Day 2 - Giving Your Feelings Physical Form
Expressing an emotion by putting it down on paper feels like taking it out of your body, bringing immediate relief.
To help you connect to your emotion, I’ll guide you through a visualization exercise that will allow you to drop beneath the surface of your thoughts and get into the space where you feel ready to create.
Today you will experience what it feels like to externalize your emotion and become a witness to it instead of being run by it.
Let's get started - in three steps
1. start with guided visualization
Before we start creating an image, I invite you to listen to this guided visualization. I strongly suggest you don't skip this step, because you want to get into meditative space and disconnect from your verbal mind.
2. Create an image
Now let's move on to the next step. I invite you to start drawing or painting immediately after listening to guided visualization.
If no images, shapes or colors came to you during guided visualization, just look at art supplies and feel what colors you are instinctively drawn to. Pick up those colors and allow your hand to spontaneously begin making marks on the paper. You may want to start with some scribbles, lines or shapes.
Try not to censor yourself, I know it’s hard but it’s not important if the image you are creating is something you can recognize or not. As you draw you will see a form beginning to emerge. That form may lead you to add more colors or shapes.
3. Witness your image
When you feel you have completed your image, tape it or pin it to a wall so you can view it from a distance. This drawing is an imagistic expression of your emotion. You have externalized your painful emotion and now you can you can witness it instead of being swept by it.
Look at the image and try to feel its emotional content. Don’t try to analyze it or ascribe any words to it. Not yet. We will dialog with your image in the next exercise. For now just be present with your image and keep it where you can see it. Honor your creation and refrain from any critical remarks.
I hope that making that image allowed you to feel some relief. This is the first experiential step in this process.
4. What's next
Tomorrow we will move on to extracting valuable information contained within your image. It's a powerful process of dialoging with the symbolic content of your artwork, which is an expression of messages hidden in your subconscious mind similarly to a dream content.
If you feel ready to tackle that now, you can skip straight to the next exercise.