Unlock the hidden language of your soul as we journey through the expressive world of art therapy—a sanctuary where your innermost thoughts find their canvas. This isn't about crafting masterpieces destined for the hallowed halls of galleries; it's about the pure, therapeutic delight in the act of creation itself. Whether you're scribbling with a simple pencil or weaving magic with vibrant paints, we unfold the historical benefits and the personal liberation that art can provide. From relieving stress and sharpening problem-solving skills to navigating life's complex emotions, art therapy offers a safe, controlled environment to explore and manage your experiences.
Embrace the joy of artistic expression without the fear of judgment or the weight of expectations. Our discourse guides you through trusting your intuition, knowing when to add that final stroke, or when to simply let your artwork be. Learn to cherish your creations without overthinking their meaning, focusing on the process over the product. Remember, art therapy is a personal journey, a dance between you and your medium of choice. It's a pleasurable pursuit that should resonate with your individuality. So, grab your tools, and let's set your creativity free in this soul-enriching episode dedicated to the art of self-expression.
PLEASE READ - Terms of Use: https://www.nextpixprods.com/terms-of-use.html
Note that Don Thompson is now available as a coach or mentor on an individual basis. To find out more, please go to his website www.nextpixprods.com, and use the 'contact' form to request additional information.
Unlock the hidden language of your soul as we journey through the expressive world of art therapy—a sanctuary where your innermost thoughts find their canvas. This isn't about crafting masterpieces destined for the hallowed halls of galleries; it's about the pure, therapeutic delight in the act of creation itself. Whether you're scribbling with a simple pencil or weaving magic with vibrant paints, we unfold the historical benefits and the personal liberation that art can provide. From relieving stress and sharpening problem-solving skills to navigating life's complex emotions, art therapy offers a safe, controlled environment to explore and manage your experiences.
Embrace the joy of artistic expression without the fear of judgment or the weight of expectations. Our discourse guides you through trusting your intuition, knowing when to add that final stroke, or when to simply let your artwork be. Learn to cherish your creations without overthinking their meaning, focusing on the process over the product. Remember, art therapy is a personal journey, a dance between you and your medium of choice. It's a pleasurable pursuit that should resonate with your individuality. So, grab your tools, and let's set your creativity free in this soul-enriching episode dedicated to the art of self-expression.
PLEASE READ - Terms of Use: https://www.nextpixprods.com/terms-of-use.html
Note that Don Thompson is now available as a coach or mentor on an individual basis. To find out more, please go to his website www.nextpixprods.com, and use the 'contact' form to request additional information.
Speaker 1:
Music.
Speaker 2:
Hi, welcome to today's podcast. Today is a very interesting topic. I'd like to focus a little bit on what you might call art therapy, or how to use art as a way to express yourself and enter into what you might call meditative state or state of relaxation, where our unconscious can really express itself, or our conscious can express itself, and I'm not implying here that this needs to be a really heavy duty emotional thing. You know, as we step through this process, it could be rather light-hearted, but you can tap into some unconscious images or reflections or emotions and bring them to the forefront and express them artistically, and this can be a real benefit. You know it's been historically found to be a benefit to people. This kind of art therapy, releasing emotions and thoughts through this really a creative force. It can relieve stress, it can encourage problem-solving, it can heighten our senses and also it can, however, bring up some, you might say, difficult memories, and we just need to be aware of that and work through it. But remember that it's a safe way to work through it. This is a safe method to work through any difficult emotions through art in a controlled way, and it's a way to really manage our life experiences and to express them in a way which will not be harmful to ourselves or to anybody else, and what we'll need to do is to select an art form. You know a method to express ourselves and I'll detail that in a little bit. But you want to choose a way to express yourself. Whatever you know way that you like, whatever way seems to be best for you. It can be as simple as a pen, a pencil and a piece of paper, but keep in mind that your primary intention should be for an exploration and experimentation. It is free from a sense of what it, in quotes, should look like.
Speaker 2:
So, you know, a lot of us have memories of school, maybe grade school, when we were encouraged to draw, perhaps, and we were encouraged to express ourselves. And we have an anxiety about that. And it's just, you know, looking for approval, you might say, from the teacher or from the parent or whoever, by putting our little drawing on the refrigerator door and seeing what they have to say. So it's important to remember that. You know, we don't want to judge ourselves. We want to just accept what it is that we express and that that expression is valuable, that expression is us and that it's good, it's okay, we're okay. And so you know we're not trying to do something that's going to wind up in an art museum. But you never know, I mean maybe it will. But you know we just have to accept the fact that most of us, including myself, this stuff is not going to end up in an art museum. It's going to be something that we use as a way to, you know, creatively express ourselves, and we want to follow our intuition really about how we proceed in this particular practice.
Speaker 2:
So we want to think about mindfully when it is that we want to add to whatever it is we're creating and when we want to stop. Knowing when to stop is really important and we also want to avoid really over analyzing the meaning of the work. It isn't really. You know, we don't need to be interpretive about it. We don't need to think about, well, what does this dream mean per se? Just expressing it. An image you might have seen in a dream, for example. Just express it. You don't have to figure it out, you don't have to do some kind of psychoanalysis on it. Just expressing it is okay. And that's what we really want to do here. We want to bring it to the forefront, we want to express it. And if you do want to get that kind of analytical insight, well, you can always go to a psychotherapist and they can talk you through it. But for this exercise, what we want to do really is simply express ourselves and you know to do something that you like to make it pleasurable, to make it enjoyable. Hopefully, you know that's what we want to do and again, you want to.
Speaker 2:
You know you want to choose what type of art to use, what type of method to use to express yourself. It can be painting. It can be, again, a piece of paper and a pencil. It can be, you know, anything that's as simple as that to something that's as complex as putting a paint on a canvas and having a palette and buying paints. That can be. You know one way to do it too. I mean, you know, if you're a painter, you can do it that way.
Speaker 2:
If you're a very tech or person, you might want to use clay. You might want to get together something to sculpt. Or if you're, you know, inclined to do collage, you can do a scrapbooking or collage type of technique. That also works and many of us have done that in the past and it can be a lot of fun.
Speaker 2:
What you want to do is you can use, you know, materials like magazines or you know just colored paper or whatever you want to do to make your personal creation. And you do want to think about colors. You want to think about what colors you know make you think about yourself and your life, which colors reflect your moods and your emotions, drawn out line of a body, and that body could be yourself, for example, and you could just do a collage of different colors or colored pencils that express how you feel about that body, about whatever emotions or feelings are coming up, and just do it in a very intuitive way, a very free form way. You can think about shapes and objects. Does a certain image you know stick in your head? For example, do you feel a broken circle of trust and perhaps you want to express that as a broken circle?
Speaker 2:
you know, or it might be the light of a candle in the dark. Do you find that inspiring? Well, you can draw the light of a candle. I'm not trying to tell you to do this, I'm just giving you some examples here. You can use these kinds of images, these kinds of images, to express your feelings through your art, and they can be as abstract as you want them to be or as concrete as you want them to be. You know it's really up to you. So oftentimes we can use symbols from our dreams that could be a really, really rich palette to work from. You know you might remember your dream. You saw some image and you can just put that image into your art. You can just sketch it out in some fashion or paint it out in some fashion or collage it out in some fashion. You can do a random scribble and you can just scribble for a few seconds to see what kinds of images come up to you. You know you don't have to pre-think it, you can just let it happen, make it very free, for Just a little bit of history about this.
Speaker 2:
Art has been around human history for many, many, many millennia. I think quite back perhaps tens of thousands of years, the first expressions of human beings were cave paintings, when you think about it. So these cave paintings were expressing what the people were feeling and thinking and their experiences in life. So this kind of expression predates, in a way, language, or certainly writing, not necessarily language, but certainly writing, and it really is a precursor, you might say, to writing. I'm not a scholar on that, but I'll just venture that as a guest, these kinds of artistic expressions were the precursor to writing, you know, on these cave paintings, and this eventually evolved into the artistic expressions that we see in a very sophisticated way in modern society. But what we're trying to evoke is to go back to these primal motivations of cave paintings. Really, in a way, we want to use these methods as a way to express our subconscious, to express our conscious, perhaps, to express our feelings, what we think about things, you know, what we think about our experiences, what we feel about our experiences, and to express them and to let them really, you know, come to the fore through this kind of creative artistic expression. It's a very valuable thing, it's a very important thing to let these kinds of emotions come out, to express them.
Speaker 2:
I love art. I mean, I've always used art as a way to express myself, to evoke feelings, to bring feelings into the fore and, to you know, communicate to people. To communicate to people these feelings that I have, these thoughts that I have, these ideas that I have related to humanity. But you know, we're not necessarily talking about anything that's sophisticated here, but it can develop in that direction. I just don't want to limit you, of course. So we want to be careful not to lapse into thinking that we're going to be doing something that's a divincy or a Picasso. You know, it's okay, we're just doing something that's very simple here, or again it can evolve into something more complex. I don't want to limit anybody if you have that kind of skill, if you want to develop that kind of skill and I don't think necessarily that it's inherently necessary to have some kind of enhanced artistic creative powers, necessarily but you can have a very simple way to express yourself that can be really appreciated by people, and you can think to artists that have expressed themselves in a very simple way and people have found that expression to be valuable, but regardless, it's valuable to yourself in this kind of approach that we're taking here, which is along the lines of art therapy.
Speaker 2:
But art therapy itself is a profession. It's a profession that can involve certification. It can involve very educated defut psychotherapists. They will use art therapy to treat patients, and that's not what we're talking about here. This is just a first step. If you're really interested in that, you can look into it and you can actually get a degree in it if you'd like. I mean, if this is something that appeals to you and something that you like, you might want to take it a step further. You can really use it as a service or a career even, and so you can consult with your local college or university and talk to them about these kinds of career paths if you find them interesting. Art is a very wonderful thing. It's a creative pathway to expression for many many different reasons.
Speaker 2:
Art therapy is one of them, but also to express yourself to humanity at large is, of course, another reason behind art, so I'll leave it at that. I had an enjoyable time talking about this subject. I love this topic of art and expressing yourself artistically. It's a wonderful thing to do. I encourage you to do it. Again, thanks a lot, and go out there and create art and be good at it and be great and or be not so great or whatever. Just express yourself and have a good time. That's the important thing have a good time at it. So I'll leave it at that until the next one. I'll talk to you later, bye, bye.