Art Therapy School

I wanted to share a bit about Art Therapy school. I've been working in the mental health field since 2011. I started out as a field guide for wilderness therapy. I worked at a place called SUWS of the Carolinas. SUWS stands for School of Urban and Wilderness Survival. We took groups of teenagers and 10-12 year olds out into the Pisgah National Forest on backpacking trips and taught them wilderness skills as well as communication skills and emotional intelligence. I learned a lot from working there. It was very healing for me as well. I remember looking through their handbook and just eating it up. Each of the students (or clients) were required to make a list of things they were grateful for every day, as well as a list of things they were proud of, and a list of "I feel" statements. We called them "FAB" statements, (I feel ___, about ___, because____). It's just basic communication intelligence education that, unfortunately not many of get. We certainly didn't have this kind of communication in my family growing up. 

After SUWS, I worked at CooperRiis Healing Community, which is an organic farm based healing program. It is a program for adults with severe mental illness and emotional distress. In both of these programs, I was struck by how much I could relate with the people going through the program. I felt that I could easily have been in the program rather than working there. I have been through a lot of similar things that the people in the programs had been through. I felt that this was one of my greatest assets working there. I could relate to what they had and were experiencing. My heart was very big for their healing journeys and I cared deeply about every single one of them. I still do. I worked at CooperRiis from 2012-2020 on and off. It was a very flexible job because at one point I switched to a "PRN" or "as needed" part-time position. This allowed me to take 3 months off to go to Penland School of Crafts for a fall encaustic painting concentration, and then 9 months off to go to the Burren College of Art in Ireland. I also returned to CooperRiis after my first year in New Mexico going to school for Art Therapy at Southwestern College. 

All of these experiences, the mental health related ones and the art related ones has had a deep impact on me and I am so grateful and in awe of every one of them. I have felt deeply guided throughout and am just amazed by the healing I've experienced and the awe and wonder that I've experienced as I follow my inner compass. 

In 2017, I had an art studio in the Phil Mechanics Building in Asheville's River Arts District. It was a very beautiful experience for me to be there making my large-scale portrait paintings on fabric with black walnut ink. In fact, I would say that I was very much living my dream, basically, as an artist, or at least rapidly moving toward it. It was an incredible feeling to have total strangers buy my paintings for thousands of dollars, sometimes without ever having met me. It's even more incredible to make them. I love it. It is my home. It is when I feel most at home in myself and I naturally feel as though it is a prayer. 

I feel so grateful for the privilege of being able to make them. It feels like an offering of gratitude while I am painting and I just feel myself bowing in reference. I think this is the feeling of doing what we are meant to do here on earth and this feeling naturally comes when we are aligned with our purpose, or our inner compass. It happens when our inner compass points true north. We can find this by listening to our body and learning the language that our body speaks to us in. It is subtle and loud at the same time. I believe this is what Jesus was talking about when he talked about the Pearl of Great Price, or the Treasure hidden in a field. This is the heaven that is among us. 

In the winter of 2017, I was working part-time at CooperRiis and full-time in my studio. My dad came to visit, uninvited. I was estranged from him at the time, but I got an email from him telling me that he was coming to Asheville. I had asked him a year before to please not come, which led to him becoming aggressive and condescending towards me, which is why I became estranged from him. I ended up calling him and visiting with him for an hour in my studio. After this visit, things started to go downhill for me. There were several other things going on in my life as well at the time. I was doing a course called "The Integrity Cleanse" by Martha Beck, which I loved, but it resulted in me digging into some old letters from a boyfriend I had in High School. These letters were extremely triggering for me. They were love letters. But what it brought up in me was a lot of emotion around my romantic life and how frustrated and sad I was about things not working out. I had convinced myself that I was destined to get married when I was 35. I thought this for almost a decade. My 35th year had come and there was no improvement in my romantic life. I felt incredibly frustrated and I realized, like a punch in the gut, that I was probably not going to have kids and it was very likely, if things continued as they were going, that I was probably never going to get married. I felt overwhelmed by the realization that I was on my own. I started to feel panicked, mostly in regard to money and how I was going to provide for myself. I felt ashamed that I made such little money, even though at the same time, I was achieving my dreams more than I ever had. I felt scared that I would always be in a shared living situation with other women, who would, I thought, be progressively younger than myself. This is what was going through my mind. I now see how untrue this was, but I think it was my panic mind taking over. 

I started entertaining the thought of exploring a solid "career"path. I'm not sure how else to say that, because I think I was actually on a pretty solid career path at the time with my art. It was going very well. But I felt that it would take at least a decade before I was able to really support myself with it alone. In retrospect, that isn't that long and would be totally worth it. But, what happened was that I started researching different potential careers that might be a good fit for me. Since I had already been working in mental health for so long, this was an obvious choice. I was surrounded by people who were either working professional therapists, or they were in school to become therapists. I started looking into Art Therapy and Art Therapy Schools. I was really just poking around online out of curiosity. I had no idea even what Art Therapy was, let alone how to become an art therapist. I just did some research and started looking at the different schools that offered art therapy programs. Then I saw one with a little blurb next to it that said, "We focus on the spiritual aspect of art." This intrigued me because this is important to me as well, and I had never really seen that offered at a school. It was Southwestern College. I went to their website and was surprised to see that they offered a vision quest as part of their curriculum. There were also several videos on their website, which I began watching. As I watched them, I began to realize that these were videos of change makers, or what Martha Beck calls, "menders", or "Team members". I stayed up til 2 in the morning watching these videos and was mesmerized. I felt so intrigued by that school that I decided just to go ahead and apply even though I didn't really want to be an art therapist, I just wanted to keep making my art. One thing led to another and I ended up in New Mexico at Southwestern College in January of 2019. This school and the experience I had out in New Mexico was the answer to many questions I had. It resolved my questions about marriage and why nothing ever worked out for me. I found a community I loved that felt like family. And I discovered "Indian Country", or the visible and very current presence of the indigenous people in this country, which is closer to what I believe this land could be like and should be like if we had integrated with the native people instead of committing genocide. 

I think I will save for another blog post the specifics of what I learned there and some of the most healing things I got out of that program and that experience. There were some very powerful lessons and healing tools that I learned at the school in addition to the overall experience of being out there. These lessons felt like hidden gems imbedded into the overall program, which for the most part was challenging for me (not in a good way) because of how distorted the school has had to become to accommodate for accreditation purposes. Academia is inherently a patriarchal system. It's a top-down structure that damages creativity and independent thinking and in a way I feel like I have spent the last year and a half since I left the program simply healing from this. Hopefully someday in the near future the academic structures will be dismantled and we will begin learning from the indigenous people true and healthy ways of learning.