Art Therapy

Art therapy is not about being an artist. It is more about expressing what is inside of us and using symbols, colors and strokes to represent the energy behind the expression. As you prepare to let your soul do some work, get out your crayons, pens, pencils, pastels, oil or water colors and a big piece of paper or cardboard to work with. You may already have some ideas of what you want to draw, but if you don’t, just start laying out color and strokes on the paper and see what emerges. I recommend that you play some provocative, emotion-arousing world music as you do your art work. Work on it for at least an hour, filling up the whole page. After you complete that part, there is another step.

Step 2: Now you will do what I call, “Beta it.” In other words you now use beta consciousness (active, thinking consciousness) to explain what you have drawn. What symbols did you use? What do they represent? Why did you use the colors that you used? Explain everything. Another beta form is to create a poem to explain the emotions and ideas, or you can write lyrics that tell the story that you just drew. Be free and do not censor yourself. You don’t have to “like” what you drew!

After you have done this, I encourage you to post it to the blog so that we can share thoughts about the process and art images.

Below are examples of students’ art work from my classroom teaching while a professor of psychology. On the back of each drawing, students explained what the images and colors represented: