AN ENVIRONMENTALLY AWARE CREATIVE ARTS THERAPY

Transcribed voice recordings February 2014 ©Catherine Meeson of Creative Therapeutic Encounters

We live in an age where ‘globalization’ is becoming the norm, and we are calling ourselves ‘global citizens’. Yet, among-st this amazing sense of expansion, we have a dissolution of relation because barriers, values and boarders have changed. We can now travel the seas from land to land, migrate co mingle- live in other countries. While we are benefiting from the great diversity of species, practices, cultures and ways, at the same time we are losing aspects of both our personal  and collective histories as we move from land to land. We are  also being affected in our body bio magnetically, as our roots sever in one place and need to be re established. Our roots and needs  are influenced by what we ingest as far as  food types that come from specific geographical regions, that the people have evolved with over thousands of years. This poses short term and inter generational concern  for migration. Of course these things always change with migrations, we’re got people from Africa moving to Australia, England to America, China to Canada, Alaska going to Europe and so on.  We take our foods with us, , we import/ export. What once contributed the stability of our foundation to planet, of our knowing and our place, in relation to the plants, the animals, the water, minerals and ores, the lay of the lands, all the old lores and ways of knowing what to do, all that is in danger of being lost completely as the elders are dying our who possess that knowledge. Much knowledge of the ancient ways has been lost to the progress of the technological era, but we fool ourselves if we think this age old knowledge is no longer relevant, we are but humans living in a larger domain of relations .

The old lore is being replaced by Industrialization, high science and abstraction, virtual reality and so forth and we are becoming increasingly disengaged from the body, disengaged from the senses and our ways of knowing. We are five minute microwavers and genetic modifiers. I am not saying that technology is bad and all of Industrialization is a bad practice, it’s that we need to  re- evaluate and take action on all the issues related of these things, with a great immediacy, in light of what we are now coming to know. And what we are now coming to know is that the relationship between all things are very delicately bound, that Indigenous people and all wisdom traditions teach us about the fragility of relationships and the sacredness of  relationship.

The workshops that I like to hold are nurturing an open arena of questioning, of discovery ,of reflection and realization, where processes are provided, and  prompts given  for you to explore this  intrinsic relation. The answers aren’t given. We explore symbolic  and symbiotic relations, through resonance, through empathy and through relation to, through contemplation. Using all of our senses, using the physicality of the body through movement, through touch. We’re using our sense of knowing and tapping ancient instinctual knowing through hearing and listening, exploring at deep levels. And then we are expressing vocally our inner worlds  through pictures and words, how we feel about these things. So  an ‘Environmentally Aware  Creative Arts Therapy’ is one that explores relationship between all things, between person and place, how the health  and state of one, affects the others, via the arts, via Creative process work/ or therapeutic practice. Vie embodied practice. We look at how we are using resources? What resources we are using?. We look at the whole concept of reduce reuse recycle and how we can be more ecologically aware? And  developing innovative practice that goes beyond the medical paradigm of a sick person in a normal society. Looking  at persons within cultures within society, within places. Because you can’t extract a human being from the context that they come from. If you take a person out of the place, the place is still going to travel with the person, in the form of customs, biology (i.e dna)  culture memory and associations.  If you put them in a new place they have got to learn to relate to that place;-  they don’t know ‘its ways and means’.

We adapt, but we don’t recognize the loss. We don’t take the time to acknowledge what it is, from where we come from, that helps to make us who we are. This loss includes the relation between a community , a community of life on all levels. The human, the animal, plant, mineral. Our definition of community has regressed in ‘concept and being’. It does not embody totality at all. We think loosely the community is the place where we live and the social structures available to our consumer mindset, or a community of interest. We need to bring those  four kingdoms back into alignment with  the natural order, as far as conducting ourselves within them.  Because unless we do conduct ourselves in a more appropriate manner all the castles are going to fall down and there won’t be a kingdom to support us, the foundation Yesod will not support us. Yesod will not support life because we have debased it. We fail to recognize the importance of foundation, Earth. And we fail to recognize that we are part of the earth. We are still embodied on form on earth. We are watery mass. We are air consumers, dependent upon right atmosphere. Our spirit, the spark of creators fire within, (the elusive creator). We have a role here as caretakers, we have a role here as incarnate beings to develop our souls, to yearn towards the greater path of enlightenment always in thought word and deed. What if this were taught in schools? Earth Ethics  101 in equal measure with math, English, the arts and sciences. We would grow a culture of care, of wisdom, of relation; such a culture would return the balance of life and restore the sanctity of all things. Sadly we are said to be living in the 6th great extinction event right now. (See http://newswatch.nationalgeographic.com/2012/03/28/the-sixth-great-extinction-a-silent-extermination/ )

So an Environmentally Aware Creative Arts Therapy is a forum for exploring intrinsic relation, via creative process 21.2.2014, end voice transcript.

Transcript 2.

An ‘Environmentally Aware Creative Arts Therapy’ is one in which the relation between person and place is understood, because the people are part of a place and the place provides us with food, with the raw materials necessary to live a life, the ores, with the animals that we eat, the plants, and the medicines. All these things are part of place. The landmarks that inform our histories and mythologies of our events; all are intertwined. And now, in this age of mass migration, we don’t have our familiars anymore, those things that act as symbols as conveyors of information and wisdom, that have been staple for hundreds and also thousands of years.  We create suburb place names like Endeavour Springs where no watercourse lay. Without familiars we become lost in a foreign sea, and so what we are needing to do, is to re-establish that link between person and place . To rebuild re recognize and evolve our relationships.

An Environmentally Aware Creative Arts Therapy takes elements of the natural world around us and uses them as a guide to process, as a guide into those symbolic worlds, into the instinctive, into the genetic and ancestral memories, that we all carry. Into those areas of knowledge which are forbidden, in the shadow and  into the light. An  ‘Environmentally aware creative arts therapy considers our mode of living and then it questions the validity of our mode of living and the social norms,  do I need these things?. We aim to consider their life beyond ourselves?, What will happen to them, my tools, my resources after I have used them?. Is there a way I can do my journey and explore my process while minimizing my impact?. So what tools and resources can I use to achieve that goal? We do not have all the answers, we are endeavouring as well, and this work, this exploration is born out of the reflections of that endeavouring, or bringing to conscious awareness. If we do not ask , it is merely unconscious practice, it is ‘a norm’. But does the norm serve? How can it better be applied?.

As we are finding out  through many current fields of study, of both the arts/ humanities and sciences, the links between the many, many, levels of social environmental and economic functioning and the links between cultures and places are both growing and diminishing at the same time. New fields are growing, old ones are becoming  barren, yet what is becoming barren, is the statistically high probability of  the loss of thousands of years of ecological relation and symbiosis.  The product of aeons of growth.  Whilst things can change, ecology books, history books etc that inform us  about what was here;  what we are losing is really not beyond our control, our ability to intervene and create change. We can reflect, and take action upon, but it must be immediately. So my aim is to convey this stream of thought and to encourage as much conscious reflection in therapeutic practice as possible. Both site specifically, using elements of place to aid process work  and using those materials generated by humanity which we use in service of growth and healing.

This is of course ‘an ideal level’,. Unless one can make ones paper, or paints, the cost effectiveness and practicalities will be a  challenge at this time, so what we can do is look to, where and how things were produced that we use and their point of origin and their origins sources?. Raw materials  such as acrylics  are synthetics, paper is largely non sustainable forestry etc. ‘Creative Arts Therapies are supreme in adaptation, improvisation, and making do with what is available.’ It taps into our instinctual tool making ingenuity, our problem solving creative response. We all have these skills, but for many they just lay dormant.  The aim is to generate awareness, and do what we can,  not evoke guilt- to expand our caring, our therapeutic practice for the circle of life considering what will come after’.

An ‘Environmentally Aware Creative Arts Therapy’ also recognises that in healing, the role of the healer is not just to work with persons at the micro cosmic level; - we have community, communities of interest and of all life. Person within family, family within culture, culture within nation.  All of those levels are made up of complex relationships, the grand tapestry of earthly life, yet not confined to earth, they also be solar systemic, for the moon and sun and gravitational pull of the planets governs life on earth. They must be addressed, all of these relationships. We are not going to get results on a holistic scale, when we talk about a person’s being  mentally ill, bla bal, projecting “ it’s her, it’s him, it’s not us. , Where as, what is really going on is within  the whole.  We can no longer be isolationist or  reductionist. It’s the whole that needs healing, the cultures of denial, broken so progress can be made. It’s the whole that has problems, and we are aiming to heal this separation, aiming to heal the hurt of the collective. The hurt of the collective manifests as a symptomatology  in the individual. So by working on the individual, we heal the collective, by working on the environment, the foundation, and the structures inherent within it, we heal the circle. But in that, we must come to recognize that we are facets of brilliance that is an  individuated soul essence, and that there are forces of collectivism, that are the bedrock of civilization and without dealing with each of those areas; -  there will be no healing, we need to take a global holistic look.

Image google search  Attribution - freelyassociating.org360  the thinker

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