Healing Journey
The images on this page are
of artwork I created, starting in 2006.
Most were created when I was a protegee in a mentorship
program sponsored by the Women’s Art Resources of Minnesota (WARM). I intuitively entered that program in
2008 after experiencing profound healing while creating my Talking Suitcase at a grief workshop following my mother’s death.
During the two years of the mentorship program, I was concurrently enrolled in
an experientially-based holistic health coaching program at the Center for
Spirituality & Healing at the University of Minnesota.
Talking Suitcase
As a psychiatric nurse I was no stranger to
talk therapy, but the healing power of imagery was new to me. I was at a point
in my life where I was ready to dig more deeply into healing from early
childhood trauma and I sensed that the art experience would augment the
personal transformative work required in the coaching program. That is exactly what happened, but to a
degree that exceeded my wildest imagination and changed my life.
Although I have no formal art education, I am
a lifelong knitting addict and lover of all things fiber. As I started the
mentorship program, I was obsessed with wet-felting and its rich metaphors related
to healing. I created Going Deeper, a
seven-foot rug, only realizing after
the fact that I was grounding myself through the work. It took two days and a
team of ten friends to actually get the rug felted — a valuable lesson in the
importance of seeking help and building community.
At that time, I was regularly listening to
guided imagery as part of my deep healing work. Riding the Waves emerged out of that guided imagery, as did The Bandaged Place, a six-foot mobile of
fiber-covered chicken wire hearts.
Garden Within followed — an
abstract representation of the safe place I imagined while listening to my
guided imagery scripts.
Garden Within
I began Breaking
Open to Joy — a piece that took over two years to complete — immediately after returning from a week-long Knitting and
Meditation Retreat. After intuitively tearing in half the felted piece I had
created as the foundation, I re-joined the pieces by knitting them back
together. Much as had been the case with Going
Deeper, I only saw after the fact how the work reflected the major life
transitions I had moved through during that period, as I stitched the pieces of
my life back together after divorce.
My current work-in-progress, Rewriting the Stories, already has a name despite being unfinished. I am tearing up the pages of 25+ years of my journals, making them into paper, and binding the paper into blank books. On the freshly created pages of those journals, I will write new life stories.
Through this work, I learned much about my
own creative process. In response
to an image that spontaneously comes to me — sometimes while meditating, I
intuitively create something tangible, process its meaning through writing, and
experience the healing by sharing it with others, both verbally and visually. I
also learned that creativity and expressive arts open doors to healing that I might
never pass through if I seek therapies that only engage my left-brain.
During this period, I also explored many other healing modalities, including bodywork and energy work. The experiences confirmed my belief that health and well-being are about resiliency, balance and the integration of mind, body, and spirit. The combination of the arts with the integrative therapies was a profoundly powerful healing experience for me — one that changed the way I serve others through my work in the world. I bring my heart and mind to the art of my practice. I partner with clients to help them identify and realize their goals, and to see themselves as whole and empowered. And I am dedicated to promoting wellness and resiliency, believe passionately in the power of art to heal, and weave those values throughout all that I do.