“Arts heal the self, soul and the mind, and give voice to the voiceless”

Arts as healing workshops and sessions, teambuilding and concept development for individuals, groups and corporates in Gauteng and Cape Town.

Art as Healing Workshops

Art as Healing and Resilience: Drawing on our Strengths

“Resilience is very different than being numb. Resilience means you experience, you feel, you fall, you fail, you hurt. You fall again. But, you keep going”

What is resilience?

Resilience is ‘the capacity to recover quickly from difficulties; the ability of a substance or object to spring back into shape; elasticity; toughness’ – art as healing can give us ways of working with this important quality when we most need it and on an ongoing basis. Resilience is the process of moving through difficult times or traumatic experiences and adapting and growing. Resilience means that you acknowledge your strengths and positive qualities that you already possess. Resilience gives you the power to remain positive in difficult circumstances – to overcome challenges and maintain or improve your mental health.

Resiliency traits as: ‘optimistic, responsible, creative, synergistic, professional, quick learner, flexible, self-motivated.’  – With art as healing exercises, these traits can be both drawn and then drawn upon. We can retrace our steps, our lives, and search for instances when these capacities were part of us. We can revisit and re-establish these traits, dragging them from the past into the present, rather than allow images of total devastation to be our whole view.

When disaster, (i.e. the pandemic) strikes, when we are traumatized by external events, it is a natural response to withdraw, to seek safety. To take this most necessary ‘time and space for regeneration’. To use this time and space to nurse our wounds, to heal our shattered minds and bodies, to work with colour and texture and shape and making things and drawing pictures, enables the seeping back into ourselves of bounce, elasticity, toughness. And from this firm base of resilience, we can step forth, back into life, back into our own lives.