Art is a way of healing. Art is a way of knowing. Art is a way of connection. Art is a way of being. Art is medicine.

“At the deepest level, the creative process and the healing process arise from a single source. When you are an artist, you are a healer; a wordless trust of the same mystery is the foundation of your work and its integrity.” ~ Rachel Naomi Remen

 There are many ways to engage, to enter, to experience multidimensionality. In the somatic experience, one can consider multidimensionality as body, mind, emotional landscape, and energy/spirit. Soma and sensation are together. Through sensation and the autonomic nervous system, one can experience listening in ways well beyond the auditory channels. Spirit is being energetic essence. In a spiritual or purely energetic context, one can consider multidimensionality as dimensions of consciousness, experience, and energetic presence. One can experience inner vision equal to or exceeding vision with the eyes open.

In a creative or artistic context, multidimensionality is that which offers a new perspective and dimensional presence while embodied and in connection. A fresh observation. A way to see or look or feel from a different perspective. Consider how texture is only a possibility of experience because of haptic perception and the ocular experience of light (creating shadow, which provides an experience of dimension and depth patterns).

When a sense of enough safety is engaged, and one can approach from a space of curiosity, the beauty in the mystery of not knowing what will happen/be created, and the union with one’s energetic or intuitive wisdom comes together, incredible healing and expansion of consciousness can take place while present in the body.

And it can all happen without any materials at all, simply the spaciousness of being. Accessing enough inner stillness for a moment to be with a clump of grass which has grown seed heads, noticing how the long blades of grass move in the breeze, how the sunlight and the grass co-create to produce dancing grass shadows on the ground, how the hairs of the seeds are not only one color as one thought from a distance, but actually iridescent, sparkling with rich variance and beauty in the light. How the breeze invites the yellow flowers of a Palo Verde tree to let go and gently drop like sprinkles of spring, carpeting the ground as if painted with yellow oxide. How a gorgeous insect was there all along but now one can see it because there is enough regulation and presence to notice it there, blending with the color of the plant.

I was fortunate enough to have had a strong knowing right away as a child that both art and nature helped me settle. Coloring, drawing, stitching and other crafts, along with being in the woods and with the textures, sights, and sounds of the organic landscape. And fortunately, it was encouraged. I didn’t ever consider the why. I didn’t care why. I just knew I felt better when I engaged in a creative process, which included the creativity inherent in nature. The simplicity of sitting by a pond and observing the world around me, the turtles and foxes, the birds and deer and fish and snakes and trees and mud. The aliveness of being. The entrainment with the natural rhythm. And the nervous system support of having surprising elements (like a gorgeous approaching deer) that allowed me to know that all surprises were not dangerous when my highly sensitive nervous system had formed with a consistent undercurrent of threat detection.

I continued soaking up art and crafts as much as was available in the tiny farm town I grew up in. I took craft and drawing classes through 4-H, and I attended every art class available in school. I’m incredibly grateful art classes were an option for me. I can’t imagine a childhood without that resource, without that space of freedom to be inward and to approach life from a different perspective. Of course, not all was ideal. Most classes offered technique and comparison to representational art as the bar for success. In other words, judgement. But it mattered not. There was a space, there was access to materials whereby I could engage with my state of being in the ways something in me yearned to return to. There was an allowance for being different (however temporary and contextual), for being the kind of quiet observer that in other spaces made people very uncomfortable. There was a connection and a brilliant coming together of disparate parts that wasn’t just the me I already thought I knew. It was me and also something intangible.

In junior high, before the internet, before abundant information and imagery was accessible, my crafts instructor, who had a soft spot in her heart for me, asked me to stay after class one day. When the rest of the class left, she shared how she traveled to Chicago to see a Georgia O’Keefe exhibit. I had never heard of the artist. My instructor shared how moving the paintings were for her, and how they reminded her of me. She gave me an Art Institute bag that had a painting of a bone on one side and a flower on the other. I cried. She saw me. She got me. She held space for that sensitive part of me to be cherished and encouraged. The me who collected bones in the woods, built a home for them around my favorite tree, and arranged them with other collections in new ways. The me who could stare at the curves, shadows, and textures of a bone or a rock or a flower for an hour and come home to myself by doing so. The me who knew the bone and the animal and the energy of history and its connection with me and my bones. The me who liked to take things apart then stitch them back together in new patterns. The me who felt the beauty in all of it. I always had a thing with bones, and indeed all the inner structures of the body mirroring the shapes in the outer natural environment. I felt the connection. I kept the bag Ms. B gave me for so many years, well into adulthood—a symbol of inspiration, of acceptance, of being seen, and of the creative brilliance in strong sensitivity. Thereafter, she was my favorite. She had deep love, sensitivity, creativity, and strength. She was the first woman I knew who asked to be called Ms. instead of Mrs., which was a big deal in our little midwestern town. And then Georgia O’Keefe was a favorite. Not only because of her art, but because of her strength in being. She did not play to the performance expected of her as a woman. Even at a time when it was even harder for women, she seemed to know and trust and remain true to herself. The images I later saw of her, photographed by her famous husband, were piercing, direct, strong in body and spirit.

After my first year of college, I dropped out. It was too much on all levels. I was the first in my family to attend, I had no idea what to expect, I wasn’t prepared for all the socialization and nonsense in the dorm, and my sensitive way of being found the schedule, the relationships, the landscape—everything—quite hard to acclimate to. I was miserable. Even the pottery class wasn’t enough to lift me from depression. I left and followed a different path, still creative, for a long while. I worked in merchandizing and display, then went to a community college to study pattern making and design for fashion, working as a fashion designer in Chicago for a while. I designed with a dear friend who had a line of organic, naturally dyed clothes. The business failed. We were ahead of our time.

When I was 30, I returned to university. I was ready to explore my inner self in within that structure. In fact, I knew the structure was necessary in order to bring forth that which was waiting to emerge. I’d tried on my own. Many “gifts” were there, but I couldn’t reach the part of me I knew was calling, was waiting, was begging to be with me consciously. Had I not felt that, I would not have returned. There are many ways of learning. And even with scholarships, I left with huge debt. Yet I don’t regret it. It’s what I needed to feel safe enough to begin touching that which was wanting expression. It was the contained structure I needed. And I had the maturity to use the rules and then break through them as appropriate.

There’s are many memories from that time. But the most pleasurable ones were when I was with people but not forced to engage while also in an inner process of my own. This can be the beauty of a shared studio. I would stand for however long I wanted simply putting paint on the glass easel, using a putty knife to mix in more oil for the consistency and shine that felt delicious, noticing the way the paint felt and looked as I moved the putty knife through it. Everyone else was putting tiny dots of paint on their easels, using little brushes for fine lines, creating thin layers. I had massive tubes of inexpensive oil paint in order to be able to create a huge pile of paint to feel into. I used the putty knife to apply thick swaths of texture, becoming one with the paint.

It was similar in the fiber arts classes. The richness of experience came from the color and texture of fiber, from the tactile qualities and the ways things could be shaped and brought together in new ways. I spent so much time feeling. And it was new. It was a way to engage with sensation, with emotion, with humans that was safe. It was just about paint and yarn and the magic of an image appearing on paper in the photography studio chemical bath. It was all magic.

Unbeknownst to my conscious mind at the time, I was creating art that was showing me the diseases I would later be diagnosed with. I was expressing the distortions and the hope. My inner wisdom spaces and psychic nature were painting the cells, neurons, sculpting the bones, and also showing me how all is connected, inner and outer.

What is interesting in hindsight is that it is this creative inner knowing, the creative and curious spirit, that has been shut off for many because of societal conditioning and defunding/purposeful redirection of energy to “intellectual” cognitive/memorization knowing. It is the way of the artist to be able to naturally form new understandings, new ways of bringing things together, new models for creation.

Thankfully, the nervous system, how trauma impacts our ability to be well, measures of wellness, energy healing, sound healing, therapeutic touch, and creativity have been researched more. Now there is more understanding of how the arts—and the artist’s way of being, the creative impulse, one’s own energetic essence—can support regulation and healing from physical and emotional trauma, as well as from chronic stressors of everyday living.  

I worked as a professional artist for many years, which came with its own set of problems and constraints. Yet I was grateful to have the space to create. To consciously enter into the rhythmic dance of creation. To get to know the requirements for creative living. And when I could no longer live as a full-time artist due to circumstances beyond my control, there was initially a deep grief. A railing against the way the world works. A fiery anger at the injustice of the systems we live and work within. Then I had the realization that I am an artist in every moment, whether or not I’m creating something physical. It’s a way of being one doesn’t lose. It's a way of observing and experiencing that can’t be taken away. It’s a wonderous way of being in awe and of tuning to and trusting creative impulse that can’t be manufactured.

And now, as a supportive service provider (quantum energy healer, somatic experiencing practitioner, life coach, sound healer, somatic arts practitioner, and artist), I find that all of these things are not ever separate. They are interwoven. They must be. Ways of art and creativity that are healing, calming, integrating, and that support a reconnection and understanding within, are calling to be shared more.

I’m in the process of developing a more structured way of sharing all I’ve come to understand and relish. I’ve learned that we need spaciousness and stillness, and we also need a bit of structure and places to begin and enter from. Ways to keep it all manageable. This writing is an expression of part of that desire. To bring into a more tangible learning that which is partly mysterious, mostly intangible, and sometimes fear inducing for folks due to prior conditioning, comparison, or shaming experiences involving art with expectation.

Because of many years of trainings and also my personal healing process, I now know ways to enter, approach, and engage which support a sense of safety in the process. I’m so excited to share more offerings with the creative process as an entry point to the center. And to bring it all together somatically, grounded, and alive in our beautiful bones while also connected with our energetic spirit. I’m in love with the ways art can help us to know ourselves, can help us heal, can help us connect, can help us to have the courage to be our authentic nature.

Georgia O’Keefe once shared how she would set up all of her art and have a show for herself first, prior to exhibiting publicly, in order to observe and come to her own conclusions and feelings about the art she had created. That way, when she was either praised or condemned and criticized, she was not impacted. Because she had a strong sense of her own knowing within first. She lived alone in New Mexico and painted, deepening that knowing of herself.

This is ideal in all spaces of living. When we know ourselves, when we know our process, our heart intention, our place inside, we are free to be authentic without impact. There is a natural desire to belong. And there is also a natural desire to be true to oneself. When one knows what it is like to be with themselves in co-creation with life, one has an opportunity to be really true with themselves, while getting to know and nourish their nervous system at the same time. And you don’t have to live alone in the desert or exhibit art to have this experience.

Georgia has also been credited with stating “Whether you succeed or not is irrelevant, there is no such thing. Making your unknown known is the important thing.”

I now humbly and joyfully invite you to join me in a 3 day soulful somatics collage offering. This will be online in my Zoom space. More details can be found here.