The Art of Trauma Healing
Exploring Creativity as Contemplative Practice for Individual and Collective Wellbeing
When I use painting as a mindfulness practice, I get to immerse myself in the thing I am painting. Become the thing. When I paint an owl, I get to focus my attention on owl. When I painted my dog in a paint your pet workshop, I got to spend the workshop feeling the warm fuzzies for him, even though he wasn’t even there.
My senses come online fully, I surrender to flow, and I release attachment to any outcome, achievement, or form. This gets me out of my head, and a way to shift into being mode for a while. If I’m lucky, I’ll even enter a flow state, where time and space drop away, and I’m just in it.
“Being mode” and “flow states” are critical components of trauma healing work. The nervous system can become hijacked after trauma and survivors can find themselves living in a chronic state of hyperarousal (anxious, reactive, tense, hyper vigilant). In order to integrate the traumatic experience, it’s helpful to start from a solid foundation of resource and regulation. So regulating the nervous system is the first and most critical step of trauma-healing work.
Art can be very regulating and supportive in managing post-traumatic stress because the body is moving, the right side of the brain is engaged, and this encourages a state of calm presence.
Recently, I have been painting trees. Trees have been a profound refuge for me in my personal trauma healing journey. From their capacity to bear witness to their solidity, rootedness, and nourishing presence, they have offered my soul a home.
In my next life, I want to be a tree.
For now, I’m bound to taking on tree-shaped yoga poses, writing poetry about trees, running away to the trees, and more recently painting trees.
When I discovered acrylic inks, it offered me a medium for capturing the depth and complexity of the bark, and blossoming in a way that is unpredictable and sacred. As it dries and bleeds, the bark reveals hidden faces, women in cloaks, openings/portals, and female anatomy.
I take my feelings and turn them into the colors of the sky, and suppressed anger becomes the bleeding vulva - a goddess cry. The twisted branches and wandering roots symbolize my defiance, and my unwillingness to conform to a pattern or a predefined way of doing things.
As I work with this piece, I set an intention to stay present and embodied, and be an open channel to what wants to move through me. Art as practice opens a channel to my heart, the branches of this tree the veins, each brushstroke is an act of creative alchemy, turning the pain of the past into beauty in the present that will last into the future.
Now, with my tree hanging over my desk, and another over my bed, I’m reminded of my innate stability, rootedness, strength, and that I have been a badass warrior goddess for generations. I already am a tree, and my roots run deep.
They have tried to burn me at the stake before, but like the sliced open stump of a willow or a lilac bush, I am unbreakable, and there are new green stalks shooting up everywhere.