Making Art to Heal – Creative Healing
For many of us artists, it’s an unspoken law, that we feel better when being our creative, expressive selves…it is the greatest of all medicines. The creative process of making art is an incredible healing force of nature.
By art, I mean anything from writing, visual arts, painting, sculpture, poetry, music or dance.
Art frees up the body’s healing mechanisms to heal itself. It relaxes the mind and removes negativity….and hence many solitary, intuitive types of personalities are attracted to the arts. They see the world a little differently, beyond the physical and materialistic world that they know to be just an illusion.
Whilst ‘doing’ the art, there is no therapist required. The healer is the actual creative process itself!
Life healing begins when there is a shift in consciousness. When the starting point may be one of fear, darkness or illness, the ‘making of art’ leads a person to a place of luminosity and clarity. The focusing on the art transforms the person’s consciousness to feeling awakened and alive.
Doctors, nurses and natural therapists are now working with artists and musicians to heal people of all ages with many different ailments….including AIDS and cancer. Art and music, combined with traditional medicine are powerful healing tools.
Conditions that can Benefit from Making Art
- Anger, Anxiety and Depression
- Fear and loss
- Relationship trauma
- Heart disease
- Cancer
- Long term illnesses
Aboriginal Music and Healing
The Didgeridoo has traditionally been used as much for music and ceremony as it has for healing. The vibration of the didgeridoo can help rebalance the nervous system and bring a hypnotic sense of peace to the body.
These low frequencies are claimed by some to have a healing effect on living tissue and promote the unblocking of energy in the body. The benefits of vibrational healing have long been highly regarded in indigenous cultures. Aboriginal elders play the didgeridoo near sick people to help them regain health.
Painting for people with a Disability
A group of Aboriginal people with disabilities are making incredible breakthroughs as a result of the All Abilities art group in Newcastle. The brainchild of local elder Aunty Elsie Randall, the group meets weekly to communicate and process their emotions through painting.
“The concept around art therapy is about regulating your emotions by identifying the emotion with a colour and inventing symbolic features within the paintings to represent people, country or incidents. The whole process is about giving balance to your emotions, whether it be positive or negative.” Says Randall.
Randall, 49, says she began using art as a way of healing from her own traumas as a child and has developed the program intuitively.“When you take your eyes off somebody it cuts out any indicators of judgement or gestures that could be misinterpreted.”
In traditional cultures it was believed that art healed the world…not just an individual.
It was believed that art and music could affect and improve the hunt, the crop cycle, the weather and even fertility. Today many healing artists, also believe that their art will help heal the world. They are making environmental or eco-art to heal neighbourhoods, rivers and or to just create world peace.
In the lyrics of Michael Jackson’s song “Heal the World” …
“Heal the world
Make it a better place
For you and for me
And the entire human race
There are people dying
If you care enough for the living
Make a better place for you and for me”
Also Read: My Journey Intensive Weekend