Michael Samuels - Healing with the Arts: A 12-Week Program to Heal Yourself and Your Community

Praise for

HEALING WITH THE ARTS

Healing with the Arts lays out a program of transformation through the union of creative and healing forces. This inner alchemy is a pure spiritual practice and this book is a map toward a healthy life you love.

Alex Grey and Allyson Grey , artists, cofounders of Chapel of Sacred Mirrors, and coauthors of Net of Being

Healing with the Arts is an exceptional guide to the power of art in deep intentional healing. Michael Samuels and Mary Rockwood Lane are leaders in the field. I recommend their book strongly.

Michael Lerner , president of Commonweal

This twelve-week program uses art to heal; it is based on two simple premises: art is the most powerful healing force we know; and everyone of us has both an inner artist and an inner healer. Read this book and discover for yourself the simple but profound truths it contains.

John Graham-Pole, MD, MRCP-UK , emeritus professor, University of Florida College of Medicine cofounder of Arts in Medicine, Shands Hospital

Every day I bear witness to the creativity that lies within each and every person. Healing with the Arts offers the possibility of transformation through ones own self-process.

Cynthia D. Perlis , director of Art for Recovery UCSF Helen Diller Family Comprehensive Cancer Center

Healing with the Arts is a guidebook for everyone, not just artists, or patients in the healthcare setting.

Cathy DeWitt , national consultant for the Society for the Arts in Healthcare

Through the elegance, depth, and insight of Mary and Michaels writings, the reader is guided through a process that can help them unlock their most inner truth, the one that can ultimately set us free, free to be ourselves and to be fulfilled once again.

Robert Browning , healthcare director for HeartMath

I dedicate this book to Danielle Ory for her love and support in my life.

Michael

I dedicate this to book to Jean Watson for our friendship and for the inspiration of her human caring theory, my foundation for art and healing.

Mary

Together, we both dedicate this book to the reader, to the artist and healer you are.

May you open your heart and experience the beauty of art and healing.

T his book brings art and healing to life in ways that are unique and purposeful for anyone and everyone. Michael Samuels, MD, and Mary Rockwood Lane, PhD, RN, use their world-class experiences and expertise to create and implement revolutionary medical arts programs in the United States. Using their own personal and professional experiences, they bring forth healing with the arts as a twelve-week program for you, the reader, and us and our community, wherever we may find ourselves.

The exercises in this book entice us into new space, meaning, and dimensions that touch on the holy, the sacred, as they guide the reader into deep inner territory. We rediscover light and dark parts of our being and become whole, holy, and healed.

How do they do this? They teach us to be our own best artist, expressing the artistry of shared humanity and uncovering our human spirit, the source of creativity. We reconsider the meaning of artthat is, art as anything that brings creativity, beauty, love, and light into our life. Anything that invites more light into the inner darkness associated with vast vicissitudes of all our human existence, of all our human frailties and detours from Source and spirit, using art to bring us home to the sacred heart, the very source of divine Love. Healing with the Arts transcends the usual approach to healing and to art. It is a culmination of the authors life works and personal practices. Michael and Mary search for the source of spirit, using their creative existence to come closer to the sacred. These practices transcend sense and mainstream mind-sets. The authors use self as instruments for the artists way. We become sojourners on their path into deeper healing and awakening of the soul. They embrace the freedom and emancipation of the human spirit, uninhibited on the journey to oneness.

Through the authors poetic, visual, and lyrical approach to life processes, you can heal yourself. You can transcend old patterns, find your inner essence, and journey forward to fulfill your lifes work, purpose, and destiny.

Michael and Mary share their own healing journeys through art: Mary painted her way through depression, and Michael healed a patients arthritic pain via illustration. I, too, have experienced the inner journey of healing through art. It allowed me to discover my inner being that transcended a traumatic accident and helped me overcome the unbearable loss of my eye, compounded by losing my husband to suicide.

I have heard that in order to heal, one has to undergo an altered state of consciousness. Art offers that, for it provides an avenue into a higher vibrational energetic field of consciousness, helping us to tap into other realities. In my personal journey, I experienced an altered state of consciousness through a deep contemplative state. By practicing inner and outer silence, I experienced a mystical awakening to the sacred. I felt the oneness of Love to the extent that I heard inner voices asking me questions, leading me to write a collection of psalms. Writing psalms allowed me to unleash the flow of horror and fear and praise that otherwise could not be expressed in polite company. Through my connection with the divine within, the loss of my eye resulted in my discovery of the loss of my I, my self, my ego, self-identity, my usual state of being, I entered into an altered state of consciousness and experienced an inner awakening to Cosmic Love, to Source for survival and ultimate surrender.

As we venture into our inner world, we capture the artist inside us. When this occurs, we awaken to healing the hole, an empty space within controlled by the ego and the outer world of fear. Through this book, we enter the mystical unknown, a world of altered states, ritual, and ceremony. We hear within and without through words and psalms or through imagery, music, and movement. We explore sacred processes to find our self. Through the joyous wonder of our inner artist, we heal our self. This book teaches us to transcend medicine and our lifes struggles, sufferings, and adventures on the physical plane. Paradoxically, we discover that embodying and grounding the inner artist is the ultimate source for healing our humanity.

Jean Watson,

PhD, RN, AHN-BC, FAAN, author of Human Caring Science

H ealing with arts is a powerful medicinethe most powerful that we know of to heal the whole person on physical, vital, mental, emotional, psychic, and spiritual levels. Thats a big statement coming from a physician and a nurse who have worked in healthcare for most of our lives. We wrote this book because healing with arts has changed our lives and the lives of thousands of people we have had the honor to work with and teach during our sixty combined years in the Arts in Medicine field.

When we say art we mean visual arts (painting, drawing, photography, film, sculpture), literary arts (journaling, poetry, creative writing, theater), music (listening, playing instruments, making playlists, chanting, toning, bells, drum circles), and dance (dancing, yoga, ceremony, choreographed ritual). Arts like cooking, gardening, and decorating your houseanything that brings creativity and beauty into your lifeare also included.