blessings of my work.

So, welcome to this dialogue with creativity.

And welcome to my blog.