Creative Health: Art Courses and Art therapy

Art and music affect every cell in the body instantly to create a healing physiology that changes the immune system and blood flow to all th painting

e organs. Art and music also immediately change a person’s perception of their world. They change attitude, emotional state, and pain perception. They create hope and positivity and they help people cope with difficulties.

Art, prayer and healing all take us into our inner world, the world of imagery and emotion, of visions and feelings. This journey inward which used to be called the spirit or soul and is now called the mind, is deeply healing. For healing comes to us from within, our own healing resources are freed to allow our immune system to operate optimally and that is always how we heal. This is the contemporary version of freeing our healing energies and is now recognised to be crucial to healing.

The essential process of healing ourselves with art, music or dance involves our own personal change. When we are ill with a physical or mental problem or when we need to grow, we start to heal ourselves with art by opening ourselves up to our inner voices of change. We allow ourselves to listen to those voices and to let their messages to us emerge.

The first step is to see ourselves as artists and then choosing a medium. We may have danced, played music or painted pictures before, or we saw ourselves as making art in our daydreams.

Am I painter, a sculptor, a musician, a poet, a storyteller, a dancer? Have I ever wanted to create something and been afraid or too busy to painting

do it? Clearing a space as a studio or place to practice is next. Getting materials together, orienting ourselves to this new world, looking at art, listening to music, being with friends who are artists, puts us in the space to create.

The most important step is to make the first movement from a place of no judgement, of trust, of love. And we let the process happen by itself. As the lines increase, a piece of art emerges and we see who we are. The art becomes a sign of our healing, a visible or audible representation of our own transformation and healing.

As we see the art appear outside of us, it looks almost like it has been made by someone else. Its beauty and wonder are almost beyond us and its message more than we could have known. Yet we see it and are witness to its message of growth, change, and transformation.

The healing power of art and music has been known throughout history. In ancient time any art form was a sacred ritual and it was part of the culture’s medicine.

In a very real way the first artist and the first healer were one figure in society. This figure became a specialist in going inward to the place of creativity and healing. All tribal peoples believed that there was a healing spirit that could be freed from within a person by going into the space of music or art and fully participating in the experience.

Christian and Buddhist art also works on the principle that meditating on images or listening to certain sounds puts a person in a sacred state and heals. Furthermore in traditional cultures it was believed that art healed the world, not just the individual. It was believed that art and music changed the hunt, fertility, the crops, the weather, the life of the tribe, and the earth. Today many healing artists also believe that their art helps heal the earth. They are making environmental or eco-art to heal neighbourhoods, rivers or to create world peace.

(Extract from an article by M. Samuels M.D.
“Art as a Healing Force”)