Art therapy
Art was one of the therapies I used to aid my healing. Art is a wonderful way to help express yourself, exploring your emotions is the catalyst for profound self discovery and one of the ways to encourage deep and transformative healing shifts.
I hadn't recognised that I was good with many things including art as it had been something I had been conditioned to hide in order to survive around my primary caregiver, and this conditioning continued for the most part into adulthood, until I found a way to unlock the fundamentals of that unhelpful primal inner landscape. In the midst of my artistic journey I found out that I had been good at art at school when I bumped into an old classmate at an exhibition...I have no recollection of this.
Art is also a way of just being in the moment, so it is a very good way of tapping into that mindfulness meditation state. I found colouring in mandalas good for this.
I started with sketching a few things for minutes at a time a couple of times a week, as that was all I could manage in the early days, and then went on to paint with water colours and gouache. This developed and I experimented with pastels, clay, textiles, crafts and calligraphy. I really just aligned the particular type of art or crafts to suit my capabilities at each stage of my illness. It gave me a lovely sense of achievement and improved my feelings of self worth and confidence, which can get knocked a lot when you are dealing with such a myriad of health problems. As the years went on I exhibited in quite a number of places and my own home ~ at my last yearly exhibition I sold 80 pieces of art and products. Below is a small slideshows of some of my art and crafts.
