Morgan's Musings

CREATIVE EXPRESSION

TOOLS FOR HEALING & AWAKENING

(c)Morgan McBride

Collage by Morgan McBride

Where we are most creative, we are most alive.

 Where we are most alive, we are most authentic. 

– Rodney Smith, Seattle Insight Meditation

Creativity offers a unique pathway to healing and awakening.  Creative expression works to renew health and passion for life as a very real tool for transformation.  Along with your other body/mind/spirit practices, be sure to make time for engaging in compelling creative activities.  Physiological changes take place between the brain and body to upgrade our production and utilization of helpful chemicals.  Many find depression, addictions and malaise lifting as they engage their whole being in playful, creative activities, learning new skills, finding new purpose in life.

It seems increasingly certain that healing and creativity are different pieces of a single picture...Creativity in terms of physiological processes means then physical healing, physical regeneration. Creativity in emotional terms consists then of establishing, or creating, attitude changes....Creativity in the mental domain involves the emergence of a new and valid synthesis of ideas, not by deduction, but springing by "intuition" from unconscious sources. 
– Carlisle Bergquist, MA, PhD.D.c.

Many people today are finding that creative path through a process discovered and developed by Seena Frost, a graduate of Yale Divinity School and a practicing therapist in California.  In her award-winning book, SoulCollage® - An Intuitive Collage Process for Individuals and Groups, Seena describes the details of this unique process.  SoulCollage is an art-oriented process for creative expression.  You can begin this experience by making simple, collaged cards, which you create with images cut from magazines and glue to a surface like mat-board.  Continuing through this guided process, you will likely discover your authentic voice, perhaps a more intimate, instinctual voice that has waited all this time to be revealed.

We believe that art and healing are joining together to become one. As art and healing merge, the field of art will be changed and the field of medicine will be changed. For many of us, healing art is a spiritual path, a transformational process, a way of being. We believe that making art frees the body's healing mechanisms to heal. We believe it unites body, mind, and spirit. The creative process is the healer. Here, art is transformational in itself. (The artists) are just people who use the creative process of art to heal themselves, others, and the earth.  

      ~  Michael Samuels, M.D., and Mary Rockwood Lane, R.N., M.S.N.,

CREATIVE HEALING: How To Heal Yourself By Tapping Your Hidden Creativity

Images are impressed upon our psyche and stored on cellular levels, allowing us to burst forth, even beyond the power of words.  Even the simplest collage has the power to capture our hearts and imagination, opening vast worlds, and evoking deep emotions.  It’s like being awake in our dreams and finally understanding the meaning. It is this expansive process, which gives SoulCollage a unique role in accessing the inner self.

But, if you have nothing at all to create, then perhaps you create yourself. 

-Carl Gustav Jung

When we combine imagery with the tools of speaking from the voice within the images, meditations, journaling, intuitive readings and intimate sharing in sacred circles, we consciously enter the realm of a greater understanding of who we are in the eternal cycles of life.  Exploring both our uniqueness among others, and our oneness with all, we gain deep insights into our selves and find greater compassion for others.  SoulCollage is a process which supports unity and the path of individuation, alongside our fellow life travelers.

The creative is the place where no one else has ever been.  You have to leave the city of your comfort and go into the wilderness of your intuition.  What you’ll discover will be wonderful.  What you’ll discover is yourself.  –Alan Alda

There is tremendous opportunity for integration of your whole being as you move through the four suits of SoulCollage, exploring personality aspects, relationships, energy and totem animals, and the spiritual, archetypal realm of guardians, guides, allies and challengers.  

Creativity is a lot like looking at the world through a kaleidoscope.  You look at a set of elements, the same ones everyone else sees, but then reassemble those floating bits and pieces into an enticing new possibility. 

–Rosabeth Moss Kanter, American Business Speaker and Consultant

While SoulCollage is a fun, creative process, it is also a sacred process, in the sense that you may be opening layers of insight and revealing more of you to yourself. Trust in your inner authority to reveal exactly what you are ready to see and feel. It is just possible that you, too, may experience great transformation.

Morgan McBride is a trained, authorized SoulCollage® facilitator.