Healing with the Arts
A 12-Week Program to Heal Yourself and Your Community
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- $16.99
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
Heal yourself and your community with this proven 12-week program that uses the arts to awaken your innate healing abilities.
From musicians in hospitals to quilts on the National Mall—art is already healing people all over the world. It is helping veterans recover, improving the quality of life for cancer patients, and bringing communities together to improve their neighborhoods. Now it’s your turn.
Through art projects, including visual arts, dance, writing, and music, along with spiritual practices and guided imagery, Healing with the Arts gives you the tools to address what you need to heal in your life—physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual.
An acclaimed twelve-week program lauded by hospitals and caretakers from around the world, Healing with the Arts gives you the ability to heal your family and your friends, as well as communities where you’ve always wanted to make a difference. Internationally known leaders in the arts in medicine movement, Michael Samuels, MD, and Mary Rockwood Lane, RN, PhD, show you how to use creativity and self-expression to pave the artist’s path to healing.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
"In our art and healing method, you are the artist-healer; you learn how to do the process yourself," assert authors Samuels (The Well Body Book) and Lane (Creative Healing). Their program requires no theory or therapist "Art truly becomes your medicine" though their statement, "Just as everyone is a healer, everyone has an Inner Artist," is both hopeful and daunting. With a week-by-week breakdown, the authors encourage "guided imagery" exercises; profile pioneers in the field of arts-in-medicine like dancer Inna Dagman; and share inspiring stories of people who've gone through their programs including Samuels's own "sculpting the cancer away" story, and a heartbreaking tale of a mother who learned to dance with her dying daughter. They also suggest weekly projects. Though the authors illustrate how their program can be uplifting, the "science" remains subjective and New Age-y they claim that making "art with the intent to heal" shifts the practitioner from a physiology of stress and anxiety to one of healing. Still, their call to use the arts and an open heart to relieve suffering may be a useful adjunct for healthcare workers and anyone else who wants to explore alternative approaches to treating illness.
