Art Exploration For Emotional Healing

In our first lesson, we will discuss the elements and principles of art and design, looking at them through the lens of emotional awareness. We discuss what to expect through the following days of the course, and what supplies you will need to have on hand to maximize your emotional exploration with art and visualization. Finally, we end with a breath awareness technique to help you tap into the right side of your brain, your centre of creativity.

In this lesson, we will learn about the "calm place" - a safe, grounded, and neutral place that exists within us that we can use for de-escalation during times of emotional discord. We will also discuss why transforming this calm place through artwork is an important foundational step toward emotional healing, using the elements of shape, colour, form, and space.

Colour psychology and the emotional connection to colour is a fascinating topic. In today's lesson, we will unpack classical association to certain colour, discuss what it means to be pulled to or resistant against colour, and end with a challenge of gaining authority over our emotions by assigning colours to them.

Box imagery can be very telling of our emotional state. Not only does it give a place where we can put discomfort, we can also examine details of the box which can give us more information about the complexities of our emotions. In this lesson, we look at texture, shape, and form and students are encouraged to construct their box from found materials that resemble what they saw during meditation.

In this lesson, we will use abstract line, shape, and form to explore our emotions. Line can give such great insight into how even or disrupted an emotion is, while shape and form can place importance, weight, and dimension on our emotions. This lesson is best paired with your sketch book and simple drawing pencils.

Goal setting isn't something that is often approached from an emotional lens. In today's lesson, we take a look at our future outlook - what it means to have authority over our path, decisions, and steps forward. We seek to undo narratives that have been taught to us about productivity and performance, and we use art to create a vision for ourselves based on what we emotionally want and need.

Expanding from our lesson on Day 3, today's lesson is about leaning into the opposite colour of our discomfort, so as to bring about emotional ease. We also introduce the element of breath, using it with visualization to diffuse uncomfortable emotions.

In this lesson, we take a look at the pieces of ourselves that we keep hidden from the world and the reasons why. Similarly, we look at the version of ourselves that we allow others to see. Then, we seek to understand why the two images may not match up perfectly, and how life could be different if we showed who you truly are inside.

Today, we explore shadow and value - both physical and metaphorical. As we step into the emotional shadows that we lean into during times of unraveling, we explore those shadows with open curiosity and embrace them as parts of ourselves. Then, we dig out our art supplies and bring them forward in a physical way, so as to normalize that we all have shadows.

On Day 10, we take a look at proportion (scale) and heightened emotions. How big or small an individual emotion feels can give us incredible insight as to how we react to those things. For example, if we assign a small proportion to shame, the natural reaction to a shameful feeling would be relatively neutral. However, if shame is something of grand scale, our reaction and internalization of it carries a great deal of impact. In this lesson, we approach heightened emotions while looking at how big or small they are within us.

Similar to the lesson about colour, certain symbols have been taught overtime to have weight with emotions. A white dove may symbolize peace to one person, while holding grief for another. In this lesson, we dig into those traditional symbols and assign our own meaning to them, joining them with our individual emotions.

Using ink (pen or marker) with paper, we seek to get creative with affirmations! We will begin with simple affirmations and "I am" statements and use our drawings to develop a positive self-talk practice rooted in affirmation and art.

As the title for Day 13 suggests, today we are looking at the balance between positive and negative. Within the elements of art and design, positive and negative spaces can put emphasis on certain elements in a piece of art, creating balance and unity, or heightening contrast and disharmony. When we apply this lesson to our emotional wellness, we are able to see contrast, balance and unity in a new way. This lesson will magnify areas of our emotional wellbeing that need tending to.

This practice makes sense of both positive and negative (building off on our last lesson) thoughts by drawing them out in a left and right portraiture. We take a look at what each side means, and what emotional connections are there depending on the side we instinctively choose to write the thoughts on.

In this final session, I teach students about expanding their practice by leaning into colours that pull them, what it means to feel resistance to an art exploration activity, and that with art there are no rules other than using the tools regularly to help achieve a higher level of emotional awareness and healing.