An Art Therapist Shares: Using Art to Connect with Your Spirituality.
If you’ve ever been to therapy, you know that a therapist will gather information about you. This may include questions about domains of your life, as history, work, home, and recreation. They want to get an overall understanding of who you are.
From a holistic perspective on health, there are emotional, financial, mental, occupational, physical, social, and spiritual aspects of your being.
When I initially ask some adult clients about spiritual aspects, I hear, “I’m not religious”. Common, when someone’s negative experiences within organized religion leave them wanting nothing to do with the people, practices, or places of their religious past. It’s hard to separate their spirituality from their former religion.
In comparison, other adult clients strictly keep religious traditions. As an important part of their identity, it’s where they receive support from a faith community. However, some describe going through the motions and feeling disconnected, spiritually. There may be several reasons for that, including grief, loss, and traumatic events.
If you identify with the second example, read on and learn how art can support you.
Using Art to Help You Integrate Religion and Spirituality.
Many things in our lives are part of our routine, or they probably wouldn’t get done. They’re the dailies. Things you do without really having to think about them. There is no learning curve, nothing new, and your body’s muscles have memory in completing those tasks. It’s the repetition. And while the routines are needed and helpful, they can become boring.
Aspects of religion are also very routine. Part of that provides comfort and meaning, but at the same time, it can feel flat. You can check the boxes without a spiritual impact.
Art can deepen your daily and weekly religious practices and make them more spiritually meaningful to you, especially during difficult times.
Enhancing Prayer through Art.
Many, if not most, faith traditions include formal and informal prayer. You may pray several times a day. For most people practicing a religion, prayer is a time when they are not focused on themselves, but rather on God or a higher power. Prayer is meditative. Informal prayer is a conversation. Meaning, it’s best if it is two-way.
Art before prayer can be used to prepare your mind for time in prayer. In an age of constant hurry of life and over-stimulation that surrounds our electronic moment-to-moment, entering into prayer can be hard. How do you get your brain into a quieter, more focused place? Art can soothe and slow your mind’s pace. Try to take a minute or two, breathe deeply, and draw some simple shapes on a page. Within the shapes, begin to write small prayers.
Art itself can be a prayer with images, rather than words. For a wordless prayer mode, let your art be the prayer. Maybe your prayer today is a scribble, or a lump of clay that you pound. As an Art Therapist, I know that traumatic experiences and tremendous losses are at times nearly impossible to put into words. Words can’t express the gravity, the pain, and the fear. Let the art speak.
Art after prayer can be used as a reflection of a prayer. If you practice informal, conversational prayers, you spend time quietly listening. When creating art, it is also a time of listening. Creating an image that portrays what is being communicated to you through listening can be a powerful reminder of your relationship with the divine. If you are praying for strength or wisdom, creating artwork can symbolize that strength or wisdom.
Setting Intentions to Change with Art
It’s not uncommon to attend a religious teaching, lesson, or sermon and feel moved to improve some aspect of your life. You have the best of intentions. Then you go home and return to your routine and don’t necessarily even remember the lesson or make any changes.
Art can help you reinforce your learning. When you are listening to a lesson, you are hearing the speaker, maybe taking notes, and perhaps viewing an outline. It’s mostly a cognitive experience. By creating something personally meaningful, after the fact, you can engage different brain processes to integrate your learning.
In the master’s program for Art Therapy I graduated from, we would read a textbook chapter, then respond to the text with art. It brought a deeper understanding to the text and helped us learn and process important principles. This was especially true in a law and ethics course.
In the same way, taking a passage, scripture, or sacred text, and creating art in response can help you gain insight and connect with the text in a more personally meaningful way. It can take you past your cognitive understanding. Art can help you see something in a text that has escaped you before.
Art can help you set and keep your intention. Let’s say that after hearing a lesson, you feel moved to grow in an area of your life. You want to be less negative and express more gratitude. That is your intention. Using art, you can create a visual cue with the word “Grateful” and images of things you are very grateful for daily. It’s the things you may often pray about and say you are thankful for. It’s your family, your friends, your health, nature, and provision.
Similar to how people create vision boards when contemplating a project, you can create a gratefulness board with multiple images that highlight what you are grateful for in your life. It could be a book that you add to periodically with photos, cut-out images, and small drawings. No words needed. Each time you look at that gratitude board or book, it will prompt you to not only express gratitude but feel it more profoundly.
If you intend to stop doing something, your board or book could display the things you intend to do instead. Instead of yelling when you’re angry, you intend to try and calmly respond to your children. Creating artwork that depicts images of ways to take care of yourself, like going for a walk to cool down, praying to God for help, or counting to 10, could help remind you of your intention and even provide a bit of accountability.
Using Art to Elevate Meaningful Sacred Texts and Scriptures
One of my favorite things on Pinterest and Instagram are posts of poems, inspirational quotes, and verses with beautiful lettering. While you may not have the skills to create such lettering, you can still incorporate art to elevate words you find particularly meaningful.
Art can help you detach from the negative to focus your mind on the positive. Working by hand is my preference because it’s grounding and helps you unplug from devices. Simply write out words of a text on an index card using different colored pens and markers. Underline a word, or add little stars, vines, or other little doodles to highlight a phrase. Read the words repeatedly, out loud.
Using the simplest of materials, you can create text artwork that you can either carry with you in a bag or photograph, so it’s always accessible on your phone. There is something about writing out a sacred text that can help you not only connect with the words but also remember the words so you can call them to mind. These words can become a phrase you repeat to calm yourself, a meditation.
I hope this blog has provided some simple and accessible ways you can use art to connect more with your spirituality.
Complimentary consultation from a San Diego Art Therapy professional
If you are struggling with grief and loss, and it’s making it difficult to feel spiritually connected, reach out today to learn more about how Art Therapy can help.
As a therapist in San Marcos, CA, I integrate Art Therapy, a holistic therapy approach, with talk therapy, supporting clients as they journey toward healing.
I have worked with clients from many faiths and respect your beliefs. Speaking about your spirituality in therapy is your right, and your personal religious beliefs do not change my practice of accepting clients with unconditional positive regard.