Free Play!
An Expressive Arts Book Club!
An experiential book club using meditation, art-making and discussion based on Art is a Way of Knowing by Pat Allen. Using a sensual variety of materials, artists will open mind and heart, heighten perception, expand vision and foster a connection with the collective unconscious. In sight!
Free Play: An Expressive Arts Book Club! will run four Tuesdays in June, 2009 (June 9, 16, 23, & 30th) from 7:00-p:30. Cost is $135 (sliding scale $100).
Nachmanovitch says:
“The formula for creation is simple. Just identify our impedimenta, and set them down, like setting down an overburdened suitcase that we have been carrying for far too long. If we are free and unperturbable, like the clouds, then whatever creation is in us will flow out, naturally and simply. It’s as easy as saying, ‘Let there be light.’ But the easiest thing to say can be the hardest to practice. We desperately cling to it whatever it may be for us, cling to our thought of gaining it, avoiding it, or keeping it once we have it. There is no refuge, salvation, or vacation from it, for the simple reason that we carry it with us wherever we go. We have our hands full with our own limited and limiting conception of selfhood.
The secret is to drop it - whatever it may be. This is not deprivation but enrichment. It is dropping off hope and fear and letting our much vaster, simpler, truer self show through, letting ourselves be ambushed by the great Tao that moves forever through this world.
The ultimate issue for the creative artist is how this turning point, this moment of transformation through surrender, is reached, and how it works to potentiate and instill life into one’s creative voice.
Registration or More Info
Please refer to the Calendar page for upcoming groups and events. For more information about individual or group counselling, groups, classes or other sessions or to register for any event, please contact Darci by phone at (204) 293-3869, or send her an email at express-yourself@shaw.ca.
“My feeling is that the concept of creativeness and the concept of healthy, self-actualizing, fully human person seem to be coming closer and closer together, and may perhaps turn out to be the same thing.”
“Whenever illness is associated with loss of soul, the arts emerge spontaneously as remedies, soul medicine.”
“When we think of the creative mind, we think of the generative mind, full of ideas and brilliant new insights. But the creative mind is both full and empty. It is able to create within itself a space for the new to arise. It is a mind that is constantly opening itself to the internal and external world.
The opened mind can be relaxed and playful. It is filled with curiosity and wonder. There is something childlike about it. It loves to get off the beaten track, to explore paths that are not the ones taken by social convention. Playfulness is sometimes important. The opened mind likes to play with an idea or object, and enjoys looking at it for the first time. It remains open to the possibility that we may not know everything there is to know - and what we do know may be wrong. It challenges assumptions, makes new connections, finds new ways of viewing the world. The opened mind can wander playfully into areas others do not take seriously, and return with creations that must be approached in all seriousness.
Some of the most creative minds of all time have allowed themselves to drift into reveries and dream states, into extended meditations during which they courted the irrational, the symbolic, the metaphorical, and the mysterious. Often enough they bring back images that they translate into theories, compositions and actions.
This journey into the unfamiliar can be scary. Some discoveries may be so strange that we want to cover them up and run. Whether exploring the depths of the human soul or the depths of matter, artists, mystics, and scientists have come face to face with chaos and disorder. But the opened mind thrives on difference and remains open to the contradictory.”
“We recognized the role of imagination that is shared between contemporary psychotherapies and all ancient traditions. It was also evident that the arts are the bridging existential phenomena that unite ritual, imagination and the dream world in a way that no other activity can do.”