This week I picked up a book half finished from last year, Fires in the Dark, Healing the Unquiet Mind, by Kay Redfield Jamison. And I wondered why I had ever put it down. This is an extraordinary meditation on moving through the depths of pain, sorrow and the difficulties of being human. Jamison scans the history of the Western mind, pulling wisdom from scholars and healers through the ages. She also shares her personal journey healing from manic depression, making the book real and approachable. As she walked me through the canyons of her own sorrow, I appreciated her honesty and vulnerability in recognizing the courage and stamina it takes to first face and then heal pain and mental suffering.
And then I turned the page.
Imagination and healing: “In 1640, Edward Reynolds, bishop of Norwich and author of the influential A Treatise on the Passions of and Faculties of the Soule of Man, wrote that to alleviate disorders “that darken the serenitie of mans Mind” one must play on imagination to invoke opposing passions by “scatterng and distracting” them, or by “mixing” them “so they naturally weaken one another.” Imagination, by awakening opposite mental states, could reconstrue grief and madness: Joy could oust sorrow, desire deflect fear, curiosity deflect apathy.”
-p. 193 Fires in the Dark
This is something I know instinctively, that creativity and imagination heal, yet when I read this passage, a light bulb went off in my mind. The act of imagining, the act of creating literally displaces the most difficult of human emotions. I have experienced this throughout my life as a creative person, and I experienced it yesterday walking into the studio and painting after a day when sorrow was settling into my chest like a dense fog. The act of putting on my painting jumpsuit and mixing chromatic black and Prussian blue to capture the low notes of this pain released it. Suddenly my mind was focused and my sorrow was displaced with making. I give this example not to over-simplify but to recognized the power that imagination and creativity play in experientially displacing suffering. The work of creating is the work of mending the parts of our minds that haunt and unsettle us. It is a tool available for free, at anytime, to each of us. If you are thinking...but I don’t have a painting studio to go to, or I am not an artist, I offer you the following exercises with which to experiment.
1. Find a magazine, recycled papers, and tape or glue. Find one blank sheet of paper...or a recycled paper to use as a base. Draw a square and work within the boundaries of that square. Set a time for 5 minutes and cut up and collage and paste shapes together to create a composition. Don’t think, just cut and paste or tape. You can judge after the timer goes off. Repeat as often as you like. The intention of this exercise is to get your mind thinking outside of it’s normal neural pathways.
2. Listen to Beehtoven’s Moonlight Sonata No 14 in C Minor while writing long hand without judgment or thought. (I linked the long version which is just over 13 minutes. Feel free to shorten this time) Shred, tear or toss when you are done. The intention of this exercise is to release fears, worries, sorrows.
3. Imagine and draw as if you are a child, your own island. On this island you can add all of the things you would need and want in order to thrive. The purpose of this exercise is to ignite your imagination just as when you were a child, again activating new neural pathways.
I do not share these exercises as a light approach to the sufferings held within you. These are small tools meant to displace and re-ignite the imagining brain. Micro steps in a larger process of healing mind body and spirit.
Until next Friday!
Be well, breathe, read, and make some art!
Jen