Michael Samuels, M.D. has used art and guided imagery with cancer patients for over twenty five years in private practice and in consultation. He has watched as his patients have drawn, played music, and written themselves well. He also experienced the power of art and healing personally as he wrote a journal and a novel while his wife lived and then died with breast cancer. He is also the founder and director of Art As a Healing Force, a project started in 1990 devoted to making art and healing one. He lectures and does workshops nationwide for physicians, nurses, artists, and patients on how to use art in healing. He is the author of seventeen books including the best selling Well Body Book, Well Baby Book, Well Pregnancy Book, and Seeing With the Mind’s Eye, Creative Healing, Spirit Body Healing and The Path of the Feather.

People who wish to participate more fully can start several days before the event. If you have a power animal or an aspect of yourself that is already a healing artist let that part of you come forth. Invite your animal spirit or artist healer to start to invoke art as one on earth. Invite them to come out and be present for this week. Invite them to guide you and show you what you can do to become your most embodied artist healer.

In the workshop we will live the four spirals of art and healing. The experience of art and healing can be visualized as taking place on four spirals: the spiral of lived experience, the spiral of transformation, the spiral of empowerment, and the spiral of love. This description of how art and healing takes place is not theoretical, it is real. It comes from the experiences of people who have healed themselves with art, music, and dance, and it is taken from the actual stories they have told us. It starts from right where you are now. The first spiral of lived experience starts from your illness, your depression, your problems, your joy. So that the four spirals or art and healing are about starting out from your life, about making the first piece of art only from who you are now.

We think it is useful for you because it divides art and healing process into four parts that are you can do separately. Its framework helps you to see that the process is easy and automatic and yet powerful and profound. Each spiral is a description of a part of the real process. Each spiral is a deepening of the process, a turn around it again, a deepening of your work, and a step towards healing. The whole process is a spiral that is constantly moving. When you go into your own creativity you go deep, your vision appears. The process is a spiral because it goes around and deepens there is no point of definition just movement. In this place you don’t have to do anything or have any plan. You only need to make the art and be there. The art is a mirror an actualization of the soul, the spiral is endless and continuous it can contract itself to go into a sacred space. You go into art, into your dream space of sacred fire. In there it is dense.

The entire healing process can be pictured in your mind’s eye in metaphorical form as a journey on a sacred spiral. The spiral down can be imagined as a concentric pathway of creativity. Spirals are concentric forces that bring a person down into their own inner creative energy. When we reach the center of these spirals we will reach the center of our heart where we are deeply connected to the world. Within the center of the heart, an inner eye opens up, the eye of awareness and witness. From the center of our spirit, we experience our inner connectedness . As the art comes out, you see that everything comes out, and you are like everything. This is about birth. The art is what you are giving birth to. The art in this sense is an offering that heals you, an offering directly from your heart.

So in the week before the workshop, go to your own lived experience. Find what comes to you about your own life, and let images come to you as a dream. Don't worry about doing anything with them, let them come and we will work with them in the workshop with art, music, and dance.

During the workshop I use a medicine wheel as a teaching tool. It is mine, you will make yours. I put it here so you can see it and be familiar with it because it is part of what we will do together. I am not trying to get anyone to use shamanic or medicine wheel imagery who is uncomfortable with it. If it is not your metaphor consider it a way of looking at the world that is an earth driven spirituality.

My medicine wheel has four or six directions, they include an animal or force, a meaning or life pattern, an element, and a theme

Mine are:

West, the bear, the unconscious, water, healing this is the direction of the medicine bear, the traditional animal of healing, it is where the imagery comes from, the depths of our visionary space, it is the place of power, the controller of the wheel

North, the turtle, grounding, earth, embeddedness this is the direction of grounding in your job, family, home, children, and the earth as your mother, here you are in her body, and in your life at once, it is home and your deep home

East, the owl or hawk, change, air, spiritual flight this is the direction of change in our lives, cancer, the diagnosis, our new life to come, and flying into her heart, into the visionary space to see the images

South, the lion, love and passion, fire, meaningfulness this is the direction of why we wake up in the morning, falling in love, passion for anything we want to do, meaningfulness,

Up , the eagle or the angel, spiritual ascendancy, goddess realms, peace this is the direction of going to she who gardens us from above to rest in peace and be totally loved

Down, the sea goddess, whales, going deep, birth realms, dreaming this is the direction of the deepening process, the power of the visions, the giving birth and death.

In this workshop we will make medicine wheels from the smallest to the largest from things we love.

We will make a group medicine wheel for our workshop too.

Art and healing are one. Now is the time when the two disciplines are coming together and merging, just like you merge with your lover. This workshop will celebrate art and healing becoming one again.