These steps are a spiral, they don't necessarily take place in order and they can take place again and again, but we found patients who healed themselves with art, experienced many of them.

1.        Pain and darkness
    We found that most people start with an experience of pain.  They articulate loneliness, grief, fear, psychological pain, physical pain, the pain of a newly diagnosed cancer. From the place of pain, they fall or move into darkness.  Darkness is the three-dimensional place where pain lives.  It is pain and the person’s perception of fear and death.
2.        Going elsewhere
    Inside the lived experience of darkness, the next themes emerge: going elsewhere, a pause, the trigger, the trigger event.  In this step, the person begins to leave pain behind and move towards healing.
3.        The turning point
    Next, each participant becomes immersed in the creative process.  They become involved in doing something in their life, making a garden, going on a trip, making art: painting, sculpting, dancing, journal writing, composing poetry.  Becoming creative is a large spiral;  how each person becomes involved in creativity is different.  Some are invited by friends, some were artists already, some become creative almost by accident. 
4.        Slipping through the veil
     Now the spiral contracts.  The participants slip through the veil, they go through a doorway.  The witness in themselves appears.  This part of the process is about going deeper.  Something appears they have never seen before.
5.        Embodiment of the spirit
     The next spiral is the embodiment of Spirit-Body Healing.  The stories illuminate this experience of attention, breath, and merging with pure spirit. 
6.        Knowing the truth and trusting the process
    This part deals with other themes that emerge, themes of restorying and of transformation.  The healing now has a flow and movement that is entrancing.  The person begins to know who she or he is and what they need to do to heal.
7.        Healing energy and compassion
    When the person becomes creative, they experience deep feelings of compassion for themselves and others.
8.        Transcendence 
    Then the final spiral, a spiral of transcendence that deals with oneness, interconnectedness,  luminosity, with seeing God and the angels.  This spiral is about receiving love and seeing their whole past as being loved. It is about visionary work and global healing.  It is about changing people’s whole lives so they are deeply in service to their community.  They become different, powerful, and themselves.  They heal themselves, others, and the earth.  They are full of energy, intensely alive, and almost messianic about how art healed them and how they now want to do projects to help others heal with spirit .