Heal yourself and your community with this proven 12-week program that uses the arts to awaken your innate healing abilities. From musicians in hospitals to quilts on the National Mall—art is already healing people all over the world. It is helping veterans recover, improving the quality of life for cancer patients, and bringing communities together to improve their neighborhoods. Now it’s your turn. Through art projects, including visual arts, dance, writing, and music, along with spiritual practices and guided imagery, Healing with the Arts gives you the tools to address what you need to heal in your life—physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual. An acclaimed twelve-week program lauded by hospitals and caretakers from around the world, Healing with the Arts gives you the ability to heal your family and your friends, as well as communities where you’ve always wanted to make a difference. Internationally known leaders in the arts in medicine movement, Michael Samuels, MD, and Mary Rockwood Lane, RN, PhD, show you how to use creativity and self-expression to pave the artist’s path to healing.

In 1979, Dr. Bernie S. Siegel, a successful surgeon, took a class from Elisabeth Kübler-Ross that focused on crayon drawing for healing, especially with patients facing life-threatening disease. Siegel incorporated into his practice these techniques — many of which were laughed at by others in the medical community. But his Exceptional Cancer Patients “carefrontation” protocol facilitated healings, often deemed miraculous, and attracted attention. “Dr. Bernie” discovered and shared the fact that while patients might need antibiotics, surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy, their bodies also want to heal. He found that this innate propensity could be aided by unconventional practices, including drawing. Why? Drawing produces symbols often representing the subconscious. Siegel shows how to interpret drawings to help with everything from understanding why we are sick to making treatment decisions and communicating with loved ones. All those facing ill health, and those caring for them, personally and professionally, will welcome the hands-on, patient-proven practices offered here.

A practical and insightful guide, Holistic Healing investigates the practices, theories, research, and history of holistic approaches as it relates to a wide range of health care and human service professionals. This text offers a uniquely comparative and integrated understanding of both ancient and modern Indigenous, Eastern, and Western traditional practices, including bodywork, expressive arts, energy medicine, eco-psychology, transpersonal psychology, naturopathy, homeopathy, Ayurveda, traditional Chinese medicine, and Indigenous healing practices. Practitioners and scholars in health, nutrition, psychology, and social work contribute to research that focuses on individual, organizational, national, and global holistic intervention applications. Chapters in this collection address critical issues such as colonization, human rights, the environment, peace and conflict, and equity and inclusion. This collection is a timely and practical resource for students of undergraduate health, social work, sociology, holistic healing, and psychology programs and is also a great resource for professional practitioners.

This fascinating collection of essays contains a variety of perspectives about the use of expressive arts for facilitating physical and emotional healing. Each author within brings a fresh approach and unique experiences to their writing. Within these pages, you will find many ideas for the use of the arts and can learn how to engage the inner layers of the self that allow natural healing processes of the body and soul to flourish. When we fully engage an art modality, we find ourselves in a place in our consciousness that could be called 'healingspace,' where we feel ourselves whole and re-member ourselves as well. From psychic trauma to physical illness, dis-ease of many kinds may be addressed through the various techniques discussed here. The tools offered by some authors are population specific and age appropriate, while several authors have given us the philosophical underpinnings for it all. While the authors within represent the grassroots voices of this new and rapidly expanding field, several of them have developed their own methods for using the arts, and have thriving practices. Our approach is wholistic. Music, visual arts, movement, dance, and poetry are discussed as separate modalities and in combination with one another in a process or flow. The reader will engage in our experiences with these modalities as they have been lived. The complementary CD that accompanies this book will allows the listener to have a full sound experience of toning. If a rationale is needed for establishing arts programs in medical centers or other health facilities, it can be found here. The book offers tools for self development and for group facilitation. Those wanting to expand their healing practice through the use of the arts will find the book to be a faithful guide. Anyone wishing for a fuller understanding of how the arts may work to facilitate healing will find much food for thought within these pages.

All across the country, a groundbreaking movement is forming in the field of health care: art and medicine are becoming one, with remarkable results. In major medical centers such as the University of Florida, Duke, University of California, and Harvard Medical School, patients confronting life-threatening illness and depression are using art, writing, music, and Dance to heal body and soul. -A woman with breast cancer who has never made art before finds healing and empowerment by creating sculpture. -A man with AIDS uses journaling to overcome feelings of despair and helplessness. -A woman suffering from depression following her divorce learns to dance for the first time in her life--and in he body's movement she rediscovers a sense of play and joy. -A musician gives meaning to his art by helping people with illness transform their life through music. -Physicians and nurses are beginning to use creativity to complement and enhance their medical practice. Creative Healing presents readers with the inspiring ways in which the arts (painting, writing, music, and dance) can free the spirit to heal. In one volume, the authors detail the transformative power of a diverse range of artistic activity. Michael Samuels, MD, has over twenty-five years of experience working with cancer patients and is the best-selling author of Seeing with the Mind's Eye and The Well Baby Book. He teams up with fellow pioneer Mary Rockwood Lane, RN, PhD, to share their extraordinary findings on the healing powers of the arts. Through guided imagery, personal stories, and practical exercises, they teach you how to find your "inner artist-healer," enabling you to improve your health, attitude, and sense of well being by immersing yourself in creative activity. Both Samuels and Lane offer invaluable insight through their personal journeys and extensive groundbreaking research, noting that "prayer, art, and healing come from the same source--the human soul." Because there lies an artist and healer within each of us, Creative Healing is an invaluable resource for anyone wishing to discover the beauty of music, dance, writing or art and connect with a deeper part of oneself. Filled with inspiration and guidance, it will help you make changes in your life and the lives of others and gain access to the sacred place where inner peace exists.

"Highly recommended to anyone that has an interest in aromatherapy and the energetic and vibrational aspects of essential oils."—Kelly Holland Azzaro, Past President of the National Association for Holistic Aromatherapy "An excellent resource...Kac's work is thorough, easy to understand, and gives you the depth to want to delve into using oils on a regular basis."—Ann Boroch, CNC, award-winning author of The Candida Cure Includes more than 100 recipes for everyday use Explore a new world of aromatic awakening, physical healing, and natural delight. The Healing Art of Essential Oils is a comprehensive guide to fifty carefully selected oils, providing a master class in uses, blending, history, and spiritual benefits. Learn how to use oils for physical and emotional healing. Prepare oils for relaxation, stress relief, and treating ailments. You'll find all kinds of uses, such as what oils work best in love spells and how to create rituals with oils. Enjoyed for their spiritual and beneficial properties by cultures around the world for thousands of years, the essential oils presented here will help you achieve holistic wellness and personal enrichment. Praise: "In this well-researched book, Kac Young leads the reader through the history of essential oils and their use in daily life, beautifully bringing together ancient wisdom with modern thought."—Kavitha Chinnaiyan, MD, director of Advanced Cardiac Imaging Education at Beaumont Hospital

What constitutes real recovery for adult victims of abuse? Current support offered to adults is often poorly planned and informed; this book sheds light on the true impact of abuse and how it can be healed. Good Practice in Promoting Recovery and Healing for Abused Adults explores the idea of 'recovery' being something physical in the short-term and 'healing' as an emotional process for long-term work. The book features chapters written by practitioners and researchers from various backgrounds and gives an insight into how to be creative in helping both male and female victims through recovery and healing processes. The prologue introduces the views of victims themselves before the opening chapter considers how recovery and healing should fit into the adult safeguarding process. The chapters then describe creative therapeutic methods which can be employed to help victims recover and to heal in different settings, whilst highlighting the long-term effects of abuse and the subsequent issues to be addressed. The issues covered range from child sexual abuse, domestic abuse and sex trafficking to the abuse of men and holocaust victims. With pedagogical features throughout, the book is essential reading for social workers, nurses, housing officers, support workers, counsellors, therapists, and for anyone working with adults who have experienced abuse in childhood or adulthood.

This book occurs at the intersection of philosophy, critical theory, psychoanalysis and the visual arts. Each chapter looks at art produced in various traumatogenic cultures: detention centres, post-Holocaust film, autobiography and many more.Other chapters look at the Juarez femicides, the production of collective memory, of makeshift memorials, acts of forgiveness and contemporary forms of trauma. The book proposes new ways of 'thinking trauma', foregrounding the possibility of healing and the task that the critical humanities has to play in this healing. Where is its place in an increasingly terror-haunted world, where personal and collective trauma is as much of an everyday occurrence as it is incomprehensible? What has become known as the 'classical model of trauma' has foregrounded the unrepresentability of the traumatic event. New, revisionist approaches seek to move beyond an aporetic understanding of trauma, investigating both intersubjective and intrasubjective psychic processes of healing. Traumatic memory is not always verbal and 'iconic' forms of communication are part of the arts of healing.