Trust the Process

Recently, we had the third meeting of our Young Adult Bereavement Art Group. It's always a bit intimidating, having a group of young souls facing me, their faces carefully blank, but inside, a tangle of  sadness, exhaustion, frustration and hope. The challenge: Somehow we (my co-facilitator and I) have to create a pathway for some of these feelings to find their way out. One of the great tests of teaching is to greet a classroom day after day, seeing the upturned  faces that expect you to offer something that they in turn, can digest. Or not. Perhaps the most difficult challenge is to face apathy.

The main way I know these folks are not apathetic is that they keep coming back, meeting after meeting. Last night, we focused on identifying feelings related to their loss. The group went to work on a "feelings inventory," each one circling the little faces that most closely match their experience.

Next, and this is where my challenge came last night, was to take the most pressing feelings and fill in a body outline with color and symbols, wherever those feelings take hold in their body. I've explained this to groups many times, but somehow, the words I use to explain symbol and metaphor were not there. Only the symbols themselves.

I try to say enough so that their tap is turned on--but not so much that I get in the way of the flow. I hold up examples and talk about butterflies in the stomach and weights on the legs and padlocks on the mouth--and then I stop, almost holding my breath--and wait.

It's slow, they stare at their empty body outlines for a long time, unsure what to do first.  Some of them tentatively begin to outline their bodies in a dark viridian green.

And then it takes hold, carefully and methodically the feelings pour through the markers in streams of red, black, green and orange. Tears are added, broken hearts appear and mouths wide open with shock.

But the greatest change is in the people from whose pens these feelings issue. As we go around the room, one by one each of them shares their map with the group. And the words which come out express relief, calm, contentment, curiosity.

I've heard it a hundred times, but the truth of it does not wear out: "trust the process."

The Head of a New Year

This week marks the beginning of the Jewish New Year, Rosh Hashanah, or "the head of the new year," an important holiday on the Jewish calendar. It's the third day of the High Holidays (or High Holy Days), a ten-day period that ends with Yom Kippur—the holiest day of the Jewish year.

A time of reflection, we look back on the events of the past year, and our actions. Have we harmed anyone or anything? It's time to make amends, to forgive and to ask forgiveness. We remind ourselves, in a gentle way, not to repeat those mistakes.

It's also a time to open our hearts, to grow, even when the opening and growing is a bit tough. What an amazing thing; this holiday that aims to make us bigger hearted people!

In that spirit, I share this poem/prayer by Rabbi Ariel Levy.

As we stand on the edge of this New Year -- readying ourselves to cross over to what will be -- may strength and inspiration rise up within and around us.  May the skies inspire a vast perspective that opens us to new possibilities.  May the fires of devotion turn us toward each other with love.  May the waters remind us that all things change and we are part of the continued unfolding.  And may the earth shine its beauty encouraging our gratitude and dignity. Each of us is here for our short time.  May we live well what we love, offering our gifts and blessings for the well-being of all.   May this year show us the way to live in harmony and peace with each other and all the earth.   And may we help each other believe that this is indeed possible.  

Wish best wishes for a sweet and fulfilling year. May we live well what we love.

All Hands on Deck with Palliative Care

Every so often, I think that it's time to take a break from my blog. This happens when I feel like I'm reaching for topics and even though life seems to be full of them, I can't see the forest for the trees.

What I know is this: I've got a presentation for our Pediatric Palliative Care Consortium here at UC Davis Children's Hospital that's scaring the pants off me--nearly. Because instead of playing it safe and using Powerpoints to hide behind, my co-facilitator and I are going to ask people to break up into groups and interact with one another.

That's not such an unusual thing in the art therapy world, but when you switch to the academic and medical world, there is an increasing distance between the tangible and the virtual.  In a recent New York Times editorial by Richard Kearney, entitled: "Losing our Touch" he notes,

In medicine, "bedside manner" and hand on pulse has ceded to the anonymous technologies of imaging in diagnosis and treatment.

All around us, we are showered with information from ubiquitous social media (of which this blog is a part), wherein we remain at a discreet distance from whoever is providing information on the other end. Now in classes, we often face computers instead of professors. And as you gain professional status, you frequently find yourself in your own office, trying to engage a in webinar, which tends to lull you to sleep rather than enliven the finer points of a subject.

During our part of the day, I want the participants to experience as much as possible, the kind of immediacy that occurs when one is faced with a palliative care patient; the overwhelming feeling of questions that you have no idea how to answer such as : "Is this diagnosis dangerous?" and reaching deep down for some untapped source of strength.

Full humanity requires the ability to sense and to be sensed in turn: the power as Shakespeare said, to "feel what wretches feel":--or one might also add what artists, cooks, musicians and lovers feel. We need to find our way in a tactile world again. We need to return from head to foot, from brain to fingertip, from iCloud to Earth. --Richard Kearney

To this end, we've reserved a room that has tables facing each other rather than toward the front of the room. We'll divide up into groups and tackle a case that involves the anticipatory grief that patients face upon diagnosis. Then we'll take that case through the course of an illness to hospice and beyond, to bereavement.

I hope to model the kind of direct hand to hand care that we want practitioners to offer patients. To do that we want to identify inner strengths, the qualities that each of us possess which allow us to enter tough situations and to be of service, no matter how daunting the circumstances. We'll lay out a banquet of images and after explaining a simple SoulCollage technique, we'llask people this question:

What quality do you call on within yourself to support children and families in their grief?

We'll invite them pick images that speak to them, to their soul, about the qualities that give them the strength and compassion to approach and support families and children at the this crucial stage of life. Can you imagine what will happen if we share these qualities with each other?

When Is a Dog Just a Dog?

Recently, I had the pleasure of hosting a South Korean Art Therapy professor, Sunghee An, at our hospital. Part of the Art Therapy Department at Hanyang Cyber University, Sunghee was curious to see our art therapy program at UC Davis Children's Hospital in action.

I was delighted when, on the morning of our meeting, I walked into the pavilion and found her waiting; collected and ready to get down to details over tea.

What I realized right away, is that when someone visits our hospital, I'm representing not only what I do--but what everyone else does as well--and how I've created my art therapy practice within that institution. When you have been in a position for a number of years, as I have, you set rules for yourself and abide by them. Sometimes, you forget why you do what you do.

Sunghee's questions allowed me to develop a narrative, which as I told the story of our program and explained why I was the only art therapist, I rediscovered many of the reasons why I set up my practice the way I did. I was happy to find that I still approve of my past decisions and that they continue to make sense, some twelve years later.

I took Sunghee on a floor by floor tour of the Children's Hospital: the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit and its very tiny inhabitants, the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit, where we discovered a lively paper doll painting sibling session and, back to our regular pediatrics floor, where we stopped in at a toddler's room to spend some time painting.

Over lunch, we discussed the psychoanalytic approach versus a more resilience oriented one.

While many of our patients have experienced trauma as a result of an accident or disease, we allow patients to guide their choices about art and music. This doesn't always foster in-depth conversations about their feelings. In fact quite the opposite. Because of the double rooms and porousness of the playroom, children often choose to engage in art activities as a means of "just being normal" or "having fun."

What happens while they are doing it, contained within the bounds of a session or an art group, is where change happens.

During Art Group that day, the children created collages of animals, primarily dogs and horses (we'd just had a fantastic donation of dog and horse images). One of the children, about 8 years old, glued several images of dogs onto her mat board and began to paint around it with black.

The color black can sometimes raise concern about a school age child and the two of us wondered privately if something deeper might be going on. I casually asked if this young person had any pets. The answer was "five, but three ran away."

"Who are these dogs?" I asked. "Rex and Toto," he answered and I began to fill in the blanks. The child also covered the back of the card with an image of a schnauzer. When asked about this animal, it turned out to be one of the runaways, who had given birth to a litter prior to running away. One of the pups had died.

In a child who otherwise was hospitalized for a minor condition, I decided to believe that in this case, the dog was just a dog. And yet it wasn't.

The confluence of events that led me to provide images of a variety of dogs and the child appearing on this day, when presented with these images, allowed him to grieve the loss of some beloved friends. Without intense introspection, amongst crawling toddlers,  babies drooling and iv poles beeping, this young guy was able to express the deep currents of his heart.

Ruth's Table

I recently met a new friend, Monica Lee, a San Francisco photographer and artist-in-residence at Ruth's table; a place and a space where people of all generations can meet and explore the arts. The organization was named after artist and sculptor, Ruth Asawa, and is situated in a senior housing facility in the Mission District.

Fascinated, I decided that visiting Ruth's Table would be a perfect artist/art therapist field trip. Securing a professional leave day, I planned an excursion with another artist, Linda Clark Johnson, Monica and her artist friend, Leslie Flores. Monica made a list of artistic destinations and we set off early on a Tuesday morning, all meeting up at the Ferry Building.

After our first compulsory stop at Dick Blick to pick up art supplies, we stopped off at the Andrea Schwartz Gallery to view the work of artist, Wynne Hayakawa, whose landscapes of trees, frozen in a moment of stop motion, provided a perfect first stop.

Wynne's worked intrigued me; the size of the works was large, probably 4' x 4' and they made an impression not unlike that of virtually driving through a forest, looking out the window and trying to secure the images as time and the car moved on.

We also dropped in at San Francisco Center for the Book, a bookbinding and letterpress studio that promotes traditional and experimental book art forms. Walking into the vast open studio space was like wandering around my undergraduate days in the letterpress studio at the University of Iowa. Since then, I thought the art of handset type had almost died out. I was happy to see the trays of type, the Vandercook presses and the exquisite display of books by the Hand Bookbinders of California.

I was also astounded by the landscape of San Francisco and how much it has changed since living there some 30 years ago. It was as if bulldozers had leveled street after street, replacing the old dwellings with newer, trendier but hopefully more earthquake safe townhouses.

However, I needn't have worried that the entire city was remodeled. Our next location was tucked away in an old warehouse district off of Army St. SCRAP, or Scroungers Center for Usable Art Parts was a feast for my recycling eyes. Sprawling in a San Francisco School District warehouse in the Bayview district of San Francisco, SCRAP is the country's oldest creative reuse center, and has been diverting waste from landfills for use as art supplies for over 35 years. According to the website, each year over 200 tons of redeployed junk avoid the fate of the land fill. I'm here to say, that you could create an infinite number of installations with the goods provided there.

After a delicious lunch of fresh fish tacos, served on heavy timbered tables at a Mission taqueria, we made our way to Ruth's Table.

As we entered, Monica explained that the idea for Ruth's Table was the idea of director, Lola Fraknoi. After meeting Lola, we were treated to a tour and entertainment by an older, blind gentleman who had simply walked in off the street and begun to play, quite beautifully, on their grand piano. It was a beguiling scene; the white grand piano (donated by Princess Cruises) set in a spacious gallery with an exquisite calligraphic exhibit and this maestro of the moment, bent over the keys and playing his heart out.

A grandmother and her granddaughter walked in and Monica introduced us to them as two of her students. Monica had recently learned about gelli printing and wanted Linda and I to do a quick demo. We happily obliged using dog fennel that I'd gathered at SCRAP and some plants that her students had picked on their way over.

A quick half an hour later, we were covered in paint and a handful of prints displayed our efforts. Monica dropped Linda and I off at Megabus, where tired and paint stained, we climbed aboard with our backpacks, stuffed with memories of the day.