New Moon Art Ritual: Artemis Sacred Journeys

Happy New Moon Goddesses!  “As surely as there is a voyage away, there is a journey home.”  ― Jack Kornfield, After the Ecstasy, the Laundry Namaste, Love, and Light, Lisa and Mary “There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it.” ~Edith Wharton Creating Time to Be Inspired Aligning with Cycles of the Moon THE NEW MOON RITUAL…SETTING YOUR INTENTIONS & MANIFESTING YOUR DESIRES by Crystal Wind The new moon is the birthing cycle of the moon’s various phases. Are you ready to attract your heartfelt longings by doing a moon ritual focused on manifestation? The new moon phase is an optimal time for planning and seeding your intentions. Seedlings need a period of gestation before they break through the soil and reach for the sunlight. This is also true for our cultivating our ideas and clearing the way for our visions to surface in reality. The dark side of the moon, with its mysterious unseen forces, offers a nurturing environment where our intentions can establish roots before their miraculous manifestations begin to sprout and reach out to the stars. MOON RITUAL FOR BIRTHING YOUR WISHES AND DESIRES Begin by setting aside a few minutes each month during the new moon phase to focus on your wishes. This will help give you clarity of mind and fill your heart with promise. When it comes to setting goals or planning ahead for your future there is no better time to get started than during the new moon. Any intentions stated or written down also carries power, so please take care in considering those things that you truly want. The saying "Be careful what you ask for, you just might get it." is fair warning whenever setting your new moon intentions into motion. But, no worries. The moon has its phases and so do our individual wants and needs. This is why it is a good practice to rededicate your list of intentions each month when another new moon cycle returns for a visit. PREP FOR UPCOMING NEW MOON MANIFESTATION Set aside 20-30 minutes to do the ritual itself. Supply suggestions: notebooks pen and colored markers scissors scotch tape candle matches incense white sage smudge meditation CDs (What I like to do is get a clear white pillar candle  and take sharpie, writing out my intentions on the candle. Then I light till it burns out ~ Lisa) Prepare yourself a sacred space where your will perform the ceremony when the new moon arrives. SETTING YOUR NEW MOON INTENTIONS IN MOTION Cleanse your sacred area with an opening prayer, a sage smudging, and/or by burning some incense.   Light one or more candles.   Center your being and calm yourself in whatever way is appropriate for you. Take some deep cleansing breaths, slip in a meditation CD to listen to, and/or leisurely sip on a cup of relaxing herbal tea.   Open your notebook, and date the first page. Write down these words “I accept these things into my life now or something better for my highest good and for the highest good of all concerned.” or something similar. Below your affirmation statement, begin writing down your desires. Your list may consist of a single item or you may have several pages listing multiple items. Try not to limit yourself. If having many things in your life helps to fulfill you then don’t deny yourself wanting these things.   During the month when an item on your new moon list comes to you no not merely cross it off of your list. Take the time to rewrite the list in its entirety eliminating the manifested item from the listing. Revising your master list in this way is highly recommended. At the same time you may add whatever else that you have decided you would like. Feel free to reword any of the original phrases to better suit your life now. It is natural that your desires will change as time advances.   A second notebook will be used as a manifestation scrapbook where you can paste in pictures or catalog clippings of items that you are wanting to manifest. Creating manifesting scrapbooks or vision boards is a fun project to undertake, enjoy yourself! You will soon be amazed how these things begin to find their way into your life once you start this process. “And as to me, I know of nothing else but miracles."Walt Whitman   My mission in life is not merely to survive, but to thrive; and to do so with some passion, some compassion, some humor, and some style. ~ Maya Angelou   " we all move forward when, we recognize how resilient and striking the women around us are” ― Rupi Kaur Namaste, Hive!

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Artemis Hive 2017

“Set your life on fire. Seek those who fan your flames.” – Rumi

#GoddessPilgrimage #ArtandYoga #TinosGreece #SacredSites #Artemis #Archetype #DivineFeminine #Womensempowerment

Goddess Pilgrimage to the Island of Miracles; June 2017 Picture Diary

Creative Healing Arts By Mary Rockwood Lane PhD RN FAAN

APPENDIX:   HANDBOOK ON CARING SCIENCE

Creative Healing Arts

Mary Rockwood Lane PhD RN FAAN

Watson Caring Science Institute

College of Nursing, University of Florida

 

I who am the beauty of the green earth
and the white moon among the stars
and the mysteries of the waters,
I call upon your soul to arise and come unto me.

For I am the soul of nature that gives life to the universe.
From Me all things proceed and unto Me they must return.
Let My worship be in the heart that rejoices,
for behold, all acts of love and pleasure are My rituals.
Let there be beauty and strength,
power and compassion,

honor and humility,
mirth and reverence within you.

And you who seek to know Me,
know that the seeking and yearning will avail you not,
unless you know the Mystery:
for if that which you seek,
you find not within yourself,
you will never find it without.

For behold,
I have been with you from the beginning,

and I am That which is attained at the end of desire.

 

 

How art and healing are one

Art and healing is a caring healing creative practice that explores the lived experience of what it means to be human.  Art is the emergence of the metaphysical realm of our humanness. It can reveal the expression of what we can know to be true since words alone can limit the fullness of life’s expression. Art, music, poetry, theater and dance can open up the possibilities of our human potential to be known and to be fully alive. The caring science is the foundational philosophical world view that addresses the human experience based on self-love, self-care, self-awareness and soul care. Caring science embraces the nature of creative expression as a way of practicing loving kindness, authentic presence, being in the now and the expression of both negative and positive feelings. The Caritas processes support art as a way of caring and a healing art form.

Art as a way of healing weaves together the inner and outer world. Art becomes an outer expression of art that can reflect the inner world of the human’s experience. Healing Art flows from the divine source of the eternal inner wellspring of the creativity which emerges from the heart. Creative healing can be way of caring for self, others and community. Art expression is opens up dynamic and natural flow realigning divine right relationship with our own true source of creativity. Art creates an opportunity to care for we hold most deeply within ourselves. This can be unexpected and deeply meaningful.  Art in its many forms expresses the metaphysical reality that can be the unseen aspect of ourselves in a wondrous and magical nature. Art creates meaning about the underlying conditions of our bodies, emotions, mind and spirit. Creativity can be a fluid expression of life experience from pain and suffering to the transcendent moments of life.

Creativity has a powerful way to acknowledge and reveal the presence of the deepest relationship with self and explores what needs to heal on the soul level. The caring consciousness is enhanced by the power of intention to facilitate healing. It can tap into the human experience of what is beyond knowing and reveals the depth of mystery and wisdom from the inner life world. This is the miracle. This power of healing flows from a higher consciousness of caring. The caritas process of loving kindness and practice of equanimity is inherent in the individual’s artistic expression. The ability to have faith and trust the process is essential to release the inner critic that holds someone back from living authentic presence. Being in the moment is the ability to experience truth, feel compassion and offer forgiveness for the pain, suffering, and/or lack of caring.

 

Health is expanding consciousness, and since art facilitates the experience of self-awareness, self-realization and self-love, it is expanding consciousness. Artistic and aesthetic expresses the nonlocal consciousness as well as the local level. The non-local level consciousness resides into our entire being. Alex Grey is a healing artist that demonstrates in his art, the open system of the human being connected to source as it reveals the inner light matrix of the living soul. This nonlocal consciousness is energy in an invisible light spectrum to the naked eye yet it is there.

 

It is with intention, self-awareness and caring, this light consciousness can become more dynamic and transformative. The intentionality of caring in artistic expression can be deeply transformative. Art becomes an emergence of the light from the depth of our being at the soul level. The song, the drawing, the movement, the dance, the story moves from the depths of our unitary consciousness into the light of our unique human expression into forms of personal beauty, personal pain and personal realization into forms, images and felt body expressions which

can be recognized by others. This creates a consciousness connected in the unitary of belonging and we are one heart, one soul, and one humanity. Intentions set energetic motions into the unitary energy field with purposeful revelations of the spirit which are residing in the human body which not only heal self but others and community as well. It is a purposeful energetic focus of human caring in the emergence and co creation of human connectedness. Art plays itself out in the multiple realms of metaphysical reality.

 

The movements, the gestures, the voices, the songs, the poems, the stories, the dances are the multidimensional expressions of our humanness. The art expression has a tremendous impact in the life world of being human. Let’s return to what it means to be human.

Art and healing returns us the basic premises of the practices of caritas. The practices of self-care, self-healing, trust and having faith, surrendering, compassion, forgiveness, authentic presence, listening to another person’s story (or artistic expression), honoring the life story of another and honoring the dignity and integrity of the other as a sacred being in the world. Caring science provides the premises of creating healing environments, how the power of the beauty, harmony and balance impacts on the human body and experience. Caritas honors the body as the Sacred in the physical therefore in its fullest expression of being a body in an artistic expression of self. Caritas honors the mystery of the human spirit as it emerges into form and images. Caritas creates a way of seeing the illumination of the human spirit as it is revealed in artistic expressions. Art opens the portal to the presence of the divine intelligence and the open heart. Art illuminates the higher reality which holds the deepest and most potent resources for healing.

The paradigm of the Unitary Caring Science embraces the creative healing arts, as we explore the following and create meaning. “Patterns, intentionality, energy, inter-subjectivity, subjectivity, presence, authenticity, transpersonal, meaning, wisdom, intuitive, emotive, nonlinear, reflective, contemplative, complexity, paradox……” Jean Watson speaks at the 3rd International European conference on Human Caring June 2017 Lucca Italy. This paper represents the constant emergence and evolution of her work as it relates to art as a way of human caring.

A Sacred Journey

Picture art and healing like a sacred journey. Picture yourself as a person who needs to heal your life in some way.  You travel to a foreign land you have never seen before to find helpers and go on a pilgrimage.  You go into the sky, across seas, into forests, mountains, deserts and the darkest places. You meet a magical holy person who is pure love, a teacher, a seer. She is a living mystic.  She leads you to the special place where love, art and caring has the power to heal. But there is a tremendous task. Only you can learn the power of caring for yourself.  So you make art to create meaning of your life, and art comes out of you to your wonder and amazement. Your art is pure freedom and it is your truth.   You are the one who will be healed.  This land is the inner world of your imagination. The figure who is the seer becomes you as the artist.  The figure who is the healer is you too.  It is all you.  It only seems like they are different parts.  She is the Oracle. She simply reminds you to love yourself and each other.  This journey will make the story true. This is the sacred journey of caring science in today’s words.

When we each find our own song, as Jean Watson says in Sacred science, Caring science, we find out what we love the most, our self-caring and healing begins.  Deep within all of us is the place of perfect beauty from which we all come.  It the same place from which we are born.  It is the same place to which we will return. In that place, we will find our deepest peace, our most profound memories of who we are.  In our lives this is the place of the memory of our brightest moment.  It is tied to our vision of being touched, being nurtured, being loved perfectly, being in the presence of something greater than ourselves. It is also tied to our memory of our greatest sadness, of our losses, of our fears of our own death.  In the center of this place of beauty, is the energy that heals us.  This is also the energy of our own passionate creativity.

 

A guided imagery story of art and healing: The legend of the Ancient woman of the springs

Stories have always been used by teachers.  We are taught most profoundly by symbols, morals, and archetypes whose meanings sink in without our always understanding them at first.  This is why fairy tales were told to children, why stories from the Bible, the Koran, or the Vedas were told to help people feel the presence of a greater power, why even older myths and legends, have always been used to help people grasp the ineffable, the sacred.

Guided imagery as a mind body therapy is also deeply relaxing and experiential.  It is a basic tool in caring arts. It is used in healthcare settings worldwide to help patients relax and heal. Guided imagery is as simple as picturing an event or memory in your imagination.  If you relax and close your eyes and picture your bedroom, you can look around in your imagination and "see" your bed, your dresser, the windows, and the color of the walls.  When you use guided imagery as a caring healing practice, you can imagine your body's healing light body matrix.

The legend of the ancient woman of the springs is a feminine archetypal myth, that links art and healing.  It is about how art and healing were one in a mythical time of spirits and how we are still connected to our ancestors through deep memories and our own physiology.  The legend itself is as old as any story and aspects of it appear in Native American legends, Jewish lore, Sufi myths and African stories.  The legend of the woman of the springs is about the wellspring of creativity that is within each of us. It is about creation, connections, and birth.

It is also a story about you being loved perfectly for who you are right now.  In this legend, the woman of the springs is the Earth mother that created you, loves you, even if you are ill, in crisis, depressed, or lost.  She loves you into the very center of your sadness, the deepest heart of your pain, the core of your anger.  We have the lost memories of being inside her body in the soft whooshing, the moving, the dimmed colors, the lub dub of her heartbeat, the flowing sounds of her breathing.   This is the first healing art, music, and dance that we recall.  This ancient legend brings us there as softly as she sings.  Do you hear her voice?   Healing art is about going back into the place where we were loved perfectly, and where we were embraced by sound, colors, and movement.  It is about you loving yourself for who you are right now and being seen and honored for who you are right now.  In the legend, the Earth Mother is the one who nurtures us and care for us.

Guided Imagery exercise

I will tell you a story.  It is a story that is older than any other.  This story is deep in our memories, this story is deep in your soul.  It is the story of the creation of art and healing. It always begins with the story of the ancient woman of the springs.  She has always been seen as the weaver of our dreams, as the mother of creativity and art, as the one who could heal.   Close your eyes, relax, let your breathing slow down. Start from the ordinary, from your kitchen table, from a drive in your car, or a hospital room from wherever you are. Go into your imagination on a journey. Go into a mystical forest.  It is a secret place, it is the place that only you can see, it is a place in your imagination.  You can find it in any moment.  You will find it by becoming ill, by being in a life crisis, by seeing death, by falling in love, by becoming an artist. First, imagine that you are on a path. It is a narrow path, the ground is dirt, it is hard enough so it is comfortable to walk on.  It is the path of the creative caring healer.  As your feet find it, you can imagine that you start to walk.  Feel the hard ground, hear your footsteps fall, feel the grass on the sides of the path touch your legs.  Smell the air, feel the warm soft breeze on your face.  As you walk you begin to feel differently, the air itself changes, it opens and fills with light., it expands and as it expands, you expand too.  Your eyes open wider.  your ears can hear more clearly. Your body moves by itself and your breath is not only yours anymore.  

As you go down the path, your way darkens and narrows slightly.  The leaves touch your skin and the soft earth caresses your feet.  The warm moist air glistens on the leaves like dew drops and the energy within you flows outward.  As you look ahead, you can see an emerald pool down a short hill.  It is round and beautiful and it shines in the afternoon sun.  It is on the bottom of a glade of small trees...  The pool is deep blue and perfectly round and in its center, is a spring that flows upwards from the earth as pure clear water. You can see the bubbles coming to the surface in whirlpools, you can almost hear the bubbling as it goes on forever.  Now look upwards on the ground next to the spring.  Above the spring, she sits, in perfect and eternal peace.  She is the most beautiful creature you have ever seen, she is a woman of pure spirit.  As you look at her, you can see that she changes as you see her.  One moment she is the Earth mother looking down on you with perfect love.  One moment she is your lover, looking at you with eternal desire, and in the next moment she is an old woman with a loom who weaves the silver and golden threads that make the springs and the earth itself.  And then, in another moment she is a turtle who has sat forever on the side of the spring watching all of it being born.  As she sits and changes like the light you can see that she has been there forever and has created the world.  She weaves the fibers of her most beautiful dream.  She weaves art and healing as one.  She weaves each of us into the vision as artists, as healers.  She weaves the very spirals that we travel on, on the energy that makes us fall in love.  She is weaving this story as I am telling you. She is weaving her song on earth.  She is singing to us.

Now look more closely. She sits on the edge of the spring and as she looks down inside the spring, she can see the eternal wellspring of creativity and she can see your life.   She has meditated here for a million years and she can see the water spring up from the very center of her own heart.  She sees how beautiful she is, was, and will be.  She sees how it always flows, and how it will flow for a million lifetimes.   For each lifetime, each of our ancestors before us from the first one, she has sat there.  She has been there for all of eternity.  

You can see that out of the spring comes a turquoise light.  It shines on her face and on yours.  You can see that she is very ancient.  If you look closely you can see that a part of her is young and youthful, and a part of her is very ancient and wise.  Look at her hands. As she sits, and you look at her hands, it is almost as if she holds a magic wand, from which she is weaving a magic web.  You can see that she looks deep into the springs, and from the center of the spring you can see the energy go up into her hands.  She weaves a magic web for you.  She catches the springs energy and power, and weaves it into the earth.  She sees it and her hands can feel it.  When you look at her hands closely, you can see that she is weaving a spiral of light, and if you look very closely at what her hands are weaving, you can see that it is the light from exploding nebula that come from the deepest inner depths. This is the moment and source that is the creation of images.   As she takes the dream of art and healing from the spring, she takes it to each one of us and weaves it into our hearts.  There is a string inside of each strand of woven web. These strings go from her hand and fly up as one, to each one of us, to you, up into the center of your heart.  You are in the place where time and space are not limited and these threads come up like spirals and you can see them go into infinity and they go up and down in the past, present, and the future.  She holds the interlocking connections together at the side of this eternal spring.  She can see us always.   And now, we can see her.  She is weaving the web and holding the connections together.  We can see that we are connected to many others.  We are connected to everyone who is healing themselves from the beginning of time to the end of time.  As we see her, we realize that we too are part of her dream.  It is the ancient dream of art and healing as one.   She sings to us in her eternal chant. "Each of you is an artist.  Each of you is a healer". She is the living legend of the ancient divine feminine. The path to her spring is the practice of caring, wisdom, compassion and love.

My personal story of healing with the arts

Within each personal story is the actual way it happened.  Theory is the way of seeing that reality. A personal story is something to be felt and experienced.   Art and healing is a passion, art is a way of healing, a way of caring, and a way of knowing.  My story goes……

 

“Several decades ago I was extremely ill.  I was going through a very difficult life event. My husband asked for a divorce.  I went into a rage, depression, and completely out of control.  All the resources in my life had collapsed and I was drowning.  I was not able to deal constructively with my life, with my children, or with my friends.  I was in therapy, but I wasn’t making any movement forward.  I was surrounded by my grief and I couldn’t see past it.  I was in a place of darkness and despair.  I remember the therapist saying to me, "It's time to do something different with your rage and your grief."

In a lucid moment, I decided to abandon my fears of being a painter, something I had always dreamed of being, and had never given myself permission to be, because I never felt good enough.  Finally, I did not put so much pressure on myself to be "good enough."  I just remembered I had always wanted to be an artist. At that time, I felt so devastated that the fear of inadequacy was minute compared to the painful loss I was experiencing.  In my memory, I remember the way everything happened like it was a slow motion movie. .  I walked out of the therapist’s office.  I was at the end of my rope.  It was a drizzling-rainy kind of day, it seemed like life was going on without me.  I was deeply depressed.  My body was in such pain that I wanted to fall down and die.   I remember walking up to a large muddy puddle.  I could see my refection in the mud. I thought about just of falling down in it.  I glanced up and there was a slow-moving car hesitantly driving towards me. As I looked at it, I flashed on the face of a woman I recognized.   It was my friend Lee Ann. She was a painter.   She came up and rolled down the car window, ‘Why don’t I take you to breakfast and I’ll take you to my studio and you can start painting.' " I took out a large canvas and did not even know how to hold a brush.  I looked though magazines and saw a picture of a woman who was broken and distorted. That was how I felt.  I started painting. I got excited about the colors of the paint, how the shapes appeared on the paper.   My painting was large and it started to look like something, most importantly it looked like my pain and it looked like how I felt.   I forgot about how I felt and instead looked at how I felt.   I got excited about the making of the painting.  Then I got another canvas and started a series of paintings of woman.  They were all distorted in the beginning.   I painted garish backgrounds.  I took photographs of myself and I started painting myself.   I become absorbed in the process and painted how I felt, instead of thinking of how I felt.   I began to realize I was painting my life.

"Next, I created a studio space for myself and simply began painting.  I painted feverishly. In the beginning, I made no attempt to define myself or my process.  I painted from pure feeling states.  I became absorbed in the pure expression and gesture of painting.  I could completely release my energy passionately on the canvas.  The series turned out to be self-portraits.  The first painting I called "Cut Out My Heart."  It was my pain, a deeply intense and dying pain.  The figure was broken, distorted, diffuse, crumpled, crying, and bleeding.  I painted "her."  This figure had been my despair, my uncensored and purely emotional energy.  And in the moment, I had released this image, I stepped back and looked.  Gasp. What I saw was an aspect of myself that I couldn’t face, it was so ugly.  Yet I felt calm and detached.  I had let go, on an intense emotional and physical level.  Painting is physical for me, I embody my pain as I paint it. For the first time, I was experiencing my pain in a strange and new way.  As a painter, I stood in front of the canvas and was for the first time in control.  I painted my emotions, I painted my body.  I could feel that I was the creator of myself.  I backed away, left the studio, and went home.  When I returned, I saw that the image had captured and contained a moment that was now past.  Then, I had an incredible insight.  The painting remained an object that contained an image created in genuine and immediately felt expression, and I now had moved past it.  I realized that there was movement and I was witnessing my own transformation.

"As I painted this series of self-portraits, in each painting I struggled with form and perspective.  Metaphorically I was recreating and reconstructing my inner form and inner perspective.  The external creative process mirrored my inner world.  I realized the manifestation of movement and change was powerful and it was a process of knowing myself.  As I immersed myself in the painting, I not only became well, but clearly became the artist I had always wanted to be, a part of myself I had neither acknowledged nor honored.  It was from this personal experience that I realized that art could be used as a vehicle for healing.

"Art became a way to know myself through the experience of the personal pain that I painted.  In seeing it, I could step away.  I became the artist, and the series of paintings remained as the physical creation of pain.  They were now my art, completely separate from me. It was a tangible experience of growing away from the place I had been when the images were painted.  

 

 

In essence I became free.  Then I spent time in my studio with my girlfriends painting my life.  I spent two years as an artist in my studio.  I painted my children playing on the beach.  I painted the surrounding landscapes that I saw.  I would set up still life on the kitchen table and I would paint the things that I loved.".

 

Your inner artist as your inner healer

The basic foundation of Creative Healing Arts is Caring Science

 

This is a painting of my grandmother when she had Alzheimer’s, Only Childhood Icons lingered in her world of confusion. In my grief, I painted her every day to be with her, connected, loving and caring for her. I was immersed in her world and I loved her more deeply as she passed away.  Art healed me, art heals others, and art heals the earth.

Each of us has deep within us an inner artist and an inner healer.  The inner artist is the part of us that is passionately creative, that feels love, that feels connected to everything around us, that can see, that knows who we are, that is at home, and that is at peace.  The inner artist can go anywhere in the inner world.  No place is closed to them.  They can even go to the inner healer and merge with it and bring it out.  The inner healer is the part of you that is the body’s wisdom that balances your body perfectly and sets your blood flow, your immune system, your physical body to be in harmony. Art frees the healer within so you can heal and care for yourself in times of crisis and stress.  The expression of Art frees your spirit so your mind and body are in harmony.