FACILITATING HEALING STORY SANCTUARIES IN AWFUL TIMES

One of the most effective things we can do as healers, activists, teachers, and individuals who want to make a positive difference is to create sanctuaries for others to gain a fresh perspective on their life, and to find and share their own experience in these times of wild change. We are not afraid to responsibly express our own truth.

Please join me on Tuesday, October 29, at 8-9:30 pm eastern for a brief and easy introduction to facilitating healing story sanctuaries. It's free and online. Write to me at julietbrucephd@gmail.com for the link and to inquire about my availability to help you or your organization become creative facilitators.

Please note: my approach is arts-based and experiential rather than clinical or academic It is based on my 27 years work within the oral and literary traditions and is guided by the approaches of artist/therapist Shaun McNiff, author of "Art as Medicine: Creating a Therapy of the Imagination," mythologist Joseph Campbell, and Jungian analyst/storyteller Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estes.

Best wishes,

Juliet Bruce, PhD

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Tell the Visual Story of Your Deep Self: Make a Mandala

Mandala is a sanskrit word meaning "circle." But it's more than a shape. The mandala represents wholeness and is considered by most of the world's peoples to be the basic structure of life -- from our cells, to our world, to the cosmos itself. 

The mandala appears in every culture across all continents and epochs. Sometimes it's used to represent sacred space; at others the moment; increasingly, the mandala is being used to heal deep psychosocial wounds and to support peace within and without. The mandala at the left is the Avaloketeshvara mandala from the Tibetan Buddhist tradition. It represents and supports compassion and forgiveness.

If you google "Mandala images," you'll find hundreds of them, many linked to web sites that discuss their symbolic meaning and offer ideas for making your own mandala. 

When I'm actively engaged on a regular basis in drawing or collaging mandalas, and then writing what I see and feel from them, I'm more centered, focused, and forceful in my life. When I share this practice with my clients, they experience the same cohesiveness and personal power.

Jung and the Mandala

At the height of his career in 1913, the psychiatrist Carl Jung went through a severe emotional crisis, in which serious internal conflicts emerged in his life. He broke with Freud, renounced his position as the head of the Zurich Psychiatric Clinic, and went through a deeply introspective 3-year journey during which he separated himself from family and friends. Toward the end of this period, he began drawing mandalas, without knowing what this meant, without knowing that he was following a path cleared by others before him in both East and West.

               

It was through the mandala that he found the way to restore himself to wholeness. They became photographs of his daily internal state, and images of what he was in the process of becoming. He sketched in a little notebook every day a circle that seemed to correspond to his interior situation. “Enlightened by these images, I could see day by day the psychic transformations that were operating within me. It was only gradually that I discovered what a mandala really means: ‘Formation, Transformation, Eternal Mind’s eternal creation.’”

               

For the next 10 years, he drew circles, labyrinths, and dark and shining centers of all kinds, the unspooling of an internal process of centering and healing the breaks in his personality. He eventually formed his theory that the mandala represented the unity of the soul, an entity much larger than the ego, a Self or atman that was the source of life and guide for its development and total fulfillment of its destiny. 


Make Your Own Mandala

This is a fun and deeply revealing visual arts exercise to do both privately and in groups. The mandala at the right is found at http://www.arttherapyblog.com/art-therapy-ideas/healing-with-mandala-art-a-multi-cultural-idea-worth-exploring/#ixzz1zMnR5hN2.

Supplies for collage: scissors, white sketch pad paper, multi-colors of construction paper, glue sticks. 

For drawing: pastels or magic markers. Simple!

Time: 20-25 minutes.

Instructions: 

1. Leaf through the colored construction paper pages and cut whatever shape in whatever color that most appeals to be your background, representing the Ground of Self, a relationship, organization, creative project, whatever area you want to explore.  It can be a circle, rectangle, or free form.    

2. Think of the elements of story. You are the storyteller, artist, director, and witness:

• Places: geographical landscape and interiors; their emotional qualities, colors, shapes, and textures.
• Loved ones - like-minded fellows who expand you, amplify your strengths, support your quest.
• Difficult people, obstacles, and conflicts - within and without. To be authentic, your mandala must contain the Shadow.
• Your grail, dream, north star: whatever most symbolizes for you the life force. 

3. Cut whatever shapes or draw figures that want to emerge that represent each of these elements. Quickly, without thinking too much about it, place them in relationship that feels right to you and glue them to the Ground. Give yourself no more than 10 minutes for this. You want to bypass your rational mind.
4. Now look at your mandala from all perspectives. This is a self-portrait emerging from the depths of your unconscious.

What Story Does Your Mandala Tell? 

This artful mandala is found at http://fineartamerica.com/featured/celestial-mandala-maureen-a-girard.html.

1. What stands out in your mandala? A shape? The relationship of shapes? Colors? Overall impression? "First thought, best thought."

2. Without intellectualizing the process, quickly write down 5 words that come to you. Working fast releases the imagination, voice of intuition.

3. Which word has the most energy for you? Or which two elements seem to oppose each other or want to be in dialogue?

4. Make this the opening word and continue writing for 5 minutes, following the words wherever they lead. This allows your verbal intelligence to transmit the kinetic truth contained in your mandala.  

5. Read it aloud to yourself or to a supportive listener. What does the writing reveal in practical terms? Is there guidance here for what you need most in your life right now? 

Mandalas are everywhere. Look for them in your life today.

How Can We Help the Children? Giving Troubled Kids a Better Story

This re-post from years ago seems relevant these days. It may be especially so for teachers, counselors, and other community professionals who work with frightened and at-risk young people.

Last week-end an art therapist posted the following message on a creative arts listserv to which I belong:

I am running a group for 6 students in 3rd grade who have behavior problems and aggression. I found that for the first group, the rules were consistently broken, even when reinforced and warnings were given. I spent so much time on just trying to get the students to be quiet when someone else was talking, take turns, ask for materials rather than grab them from another student, sit in their chair, not name call, tease or swear, that there was little time to focus on the artwork. Any advice on things that will work for them?

This was my response:

I co-facilitated a social skills summer camp for special needs kids with many of the problems you described. They ranged in age from 6 to 12 and there were 10 of them.

What I did was to give them a better story than the one they were used to hearing about themselves -- a profoundly negative story that was imprinting itself more deeply every day on their sense of who they were and what life would be like for them. I completely changed the ballgame from a therapeutic or teaching environment into a Native American warrior rite. (Thus going with their aggressive impulses rather than trying to change them.)

To start with, I played non-percussive music -- mostly Carlos Nakai -- to create a relaxed and mysterious space totally outside of their ordinary lives. All the chairs were placed in a circle and they drew on the floor. I had each one draw fire (implicitly allowing safe expression of their anger and aggression through the metaphor of flames) and had them arrange their drawings together to create a campfire in the middle. I named my co-facilitator -- a social worker -- the Village Chief and myself the Medicine Chief. (Amazing how we both rose to those roles!)

I defined the kids as braves who were becoming adult warriors of the tribe. Their mission was to protect the people, not go to war because that wasn't necessary. All activities and social skills teachings were presented within this context of a brave band of warriors and their mentors. I told stories and myths about indigenous people and they responded with pictures and stories about themselves (some revealing through metaphor that they were experiencing violence, chaos, or trauma at home), and they learned the "warrior code" of behavior rather than "social skills" or "rules of conduct." There were no sticks, but there were plenty of colored rubber balls. To talk, you had to ask for and hold a "talking ball." Only it turned out not to be a ball; the kids decided that it was a sacred fossil containing the bones of a dinosaur that were the source of the power of the tribe and its warriors.

What happened with most of the children was that they were so spellbound by the imaginative world they found themselves in and who they were within that world that they forgot to be disruptive. Teaching took place "under the radar."

It wasn't perfect, of course, but we built in an exit point whereby kids who were disruptive could ask for or be "given" a time-out to go out into the hall with one of the co-facilitators to talk or just to sit quietly. No punishment, just calming retreat.

A year or so later, I used basically the same approach in a more subtle, sophisticated way with youths in a diversion from incarceration program and after that, with teens with HIV/AIDS who were living on the streets. Again, it imbued the groups and each member with a dignity and respect from adults and other kids that they rarely if ever had experienced, and they got to perform "up" to that new self-image rather than "down" to the low expectations most adults had for them.

All of us -- especially children and teens (and adults going through difficult times of loss and transition) -- hunger for dignity and self-expression within the structure of respectful community, as well as some kind of "roadmap" or pathway forward to a better sense of self and future. I've found the traditional rite of passage model and myths of all cultures immensely useful in creating these kinds of dynamic and nurturing environments.

by Juliet Bruce. All rights reserved.

Mandala and rhe Art of Visual Storytelling

The mandala -- a circle -- is the oldest expression of wholeness. Buddhist, Hindu. Jung. (His mandalas are on display in the magnificent exhibition now at NYC's Rubin Museum, extended until Feb.) This was how Jung healed himself from a nervous breakdown after his break-up with Freud, and became the basis of his psychology.

There is a whole, healthy, radiant Self inside us -- a reflection of God or life force energy -- that is larger than our ego, which is separate, and is connected with every living thing. Our internal healer. Our compass for our authentic path and role in life. Our unending source of supply.

When I was writing my dissertation -- normally not known as an experience of joyousness! -- my advisor (a visual artist) showed me how to use visual art to keep up my creative energy, use the creative unconscious to pull together ideas, and dissolve creative blocks. My dissertation did turn out to be a labor of love and joy, a living document on creative practice that I use to this day!

I continue to use the same process, almost as visual and story meditation.

Tools for Creative Practice: Finding and Expressing the Visual Story

This particular exercise combines the art of Mandala with the art of construction paper collage and the art of seeding story. It can be done alone or with a group. It uses the simplest of materials, making it effortless to do for yourself, with your clients, a child, a loved one -- a sketch pad with strong paper; a pack of construction paper, scissors, a glue stick, a writing pad and pen.