Rather than looking for a set of meanings or answers, sometimes simply being present to your images is a way of knowing. I find that experience of being present to my images is similar to the practice of vipassana (insight) meditation. In this form of meditation, one finds a place of awareness from which to observe the internal river of thoughts and sensations that flow through body and mind. Being present to your images without getting attached to them is simply seeing and being with them without judgment. As in meditation, the internal “witness consciousness” is strengthened, and you have the opportunity to practice nonattachment to feelings and experiences. While vipassana is a path of making meaning through self-observation, being present to images is a way of knowing through observing what has been created by the self.  ~Cathy Malchiodi

access a little playful abandon…….be quiet and laugh and be serious and be wild…..what could we discover?

In creative arts therapy images are perceived as guides and helpers. We follow their leads and adopt their purposefulness. Poets similarly work with the interplay between perceptions of the physical world and emotional experience. In the poetic process physical things are personified. People and things correspond to one another. In poetry and creative arts therapy, there is an assumption that there are many mutual influences between physical expressions and human emotions. Are there essential forms and configurations that permeate your life? Is there a central focal point? Many different focal points? What colors do you associate with the different phases of your life? Is there a color that pervades every period of your life? Look at your life in terms of illumination and shadow. What stands in the light? In the darkness? Are there formless qualities of you life? Experiences that cannot be identified with physical structures of any kind?  ~Shaun McNiff

create it, give it away

Like a sandcastle all is temporary.

Build it, tend it, enjoy it.

And when the time comes, let it go.

~Jack Kornfield