Creative Healing: How to Heal Yourself by Tapping Your Hidden Creativity

by Michael Samuels MD, Mary Rockwood Lane RN, PhD

Overview

All across the country, a groundbreaking movement is forming in the field of health care: art and medicine are becoming one, with remarkable results. In major medical centers such as the University of Florida, Duke, University of California, and Harvard Medical School, patients confronting life-threatening illness and depression are using art, writing, music, and Dance to heal body and soul. -A woman with breast cancer who has never made art before finds healing and empowerment by creating sculpture. -A man with AIDS uses journaling to overcome feelings of despair and helplessness. -A woman suffering from depression following her divorce learns to dance for the first time in her life--and in he body's movement she rediscovers a sense of play and joy. -A musician gives meaning to his art by helping people with illness transform their life through music. -Physicians and nurses are beginning to use creativity to complement and enhance their medical practice. Creative Healing presents readers with the inspiring ways in which the arts (painting, writing, music, and dance) can free the spirit to heal. In one volume, the authors detail the transformative power of a diverse range of artistic activity. Michael Samuels, MD, has over twenty-five years of experience working with cancer patients and is the best-selling author of Seeing with the Mind's Eye and The Well Baby Book. He teams up with fellow pioneer Mary Rockwood Lane, RN, PhD, to share their extraordinary findings on the healing powers of the arts. Through guided imagery, personal stories, and practical exercises, they teach you how to find your "inner artist-healer," enabling you to improve your health, attitude, and sense of well being by immersing yourself in creative activity. Both Samuels and Lane offer invaluable insight through their personal journeys and extensive groundbreaking research, noting that "prayer, art, and healing come from the same source--the human soul." Because there lies an artist and healer within each of us, Creative Healing is an invaluable resource for anyone wishing to discover the beauty of music, dance, writing or art and connect with a deeper part of oneself. Filled with inspiration and guidance, it will help you make changes in your life and the lives of others and gain access to the sacred place where inner peace exists.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781725229327
Publisher:	Wipf & Stock Publishers
Publication date:	02/01/2011
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	304
File size:	53 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Michael Samuels, MD, has used art and guided imagery with cancer patients for over twenty-five years. He is the founder and director of Art as a Healing Force, a project devoted to incorporating art with healing. He teaches art and healing at San Francisco State University and John F. Kennedy University. The author of fourteen books, he gained national acclaim with his best-selling Well Body Book, Well Baby Book, Well Pregnancy Book, and Seeing with the Mind's Eye.

Mary Rockwood Lane, RN, PhD, is the co-founder and director emeritus of the Arts in Medicine program at the University of Florida, Gainesville. She is now Associate Professor of Nursing at the College of Nursing, University of Florida, where she teaches Creativity and Spirituality in Healthcare. Her books (with Samuels) include Shaman Wisdom, Shaman Healing and Spirit-Body Healing.

Read an Excerpt

Chapter One

How Healers Use Art, Writing, Dance, and Music

Physicians and nurses are discovering that art, music, dance, and poetry have profound healing effects on their patients. Hospitals all over the world are incorporating music and art into patient care. The most sophisticated university medical centers are now creating "art in medicine" programs that invite artists and musicians to work with patients and literally change the hospital environment. These programs bring artists and musicians into the patients' rooms to make art, or have the artists perform in lobbies or atrium spaces. The patients experience the exhilaration of music or the beauty of an exhibition. They paint, play music, and dance with the artists. Art and music crack the sterile space of fear that surrounds the patients. Art opens the hospital to the joys of the human spirit. The spirit freed helps the body heal. Replacing fear with hope and darkness with light is the essence of modern body-mind-spirit medicine.

There are hundreds of art programs—both large scale and small scale—in nursing homes, hospices, community hospitals, and university medical centers. There are recreational therapy programs in drug treatment centers that use art, child life programs that use art, and community programs that use art. These invaluable grassroots programs are transforming medicine all over the world. Our intention is to illuminate these programs so that they can be recognized as the jewels they are. It is our hope that they will be integrated as part of the primary health-care model, and not segregated to the side as recreation or entertainment

We also want to acknowledge thecaregivers who use art or music as part of their practice. If a nurse or other caregiver sings to a patient as part of a bath, we want the singing to be seen as just as important as the bathing, as a primary part of health care. We invite all the people associated with such programs to see themselves as critical to health care and to take seriously the making of art in a health-care setting. The artist brings spirit and hope to their hospital environment.

The New Field of Art and Healing

Art and healing is quickly becoming a new field in the world of healing and the world of making art. Art and healing has brought the creative arts, including painting, sculpture, music, dance, storytelling, and poetry, into clinical health-care settings. In art and healing, the creative arts are used for their own healing power rather than for interpretation or therapy. This new innovative approach is being integrated into the patient's health care in many settings, including bone marrow transplant units, adolescent diabetes units, adult oncology units, and outpatient cancer units. By opening the scientific paradigm of the medical center worldview, art and healing will revolutionize preconceived conventions of health care. It is a return to the illumination of beauty inherent in our humanness. Healing art is the new alternative medical therapy. It will become the next movement in holistic medicine, and each person who is ill can practice it themselves now with this book.

What has caused the growth of art and healing worldwide? Healing art is being born as we speak. The concept is catching fire, is awakening in people's spirits. The idea is being born anew. It is being born in two worlds simultaneously. In the world of art, artists, musicians, and dancers are realizing that their imagery has meaning. They are understanding that their imagery heals them, others, their neighborhood, or the earth. It is coming as a flash, an awakening. When artists make a healing image they feel such energy around them that they cannot help making more. Their lives are changed, their world is changed. The second vision comes from the world of the healer. Art in the hospital, or art at the bedside with a person who is ill, is an electrifying experience. It becomes the doorway for the spirit. It becomes the vehicle for the opening of the heart. It is integral to healing.

How does this rebirth of art and healing manifest itself in the outer world? First, now there are artists, musicians, and dancers making healing art purposely. A large body of work of this type of art is accumulating. This art heals by freeing the artists' own healing energy and resonating their body, mind, and spirit. Next, the artist can make a piece of art to heal another person. The artist can do it for specifically one person or for a group of people. This is transpersonal healing. It connects one to another; it is an art of interconnection. The third type of art heals the world. The artist makes a piece that works with the energy of a whole system, whether it be a neighborhood, an ecosystem, or the planet itself. This art can be ceremonial, environmental, performance, or static. It involves the community. It involves energy and movement. It is truly shamanic; it balances the world.

When patients make art to heal, with or without a guide, or when patients use art in their healing, we have the second broad category of healing art. Art at the bedside, art workshops for patients, art therapy, art exhibitions at hospitals, and environments in healing centers all represent this type. Again the way this art heals is the same. It does not matter whether healing art is made by an artist or a patient. It heals by making it and freeing the patient's own energy, viewing it and letting the energy be freed or participating in a ritual where the energy is freed.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction - Art as a Passionate Way of Healing 1

Part 1 What is the New Field of Art and Healing?

1 How Healers Use Art, Writing, Dance, and Music 11

2 How Art and Healing Are One 38

3 Story Time: The History of Art and Healing 59

4 How Art Heals: The Physiology of Art and Healing 77

Part 2 How You Can Use Art, Writing, Dance, and Music to Heal Yourself

5 You Are Already an Artist 103

6 Healing Yourself with the Visual Arts: Painting, Sculpture, Photography, and Crafts 127

7 Healing Yourself with the Word: Writing, Poetry, Storytelling, and Theater 168

8 Healing Yourself with Movement: Dance as Healing 192

9 Healing Yourself with Sound: Music as Healing 216

Part 3 How Professional Artists Are Using Art to Heal

10 The Wellspring: How to Become Healing Artist, an Artist Healer 241

11 How Professional Artists Use Art to Heal Themselves, Others, and the Earth 248

Conclusion: Transforming the Future: Become a Healing Artist 273

Bibliography 283

About the Authors 291

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"Dr. Mike Samuels is one of the leading pioneers in exploring creativity as an important part of every person's healing journey."
—Dr. Dean Ornish

Editorial Reviews

"Dr. Mike Samuels is one of the leading pioneers in exploring creativity as an important part of every person's healing journey."
—Dr. Dean Ornish

From the Publisher