Arts Of Healing

Heal yourself and your community with this proven 12-week program that uses the arts to awaken your innate healing abilities. From musicians in hospitals to quilts on the National Mall—art is already healing people all over the world. It is helping veterans recover, improving the quality of life for cancer patients, and bringing communities together to improve their neighborhoods. Now it’s your turn. Through art projects, including visual arts, dance, writing, and music, along with spiritual practices and guided imagery, Healing with the Arts gives you the tools to address what you need to heal in your life—physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual. An acclaimed twelve-week program lauded by hospitals and caretakers from around the world, Healing with the Arts gives you the ability to heal your family and your friends, as well as communities where you’ve always wanted to make a difference. Internationally known leaders in the arts in medicine movement, Michael Samuels, MD, and Mary Rockwood Lane, RN, PhD, show you how to use creativity and self-expression to pave the artist’s path to healing.

A renowned diagnostician shares stories of his patients and explores the importance of the human factor in medicine. In The Art of Medicine, Toronto Western Hospital’s internist Dr. Herbert Ho Ping Kong draws on his vast dossier of personal cases and five decades as a clinician to examine the core principles of a patient-centered approach to diagnosis and treatment. While HPK, as he is fondly known, recognizes and applauds the many invaluable innovations in medical technology, he makes the point that as disease and its management grow increasingly complex, physicians must learn to develop an arsenal of more basic skills, actively using the arts of seeing, hearing, palpation, empathy, and advocacy to provide a more humane and holistic form of care. Aimed at medical practitioners, aspiring doctors, or anyone interested in health and medicine, this book also contains interviews with more than a dozen of HPK’s patients, as well as short essays that explore the thinking of his professional colleagues on the art of medicine.

Ferrara, who is accepted as a healer in Cree communities, shows how art therapy became a ritual for her patients, noting that Crees often associate art therapy and their experience in the bush and arguing that both constitute a place for them to re-affirm their notions of self. By including patient drawings and letting us hear Cree voices, "Healing through Art" gives us a sense of the reality of everyday Cree experience. This innovative book transcends disciplinary boundaries and makes a significant contribution to anthropology, Native Studies, and clinical psychology.

As well as providing an authoritative history of art therapy, it covers such diverse topics as the philosophy of art therapy, the way attitudes to insanity have changed, the role of art therapy in the context of post-war rehabilitation and the treatment of tuberculosis patients, Surrealism, and Britain's first therapeutic community.

Achaan Chah spent many years walking and meditating in the forest monastery of Wat Ba Pong, engaging in the uncomplicated and disciplined Buddhist practice called dhudanga. A Still Forest Pool reflects the quiet, intensive, and joyous practice of the forest monks of Thailand. Achaan Chah’s humble words, compiled by two Westerners who are former ordained monks, awaken the spirit of inquiry, wonderment, understanding, and deep inner peace. Attachment, according to Achaan Chah, causes all suffering. Understanding the impermanent, insecure, and selfless nature of life is the message he offers for human happiness and realization. To vividly grasp the meaning of attachment leads us to a new place of practice – the path of balance, the Middle Path.

In 1979, Dr. Bernie S. Siegel, a successful surgeon, took a class from Elisabeth Kübler-Ross that focused on crayon drawing for healing, especially with patients facing life-threatening disease. Siegel incorporated into his practice these techniques — many of which were laughed at by others in the medical community. But his Exceptional Cancer Patients “carefrontation” protocol facilitated healings, often deemed miraculous, and attracted attention. “Dr. Bernie” discovered and shared the fact that while patients might need antibiotics, surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy, their bodies also want to heal. He found that this innate propensity could be aided by unconventional practices, including drawing. Why? Drawing produces symbols often representing the subconscious. Siegel shows how to interpret drawings to help with everything from understanding why we are sick to making treatment decisions and communicating with loved ones. All those facing ill health, and those caring for them, personally and professionally, will welcome the hands-on, patient-proven practices offered here.

Today’s world urges us to look outward for life’s meaning and purpose—but our inner lives are the true source of the deeper knowing that gives life meaning. In Finding the Wild Inside, Marilyn Hagar encourages readers to discover that creative place inside us that knows there is more to life than we are currently living—the less rational part of ourselves that she calls our “wild inside,” a place most of us have not been taught to navigate. Using stories from her own life—from infancy through caring for her elderly parents as an adult—Hagar shows us how, through playing in the arts, contemplating our nightly dreams, fostering our intuition, and reconnecting to Mother Nature, we can discover our own authentic wild self. Opening to this part of ourselves, she teaches, isn’t so much a search as it is a listening, a curiosity, a playfulness, and a learning how to think symbolically, all of which can be cultivated. Most of all, it takes a willingness to lay down our egos and open ourselves to the awe and wonder of the wild universe of which we are a part. Instructive and inspiring, Finding the Wild Inside is a blueprint to living life from the inside out—and, in doing so, walking a path of authenticity and belonging.

Art for Healing: Painting Your Heart Out is a book about the beginnings of an organization called "Art & Creativity for Healing" which was founded by Laurie Zagon in 2001, and the powerful impact that its programs have had on children and adults suffering from abuse, illness, grief and stress. Art & Creativity for Healing was founded with a vision that the creative process and emotional healing often intersect when words are not adequate, and pain is too deep. The organization's programs are designed to work in conjunction with other therapeutic models including traditional talk therapy augmenting the benefits of these modalities with a unique creative approach. Specifically, the "Art for Healing' methods allow participants to learn a new way of communicating through color that encourages emotional breakthroughs and further enhances the therapy process. Unlike other art programs that employ a loose format of free expression, the "Art for Healing" curriculum contains strictly guided exercises designed to elicit emotional responses.