Some days, I will post a project in art and healing from my class at SFSU or JFK to help you understand how to use art and healing in your life.
The projects are unbelievably beautiful, I honor each student and each project.
First, Margi Rohde from my Art in Healing class at the John F Kennedy Transformative Arts Masters Program.
http://www.jfku.edu/programs/programs/arts/tranform/
here is Margi's project:
"I chose two projects for the Art & Healing class, one I had already begun and was eager to finish and the other was a start to something which will be on-going. I found myself to be wildly enthusiastic about the process. I have experienced the healing power of art in many forms within my own life and was interested in taking what I have learned and seeing how it would work with others.
The first project was with my daughter. She has spent several years healing in regards to an extremely toxic relationship. She was feeling that she was nearing the end of that process and wanted to make her healing tangible. She wanted to do something incorporating the idea of the natural elements.
First she made a box containing some personal effects from a man with whom she had had a long relationship. She covered the box with poetry he had written to her and some of her own drawings. As she thought about this for a while she became convinced that she wanted to burn it.
She asked me and my husband to participate with her in a ritual of burning the box and saying a few words to acknowledge the importance of this person in her life and the destruction he had brought, as well as breaking the power he has had in her life. She had written a few pages of renunciation which she read as the box burned. This brought her a tremendous sense of release, freedom and joy. She felt at this moment that her process of healing was finished.
She carefully took the ashes home with her and waited until we talked further and the next step became clear. For her second event in the healing process she wanted to do a Chinese brush painting of the words ‘death’ and ‘joy’. She mixed some of the ashes into the ink; the result was a gritty texture not un-reminiscent of bones from cremation. This pleased her greatly as it gave a sense of finality to the aspects of the relationship she was healing from.
The following and final step took place several weeks later. I had been making cairns at Pt. Isabel and she asked to join me and construct a funereal cairn in which to bury the ashes. There was a lovely triangulated group of rusty wire which She used as a base and she built her cairn out of composite riprap. It was important to her to use discarded building materials in the place of natural stones to further symbolize the ending of the control this person had held over her and the destruction he had brought into her life. She poured the ashes into the cairn and finished the construction with stones on the top as adornments.
The following day we went back, there had been two high tides since the cairn was built and the tide was still up though not high. The cairn was partially submerged and the ashes were covered with water. She was struck with the image of the tide rising and very gently carrying the ashes of this relationship out to sea. I was honored to companion her through this process and feel as she does that she has come to a place of rest. She feels released from the pain which had defined her for several years and is ready to move forward into new and healthy relationships.
This process was a natural one for me as we had talked extensively over the course of this class about what she might do to celebrate the end of this step in her process of healing. She was easy to work with, in great part because of our closeness and the love and trust we have for each other."
