My concentration is entitled, Creative and Alternative Healing, which is the utilization of creative, artistic or holistic/unconventional methods to achieve healing, be it physical, mental, emotional, spiritual, etc. I’m looking at healing as an attempt to restore balance and harmony within a person and help them to achieve their highest level of wellbeing, which is essentially the state of being comfortable, healthy and happy in one’s life. Wellbeing differs from person to person, as values and what one needs to be fulfilled shifts between people, so this healing is individualized and specifically curated for each person. I’m mostly concerned with the ways people can heal themselves, through natural, holistic and creative means without the use of a practitioner and without participating in the traditional biomedical model of disease. However, while that is ideal, I also recognize that some conditions require the help of the western, allopathic model of treatment, which my concentration also compensates for, by offering complementary healing methods, which can be used in conjunction with those “traditional treatments.”
Ultimately, I’m looking at the ways art and narrative (and the community created through these forms) can facilitate healing. Often times, the biomedical model of treatment fails its patients repeatedly. By focusing solely on fixing the body and suppressing symptoms, doctors fail to consider the whole person, how illness can affect other parts of a person’s identity, not just their body, and ultimately, fails to fully heal them. And I also feel like this model fails to get at what healing is actually about. The biomedical, allopathic model is all about diagnosing symptoms, getting rid of them and learning to “fix yourself” or whatever is wrong with you. However, one of my biggest aims with this colloquium is to change that understanding of healing as “fixing” to healing as accepting yourself and shifting unhealthy habits to ones that are healthier and more beneficial for you.
My concentration looks at the various ways that a person can find healing outside of this traditional method that we are familiar with today. I broke down my concentration into four basic areas: Basic Understanding of Health and Illness, Prevention of Illness through Self-Care, Healing with Complementary and Alternative Methods and then Narrative Healing (which is not limited merely to creative writing, but all the methods one can use to tell a story and share their personal narrative, from photography, to healing art, even music and dance.
The road to my concentration was a bit winding. It began as a personal endeavor to understand my own body and various ways to heal myself. I have experience with mental illness and chronic illness and didn’t find the comfort, relief and support I was looking for in the traditional, western medical model of healing. Often, I would go to the doctor because I was experiencing unexplainable body pain and feel ignored and glossed over for the entire appointment. The doctors would hear the first couple of things I said, prescribe me a new medication without actually informing me about the medication and its effects and uses and then send me on my way, with a huge bill. Every time, I left disappointed. No one could get to the root of my pain, let alone heal it. Everything felt like band-aids on top of gaping wounds, instead of permanent fixes. After a while, I began to accept that this was what health and illness was all about. Detailing symptoms, feeling ignored, and then being given diagnosis on top of diagnosis with a litany of medications.
However, after talking to other people, not limited to people with illness, but just “regular” college students as well, I realized that this was a common concern for a lot of people especially, women, and more specifically women of color. Often times, the healing methods that are most common and readily available to us, fail to consider us as human beings, and rather look at us as a sum of our symptoms, a walking embodiment of disease or illness.
And that realization was really disheartening for me. I wanted to fix this. I wanted to do something about this, but I didn’t really know how to go about this until I started my college career. Coming to college, I knew I was interested in art (photography and created writing) and I knew I wanted to help people, but I wasn’t sure how to do that exactly. In the spring semester of my freshman year, I took Creative Arts in the Helping Professions and it set me on this entire creative and alternative healing journey. It was my first introduction to anything outside of the traditional, sterile environment of medicine and for my final project, I proposed a project that used photography as a therapeutic tool for healing and community, working with adolescent girls with chronic illness. I was fascinated by the prospect of using art to heal, rather than medication and wanted to pursue it even further. From there, I took as many creative and holistic healing classes as I could find, including various arts workshops to advance my own craft, so that I could be able to teach some of these creative techniques to others.
Classes such as “The Science of Happiness”, “Photograph NY: Create your Vision”, “Creative Arts in the Helping Professions”, “Mad Science/Mad Pride”, “Literature of Children and Adolescents”, “Medical Anthropology”, “Intro to Art Therapy”, “Creative Writing: Fiction and Poetry”, “Advanced Creative Nonfiction”, and “Complementary and Alternative Mental Health” really informed my thinking around this topic. However, the class where I was really able to flesh out my ideas about my topic was through my independent study, “The Study of Self-Healing.”
Literally a week before I began the study, one of my childhood friends died suddenly, and a few months after that, one of my best friends was murdered, so the class became one of absolute necessity instead of one borne out of interest alone. My independent study was an arts-based and experiential course that provided me with a personal exploration of the art of self-care. It took as its starting point the evolution of health and wellbeing as both a concept and a practice, as I aimed to define the fundamentals of healthy well-being and positive psychology and what each ideology actually entails. Essentially, the course took a multi-dimensional approach to self-care that examined physical, emotional, cognitive, spiritual, social, professional, and creative health. I put the concepts I learned into practice through immersive arts experiences, along with revelatory, practical assessments. These exercises, coupled with the range of readings I interacted with worked to revitalize my own health, by helping me realize and establish a self-care routine that I could follow, by helping me to answer the question of What it means to live a fulfilling life and heal in the midst of grief.
The work I did in my independent study was a true starting point to this colloquium, allowing me to organize my thoughts around this concept as well as allowing me to actually put my concentration into practice to test its effectiveness. A good portion of the books and topics covered in the study have made it into my colloquium. In fact, one of the texts, Neon Soul, allowed me to really conceptualize what my concentration was essentially all about. One of the poems, entitled “Loss” can really be understood as an introduction point to this entire conversation. It states: “The question is as hard as / swallowing rocks and as / brutal as stormy water / crashing to shore / the question is not always why / but how do we let go without / falling apart – without crumbling / from loosening our grip on what / was and what could have been”
In this particular poem, the author, Alexandra Elle, poses the important question of how to cope with the stress of living, especially in the face of loss or illness. She raises questions such as: how does one let go of the carefully curated identity that they created for themselves and the vision of life they had held close for so long? How does one let go and embrace the present, the future that is right in front of them? The quote addresses the point of how difficult it can be to heal. How impossible it may seem at first, but how vital and necessary it is in the end. My colloquium is an answer to this question by providing a litany of creative and alternative healing techniques that allows one to cope with their circumstances and ultimately equip them with the tools necessary in order to thrive.
Originally, I was mostly concerned with the healing of various chronic mental and physical conditions: depression, bipolar disorder, lupus, arthritis, dementia, etc. and how art, self-care and holistic health could improve the quality of life of people with living with “incurable conditions.” However, after learning more about acute illnesses and considering the pain that can come along with one’s daily existence, I decided to expand my concentration to be therapeutic for people at all places and stages of the health spectrum, from those who are already considered “healthy” and want to maintain their wellbeing, to those who are experiencing acute illness, such as grief, broken bones or curable diseases, such as MRSA, to people who find a difficult time functioning and reaching their full level of potential in their daily life due to stress and not having the necessary knowledge to achieve fulfillment, all the way to my original audience of the chronically ill.
The texts I gathered cover a range of topics, but are all related by the concept of healing, through defining and explaining various healing methods to exploring the ways in which other people have went about their own healing through creative and alternative means.
I posed a lot of questions to myself during my preparation for this colloquium, starting with trying to understand and break down some of the core concepts. With the texts guiding me, I worked to understand what it means to be sick or healthy, what the modern understanding is of illness and disease, what wellness and health actually mean and what the relationship is between wellness and illness. From there, I worked on the concept of “healing” - how has healing evolved over time, what does it mean to heal and what does it mean to actually be “healed?” Finally, after that foundational knowledge was set, I was able to move onto the various ways there are to achieve healing and wellness, starting with what I consider to be the core of my concentration, Narrative Healing. Narratives play a huge role in the construction of our identity and the world around us. For centuries, people have used stories and storytelling as a way of conveying values and exploring life. Myths, fairytales, self-help books, autobiographies, and stories of Biblical origin all serve to provide and communicate meaning. Texts such as Narrative and the Cultural Construction of Illness and Healing, The Wounded Storyteller, and the “Experience of Healing Stories” allowed me to understand the core concepts of narrative healing, how it works and the importance of narrative in terms of healing. The Old Testament, Aesop’s Fables and Arabian Nights give some ancient understandings of narrative healing. Art and Healing, Phototherapy in Mental Health, the Wounded Storyteller and Writing as a Way of Healing explained the nuances of various forms of narrative healing and Unholy Ghost, For Colored Girls, Neon Soul, Images from Within, “Cranes in the Sky” and “What is Wrong with Me?” gave some examples of narrative healing at work. Related to Narrative Healing is the concept of metaphors and Illness as Metaphor, Unholy Ghosts, Narrative and the Cultural Construction of Illness and Healing and “Disease, illness, sickness, health, healing and wholeness: Exploring some elusive concepts” explained the role that metaphors play in the phenomena of disease and illness.
Another huge pillar of Creative and Alternative Healing, is Holistic Health and Complimentary and Alternative Healing. Physica by Hildegard Von Bingen, Eber’s Papyrus and De Medicina gave some ancient understandings of holistic health and wellness in general while Healing with Complimentary and Alternative Therapies, Invitation to Holistic Health and Expressive Therapies gave some practices of CAM therapies and how they work.
Last, but not least, is the idea of self-care. The process of self-care can most easily be understood in the poem “The Ritual of Healing” by Alexandra Elle (featured in Neon Soul): She states: “bathe / soak / scrub with sugar and salt / wash your hair / cleanse your body / taste your tears / what used to be / is gone now / what used to be / is no longer yours / to keep. / watch it twirl / down the drain / watch it dance / away with soot / and skin / the pain, the pain, the pain / free it / admit it / honor it / gather yourself / drenched in truth / and let it go.” The poem addresses the figurative and literal process of self-care in order to heal. The first step of healing is recognizing the fact that you need a transformation, that something is missing and you desperately want it. In order to fully heal, one needs to learn how to take care of themselves, physically, emotionally, mentally and spiritually by developing a deep affection for one’s self. There is also a level of acceptance that must be reached – to accept yourself where you, to accept that loss is a part of life, to accept the love you deserve so that you may find the strength to heal. You have to acknowledge and accept your pain in order to do something about it and let it go.
For this topic, Nicomachean Ethics explains some original, ancient ideas regarding self-care, while texts such as Invitation to Holistic Health and Invitation to Self-Care help to define the core components of self-care, as well as establishing some rewards and complications of the practice and differentiating between self-care and complimentary healing.
Ultimately, my concentration is looking at virtually everything that health and healing encompass. It is very broad and ambitious in its approach, so I tried to break it down into smaller sections to make it easier to understand. This colloquium is by no means exhaustive - while it covers a vast array of healing techniques, there are still many, many more that exist. I wanted my colloquium to be an introduction to healing, a starting point for people who have a desire to change their existence, but don’t know where to start.