Healing With The Arts

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This fascinating collection of essays contains a variety of perspectives about the use of expressive arts for facilitating physical and emotional healing. Each author within brings a fresh approach and unique experiences to their writing. Within these pages, you will find many ideas for the use of the arts and can learn how to engage the inner layers of the self that allow natural healing processes of the body and soul to flourish. When we fully engage an art modality, we find ourselves in a place in our consciousness that could be called 'healingspace,' where we feel ourselves whole and re-member ourselves as well. From psychic trauma to physical illness, dis-ease of many kinds may be addressed through the various techniques discussed here. The tools offered by some authors are population specific and age appropriate, while several authors have given us the philosophical underpinnings for it all. While the authors within represent the grassroots voices of this new and rapidly expanding field, several of them have developed their own methods for using the arts, and have thriving practices. Our approach is wholistic. Music, visual arts, movement, dance, and poetry are discussed as separate modalities and in combination with one another in a process or flow. The reader will engage in our experiences with these modalities as they have been lived. The complementary CD that accompanies this book will allows the listener to have a full sound experience of toning. If a rationale is needed for establishing arts programs in medical centers or other health facilities, it can be found here. The book offers tools for self development and for group facilitation. Those wanting to expand their healing practice through the use of the arts will find the book to be a faithful guide. Anyone wishing for a fuller understanding of how the arts may work to facilitate healing will find much food for thought within these pages.

Robert Flatt always held the belief that life is good. When he was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease, he refused to let the news alter his fundamental perspective. Robert viewed this unexpected hurdle as an opportunity: the debilitating disease granted him the gift of time to pursue his artistic interests. Through photography, he discovered the beauty in his own backyard and the immense healing power of art. Taking vivid photographs of the wonders he had previously overlooked helped him cope, and he realized the power of the beauty he observed could help others, too. Despite his physical limitations, he began traveling the world to pursue this passion that made him feel so intensely alive. Robert's irrepressible good nature, patience, and undeniable talent have resulted in this collection of images both intimate and grand that showcase the wonders that surround each of us, if we take the time to look and have the right perspective to see. Coupled with Robert's candid, empowering reflections on existence and his illness, the vision of the world revealed in Healing Art urges readers to live in the present, relax, and remember that life is good. Despite the nature of our burdens, if we can focus on an image of beauty today, we have not let our challenges define us. And for another day, we have been fully alive and open to the presence of joy. Could we really ask for more?