Kimberly Hetherington

The ability to be creative and engage in any type of art is an important aspect in reducing stress and increasing well-being. It is also one of the most cost effective, non-invasive, as well as a non-pharmacological technique in reducing negative mental health symptoms.

Participating in creative activities helps people cope with stress and despair and alleviate the burden of chronic mental illnesses [7]. Cultures all over the world consider artistic expression an important aspect of the healing process. Throughout history, people have used paintings, storytelling, dances, yoga, and chants as healing rituals [7,34,35]. Over the last decade, health psychologists have carefully examined how art therapy help heal emotional traumas, enhance awareness of oneself and others, establish self-reflection capacity, reduce mental manifestations, and transform behaviours and way of thinking. 

I’ve seen the positive effects of engaging in art therapy firsthand while studying transpersonal art therapy. It’s helped me so much in managing my own anxiety, I hope others who are seeking support can experience it themselves.  These are a few quotes I’ve come across that describe how incredible the field of Art Therapy truly is.

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“Expressive art therapy integrates all of the arts in a safe, non-judgmental setting to facilitate personal growth and healing. To use the arts expressively means going into our inner realms to discover feelings and to express them through visual art, movement, sound, writing or drama. This process fosters release, self-understanding, insight and awakens creativity and transpersonal states of consciousness.”
– Natalie Rogers

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“Since grief is not a cerebral problem but a subjective experience, we understand grief only and entirely as we filter and interpret it through our own experience. Initially it captures us, but we can capture it back and reshape it; and the expressive arts and therapies function beautifully as vehicles to help us reshape grief.”
– Sandra Bertman

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“Art is the highest expression of the human spirit.”
-Joyce Carol Oates

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“The great power of the arts is to activate, renovate, and transform. Indeed, the arts, as the process of grief, can thaw what trauma and suffering freezes, or at least can help us better endure the sorrows and appreciate the joys of life.”
– Sandra Bertman

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“Something is always born of excess: great art was born of great terrors, great loneliness, great inhibitions, instabilities, and it always balances them.”
– Anais Nin

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“Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.”
– Pablo Picasso

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“Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.”
– Thomas Merton

“The creative arts provide opportunities to make concrete objects representing feelings and thoughts that are elusive, hidden, and mysterious
Discussing the characters in their images is often experienced as less threatening than discussing their psychological difficulties directly.”
― Bruce Moon

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“At the deepest level, the creative process and the healing process arise from a single source. When you are an artist, you are a healer; a wordless trust of the same mystery is the foundation of your work and its integrity.”
― Rachel Naomi Remen

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“Art speaks where words are unable to explain.”
– Pam Holland

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“I could say things with color and shape that I couldn’t’ say any other way – things I had no words for…”
– Margaret Naumburg

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“Art is the activity by which a person, having experienced an emotion, intentionally transmits it to others.”
– Leo Tolstoy

“Every artist dips his brush in his own soul, and paints his own nature into his pictures.”
– Henry Ward Beecher

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“I found I could say things with colour and shapes that I couldn’t say any other way – things I had no words for.”
– Georgia O’Keefe

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“If an art installation gets a patient out of his room or paintings take a person’s mind off their pain and lower their stress levels, the art isn’t just decorative anymore. It’s part of the entire model of care.”
– Dr. Lisa Harris

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“The heart of the [art therapy] profession is experienced in moments that defy verbal description. Every paint streak, each chalk line, every slab of color harmonious and dissonant, declares to the artist themselves, to beholders of their work and to all humankind that I am, I am here and I have something to express.”
– Bruce Moon

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“Art therapy invites people to remember who they are beneath their symptoms.”
– Anonymous

“Art can permeate the very deepest part of us, where no words exist.”
― Eileen Miller

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“Art is my cure to all this madness, sadness and loss of belonging in the world & through it I’ll walk myself home.”
― Nikki Rowe

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“Creating artwork allows your mind to be in a safe place while it contemplates the tougher issues you are dealing with. One can use the tools of brush, paint, pastels, crayons etc to expose and even for a short time color those issues in a different light.”
― George E. Miller

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“I should advise you to put it all down as beautifully & as carefully as you can—in some beautifully bound book. It will seem as if you were making the visions banal—but then you need to do that—then you are freed from the power of them. . . . Then when these things are in some precious book you can go to the book & turn over the pages & for you it will be your church—your cathedral—the silent places of your spirit where you will find renewal. If anyone tells you that it is morbid or neurotic and you listen to them—then you will lose your soul—for in that book is your soul.”
― Carl Jung

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