Creative Healing: How to Heal Yourself by Tapping Your Hidden Creativity - Softcover

Samuels, Michael

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1610970454 ISBN 13: 9781610970457

Publisher: Resource Publications, 2011

Synopsis

All across the country, a groundbreaking movement is forming in the field of health care: art and medicine are becoming one, with remarkable results. In major medical centers such as the University of Florida, Duke, University of California, and Harvard Medical School, patients confronting life-threatening illness and depression are using art, writing, music, and Dance to heal body and soul. -A woman with breast cancer who has never made art before finds healing and empowerment by creating sculpture. -A man with AIDS uses journaling to overcome feelings of despair and helplessness. -A woman suffering from depression following her divorce learns to dance for the first time in her life--and in he body's movement she rediscovers a sense of play and joy. -A musician gives meaning to his art by helping people with illness transform their life through music. -Physicians and nurses are beginning to use creativity to complement and enhance their medical practice. Creative Healing presents readers with the inspiring ways in which the arts (painting, writing, music, and dance) can free the spirit to heal. In one volume, the authors detail the transformative power of a diverse range of artistic activity. Michael Samuels, MD, has over twenty-five years of experience working with cancer patients and is the best-selling author of Seeing with the Mind's Eye and The Well Baby Book. He teams up with fellow pioneer Mary Rockwood Lane, RN, PhD, to share their extraordinary findings on the healing powers of the arts. Through guided imagery, personal stories, and practical exercises, they teach you how to find your "inner artist-healer," enabling you to improve your health, attitude, and sense of well being by immersing yourself in creative activity. Both Samuels and Lane offer invaluable insight through their personal journeys and extensive groundbreaking research, noting that "prayer, art, and healing come from the same source--the human soul." Because there lies an artist and healer within each of us, Creative Healing is an invaluable resource for anyone wishing to discover the beauty of music, dance, writing or art and connect with a deeper part of oneself. Filled with inspiration and guidance, it will help you make changes in your life and the lives of others and gain access to the sacred place where inner peace exists.

About this title

From the Publisher:

Art and Healing Come Together With Remarkable Results
CREATIVE HEALING: How To Heal Yourself By Tapping Your Hidden Creativity by Michael Samuels, M.D., and Mary Rockwood Lane, R.N., M.S.N., presents readers with the inspiring ways in which the arts (painting, writing, music and dance) can free the spirit to heal. Through guided imagery, personal stories, and practical exercises, the authors teach you how to find your own "inner artist-healer," enabling you to improve your health, attitude, and a sense of well-being by immersing yourself in creative activity. A practical and detailed exploration of the ways in which the arts can free the spirit to heal, CREATIVE HEALING includes: · Dramatic real-life examples; · Step-by-step exercises for igniting the creative process; · Fascinating historical roots of art and healing; · Information on art healing programs across the country. Not only are Michael Samuels, M.D. and Mary Rockwood Lane, R.N., M.S.N. renowned in the field of art and healing, they also have first hand experience with the transformative power of art in health care. When Michael Samuels' wife was diagnosed with cancer, he began journalling. "It became a story of bravery and of Nancy as my teacher....Somehow my vision was of her beauty, not her suffering, and that is the vision I hold even to this day." He is the founder of Art As A Healing Force, a project devoted to incorporate art with healing. Several years ago, Mary Rockwood Lane was in a deep depression over her divorce. She was in therapy, but was unable to deal constructively with her life, children, or friends, until she started painting, something she had always dreamed of doing but never tried. Over the next few years, she not only became well as she painted, she became the artist she had always wanted to be. She is currently cofounder and codirector of the Arts in Medicine program at the University of Florida, Gainesville, the largest arts and healing program in the country.

From the Author:

Creative Healing is a book about freeing your inner healer
Creative Healing is for everyone, it is about becoming your inner artist and using your own creative resources to heal yourself. This book is a practical guide that step by step will help you reclaim your own creativity and your own power to heal. This book is an invitation to you. It provides the support, tools, and suggestions of how to heal yourself or others with art. Creative Healing takes something you do every day and turns it into a spiritual path to go even deeper into the spiritual center of your life. Follow us inward to your heart. Let art, writing, music and dance heal you and transform your life.

Creative Healing is a book about freeing your inner healer by embracing the passionate creative artist that is within each of us. It is a book about healing yourself, others, or the earth, by tapping into the creative energy that makes us and keeps us alive. Prayer, art, and healing all come from the same source: the human soul. Research has shown us that a person in prayer, a person making art, and a person healing all have the same physiology, the same brain wave patterns, and the same states of consciousness. Creative Healing is a book about conquering illness and healing body and soul. In this book, when we use the word "art", we speak of all the creative arts. This includes the visual arts, painting, sculpture, photography, and crafts. You can heal yourself with writing, poetry, journals, essays, stories, storytelling, or theater. Music, songs, tones, chanting, silence, sounds of nature, and dance, movement, ritual, circle dancing, ecstatic dance all are deeply healing.. Art in Creative Healing is all creativity; it is any way we can be creative in our lives.

Art and healing is a new medically proven technique that strengthens body, mind and spirit. Art and healing can help you to heal illnesses including cancer, AIDS, and depression. It can help you reduce symptoms, alleviate pain and improve your attitude and the quality of your life. Creative Healing is not only about healing, it is also a spiritual path. It can help you feel connected to others and the earth. We want Creative Healing to be accessible to everyone. We believe that everyone is an artist; everyone can be an artist- healer if they want to be. It is a way of being, a way of seeing, a way of drawing, a way of making music, a way of writing, a way of dancing that is deeply personal and transformative. When we say prayer, art, and healing all come from the same source, we mean they are three paths coming together as one. The part of each of us that is spiritual, that is creative, and that is self healing or a healer all come together in this sacred process. They join, explode, and change us and the world.

Creative Healing is not only about one healing modality; it is about freeing the healer within. It is not about being a certain kind of artist; it is about you being the most creative person that you can be. It is not about one spiritual path; it is about luminosity. It is about honoring yourself and waking up the creative spirit that is inside of you and letting that spirit come forth. It is about being an artist as a healer, for that is who you are. We have tried to make Creative Healing a deeply personal book. Consider it like a conversation. Much of it is taken from conversations between the authors about art and healing, and from interviews with people in this field. It is very real; it is not abstract. We are reminding you that what you know about art and healing is already deep inside of you. It is within all of us; it is our inheritance and birthright.

About this edition

• Publisher: Resource Publications
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 1610970454
• ISBN 13: 9781610970457
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 304