Art as Medicine

"I view art as a medicine that proceeds through different phases of creation and reflection. Although therapists and other people involved in this process make their contributions as guides and witnesses, the medicinal agent is art itself, which releases and contains psyche's therapeutic forces. The medicine offered by meditation on art is generally an infusion of imagination and awareness rather than a specific answer. 'Messages' may ultimately be less significant than the engagement of images. Rather than understanding the 'meaning' of the dreamer's pleasurable slide down the long pole into the darkness, we enjoy the slide and hold on to the image.

"Yet artistic images encourage us to look at them and reflect upon their natures, both physical and psychological. Interpretation enters the world of the image in response to its nature. Rather than labeling pictures from our frames of reference, we meditate on them, tell stories about how we created them, speak to them, listen to what they have to say, dramatize them through our bodily movement, and dream about them. All of these methods are dedicated to the ongoing release of art's expressive medicine. Analysis and reason make many contributions to our meditations, but they do not dominate."
Art As Medicine: Creating a Therapy of the Imagination

Save Treasures

"When my wife was sixteen she played the lead role in her high school play, and someone gave her a bouquet of flowers. She kept one of the roses until it dried, and when the petals fell off, she put them in a box, which she has carried with her ever since. Now that the emotional connections to the play have faded, the object is important because it has been with her for so long."
Earth Angels: Engaging the Sacred in Everyday Things

Soulful Materialism

"My vision of soulful materialism is foreign to almost everybody's idea of an angel. I long for deeper relationships with physical things. The objects themselves seem to ask for this. They have been neglected, misunderstood, and viewed as lifeless artifacts, existing to be used and ultimately cast aside in a materialist world serving people. But according to my contrary nature, 'the toxin is the antitoxin.' Material things contain the spirits of their salvation. We can help the process along by reframing our relationships to them, appreciating their expression, life, and creativity. When we begin to see how the spirits of things affect, and actually form us, our relationships with them will be transformed. They will change us if we can deeply contemplate their natures. This intimate dialogue is basic to consorting with angels.

"I am intrigued with the angel in the microwave, my grandmother's portrait, the plant on the windowsill, the computer on which I write, and the things that go contrary to my aesthetic sensibility. I am also concerned with spirits that live outside consciousness in homes, offices, and neighborhoods."
Earth Angels: Engaging the Sacred in Everyday Things

Art as A Spiritual Discipline

"Art as a spiritual discipline entails paying attention to images and opening ourselves to their unique expressions rather than trying to fix the problems we think they represent. The unsettling image is an ally of the soul that helps me reframe how I am looking at life and living it."
Art Heals: How Creativity Cures the Soul

A Bus Ride

"I can change the significance of the bus ride I take every day, by approaching it aesthetically. I can do this completely within my imagination as I sit and open to reverie, or I can actually begin to document the trip artistically by keeping a poetic diary focusing on each day's ride or writing a story from the perspective of the bus and its repetitive odyssey. By personifying the bus I get a completely different perspective of the world. This is what I mean by infusing life with imagination and increasing its influence on daily life. The bus might tell stories about the people it transports, the qualities of neighborhoods and streets, the weather, and the variations in an otherwise consistent routine. By re-visioning the bus as a pundit who wisely reflects on its environment, or as a poetic observer, I open new perspectives on the world.

"If I have negative feelings about taking the bus, I can be assured that there is plenty of psychic energy involved in my relationship with it. Personifying the bus expands my compassion for its experience. The demon bus, the thing I loathe to ride, is transformed into a psychic helper who shows me how to look at things differently. Stuckness, boredom, anxieties, and even depression involve a certain failure of imagination. I see over and over again how the healthy and creative person has an open, flexible, and engaged attitude toward things. This ability to shift attention and accommodate to situations probably has something to do with the origin of the term 'well-adjusted.' ''
Earth Angels: Engaging the Sacred in Everyday Things

Change Your Perspective

"Try looking at doorways, gates, and other passageways symbolically. As you walk down a street, consider the different types of entrances you see. What do they say to you about the spirits of the place and the soul? What rites do you imagine people experiencing as they pass through the openings? What qualities connect the passageways in one house to those of its neighbors? What characteristics distinguish homes from one another?

"Take this foreign perspective and apply it to your own household. Imagine yourself walking through it as a stranger who is looking at things 'for the first time.'
What do you feel at the different points of passage?
Look at your fireplace, bed, closets, picture frames, and dressers symbolically. What things give the stranger a sense of the people who live in the space? What areas convey intimacy?
Are there ceremonial places in the home?
Are there chairs that look like seats of the soul?
Where is the imagination most alive?"
Trust The Process: An Artist's Guide to Letting Go

Overcome Boredom

"I remember John Cage in a lecture/performance at Lesley University saying something like this: 'If you are bored with something after two minutes, keep doing it for four minutes. If you stay bored, do it for eight, then sixteen minutes. If still bored, press on to thirty-two minutes, and at that point you might begin to find it fascinating.'

"Cage's illustration suggests that the mental switch is not necessarily an act of will or intention. It is closer to letting go, to getting beyond mental resistance and judgment. The breakthrough happens when we surrender to doing the activity for its own sake, no matter what it might be. The creative slipstream requires complete involvement in the immediate environment and attention to the present moment."
Creating With Others: The Practice of Imagination in Life, Art & the Workplace