I can just hear you; everyone knows about feelings, what more is there to know? Well, did you know that feelings help us to construct our life’s ‘road map’. Emotions also help guide us, help in decision-making, and they drive our actions, and reactions, in the world around us. Feelings do more than most of us realize!
But sometimes we push those feelings down (for one reason or another), and sometimes we even disown them. Maybe it’s not safe to show certain emotions or societal pressure might keep our feelings stuffed down. Just think of how our culture often judgmentally deals with emotions; “it’s okay for men to show anger, but not women!”, “Big boys don’t cry”, “You’re just a ‘fraidy-cat!”. When we conceal our feelings from others (suppression), we often go on to then numb ourselves in order not to feel those feelings anymore (repression). It might just be too painful to feel those feelings or it might be unsafe too express certain ones. 'Stuffing’ of these emotions is often a way of protecting ourselves.
When we are unable to express our emotions in a healthy way, they get ‘stuck’ in the body, and they don’t just go away. Those unexpressed emotions have a way of hanging around, knocking on our forehead until we acknowledge them. They can even come out physical sensations; aches and pains, low energy, chronic or acute illnesses. These physical reactions to suppressed emotions, not to mention the suppression of our personal truth, our authentic selves, are the high cost of unexpressed feelings.
Our feelings carry a profound inner wisdom; they are teachers of the highest kind. But the feelings can only be accessed if we free them from the prison we often sentence them to; left unfelt in our body. Expressive artmaking is a wonderful way to both discover and express feelings. To first accept what we are feeling, and then to embrace the truth of those feelings (the good, the bad and the ugly) is the goal. Through therapeutic artmaking, we flush these emotions from the body, out onto paper or into the sculpture or with a host of other mediums, and in doing so, we learn more about ourselves. Let the healing begin!
Who could benefit from the workshop? Everyone!
Note:artistic abilities are not required to participate in therapeutic artmaking!