April / May 2004

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Imagination & Power:
The Soul’s Journey
— Shellee Davis

The expressive arts workshop floor is strewn with clay sculptures, colorful feathers and beads, writing paper, and people. The group has just moved while holding a clay ball, thinking about how each of them has been shaped by the world. Their hands shaped the clay however their feelings moved them to do it. Now they’re writing thoughts, images, or feelings that have come in response to the sculpture they have created. And somewhere in this process, magic has happened. People are transfixed by what they have made, some weeping, some jubilant, some wondering what in the world this has to do with them and where did it come from? After all, it’s only clay—but it’s not.

Once fashioned into form, whether rough hewn or elegantly detailed, or even balled up into “nothing” again, it is a window to the psyche, a door into a world of feeling and possibility. Through this creative medium, many touch something deep—others just graze a surface that only gradually reveals its clues. Our creations, whether consciously designed or spontaneously expressed, are like dreams, with layers of meaning.

MARCIA

Marcia’s flat clay figure of a woman lies on a paper plate, and she initially dismisses it as poorly done and ugly: “It’s flat. I can’t even make it stand up.” When asked to describe the sculpture and put an “I” in front of each sentence, she reads it to the class: “I am flat on my back. I can’t stand up for myself. I want myself to be different. I don’t accept the way I am.” I point out that her flat woman sculpture may be like a dream pun because Marcia says she really is feeling “flat on her back”—physically and emotionally exhausted. Changes in her job have increased her workload and eliminated what she most valued about the job. Now she is miserable, demoralized, and does not know how to “stand up for herself” in this new situation. Having openly acknowledged that her job is eroding her spirit, Marcia decides she can no longer ignore or endure this—not even for the money. She uses art to explore making a transition. When she returns home, she seeks a new position and later happily reports that she has found it.

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PHOEBE

Phoebe draws a female face. “I don’t like it and don’t have anything to say about it.” She looks at it askance. Someone else comments: “For me the eyes resemble yours and seem sad or pensive.” Phoebe then tells us how unhappy she feels about operations she’s had on one eye and about the doctor insisting that she have surgery on the other. She becomes animated, wondering, intense, her voice full of emotional crosscurrents. Someone mentions the bright yellow color at the throat of her drawing. “I just had to put a feeling of hope into the picture,” she says with a look of concern and yearning. At the next class Phoebe says the feelings her drawing evoked have stayed with her all week. She’s doing more art, wondering whether to have the operation or not. But now instead of feeling paralyzed, she feels energized and mobilized.

ART AND LIFE AS ONE

The magic of the expressive arts has many components. One is the power of creativity to catalyze deep feelings and insights and to give birth to objects that act more like verbs than nouns. Art becomes the embodiment, or the interweaving, of a dynamic relationship between the inner and outer, the world of spirit and the physical. In cultures where art is central, such as in Bali, we find that there is no word for art because there is no separation between art and life. Another component is the person-centered approach, which creates a safe container for personal transformation. The resulting environment encourages self-orientation. It supports and sustains a belief in the vast inner resources we each have and empowers us to make our own choices. In my teaching I have observed that within a year of starting these expressive arts courses, virtually all participants change their lives to more faithfully reflect and embody their values, dreams, and desires. In the face of every major change in my life, I have first quailed before the unknown. I feel anxious and powerless when I think the world is already defined and fixed in place by others—that there are limited options forcing me to fit in or become a pariah because I can’t or won’t conform. Like many of us, I have been told to get realistic, get in line, join the rat race. Carl Rogers addressed these issues by saying that there is “a desperate social need for the creative behavior of creative individuals”:

Many of the serious criticisms of our culture and its trends [point to] a dearth of creativity. . . . In the clothes we wear, the food we eat, the books we read, and the ideas we hold, there is a strong tendency toward conformity. . . . To be original or different is felt to be dangerous. (Carl Rogers, On Becoming a Person, Houghton Mifflin, 1961, Chapter 19: Toward a Theory of Creativity)

When Rogers wrote about fostering creativity to foster wholeness and healthy personal growth, he described one of the main factors as “the ability to toy with ideas, concepts, materials—the ability to be playful with the elements which go into the creative product. A willingness to experiment.”

So, creativity, spontaneity, and play are not frivolous and superflu-ous. They are powerful ways of relating to the world which develop resilience and liberate the ability to see and interact with things varia-bly. Viewing artwork as a dream, we are like lucid dreamers consciously interacting with possibilities in the deep play of life. Beneath the veneer of the external world is the play of reality, the play of dreams, free play, free association.

A CONTINUUM OF REALMS

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What we perceive as reality depends on how we look at it. The western mechanistic view sees a world of inert matter, natural resources to be harnessed, controlled, and used by humans. The shamanic view is much deeper: the world around us is anima mundi, a sentient, conscious, interactive world. Plants, for instance, are not just mute specimens: they speak and share their wisdom. This is a world where imagination, dreams, and external reality overlap, a holistic realm where the mental, emotional, spiritual, and physical are not separate, but a continuum.

My major life changes were first cultivated in my imagination, and I have found that the challenges of life and creative processes mirror each other. Inspiration or necessity fuels the desire for change, and we embark on a journey. Along the way is the emotional roller coaster of blocks and breakthroughs. Over time I have had enough “dreams come true” to make me a believer, but my challenge is always the same: to believe again and support myself through the process. This is, to the core, a question of facing one’s sense of self and beliefs about the world for better or worse—an infinite series of moments of truth.

This approach to life is not a simplistic attempt to “create your reality,” as if we could control reality or dreams. It’s not a matter of power as control, but about the power inherent to creative engagement and relationship. It is a matter of being a creative, responsible person in a creative, responsive world. As Rogers also observed in On Becoming a Person:

In a time when knowledge, constructive and destructive, is advancing by the most incredible leaps and bounds genuinely creative adaptation seems to represent the only possibility that man can keep abreast of the kaleidoscopic changes in his world. . . . Consequently it would seem to me that investigations of the process of creativity, the conditions under which this process occurs and the ways in which it may be facilitated are of the utmost importance.

The person-centered approach to expressive arts is one way of educating people to embrace creativity as a life-enhancing survival skill. Once people learn to encourage and respect their authentic selves, they can extend this respect to their relationships, community, and environment. Once they experience making creative, constructive changes in their own lives, they see the possibility of making a positive difference in the world.

ART CHANGES LIFE

During the Chilean dictatorship, mass unemployment and the risk of starvation motivated groups of women to create arpilleras (patchwork pictures made from sewing cloth scraps onto burlap bags) to support their families. Under martial law, people were forbidden to gather publicly in groups of even three. Only in church were these women allowed to come together to do their craft. There they discovered that their images reflected what they saw in their lives: they expressed the pain and horror they felt about their loved ones being kidnapped, tortured, and killed by the dictatorship. Realizing they shared a common experience of terror and loss, of helplessness and grief, they acted as a support group for each other. Art was their language when it was forbidden to speak, and art changed their lives.

A GLOBAL EXAMPLE

As international interest in this folk craft grew, the women sewed messages and explanations into the hems of the arpilleras. These pictures slipped out of Chile right under the nose of the military. Once the rest of the world read the message of the arpilleras, the state of oppression in Chile garnered international attention and scrutiny. The world became a conscious witness to the death and destruction, and the Chilean government was no longer able to operate with impunity. It had to answer for the human rights violations and atrocities it had committed (Guy Brett, Through Our Own Eyes: Popular Art and Modern History, Ch. 1, New Society Publishers, 1987).

That positive change can arise from such dire circumstances gives me hope. I invite everyone to explore creatively and be guided by the inner logic and magic of the anima mundi. Imagination can help us make a paradigm shift that will allow humanistic values to flourish—in a healthy environment and a socially just world.

SHELLEE DAVIS, M.A., REAT, is faculty at the Person-Centered Ex-pressive Therapy Institute (PCETI) and in the Expressive Arts for Heal-ing and Socal Change Certificate Program at Saybrook Graduate School. Her teaching focuses on the transformative power of creativity for personal and political change. She cofounded the PCETI programs in England and Japan and the Expressive Arts Program at World College West, where she used expressive arts to prepare stu-dents for studies abroad and to deal with culture shock upon their re-turn. She also teaches and practices authentic movement, dream work, and chi-gung. P. O. Box 780, Cotati, CA 94931, (707) 664-9828.

Second Expressive Arts Story

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