Active Imagination Is A Gift Towards Childhood Healing!

 Hello world! Kemi Writes here!

I want to talk about expressive art therapy today, but first I am going to briefly talk about the man and his images, Carl Jung, and his background with art. For Carl Jung, art is a form of finding meaning/self-understanding and reach a sense of wholeness. Active imagination to Jung, is all about constructing meaning using symbols and images as a way to better understand and make sense of human experiences. Active imagination was what gave Jung a deeper awareness of his childhood self and his psyche as well as the dynamics within his psyche. So, Jung believes that the soul emerges mostly through images and symbols, and it is a fundamental way of expression.

"Artistic expression is an innate way of knowing and healing in childhood" (McNiff, pg.53). 

In my creativity class, we read and talked about expressive art therapy, and I think of how transformative it is for children and adults. Artistic expression is easier for children to do than for adults because children just dive deep into it without much thinking, but adults need more structure when it comes to active imagination, and I think the impact of societal influences and parental pressures could be possible reasons why. In one of the readings we read, it discussed the importance of seeing how children can actually "teach adults how to reconnect with the most fundamental ways of art healing" (McNiff, pg.53). It is interesting to see the roles reversed because usually it is adults teaching children, and to think that children can help adults connect back to childhood imagination is kind of fascinating to me. 

"Creative imagination is the realm where inner and outer experiences can meet and create together. The imagination welcomes good and bad, joy and fear, and all the other ingredients of experience and uses them as sources of its life enhancing expression" (McNiff, pg.54). 

Expressive art therapy has many modes of expression within it such as, writing poetry or fiction, movement, music, verbal expression, sculpting, theatre, etc. So, the way I see it is, the realm of creative imagination holds space for every experience and every experience is communicated through various modes of artistic expression. This is art healing and childhood healing that brings that sense of wholeness I mentioned before. Bringing one's inner and outer experiences together and creating from that sounds balanced and healthy to me. I guess it sounds appealing to me. 

When we did our art therapy activity, I feel like I struggled with the exercises because I was overthinking what I was doing, and I think an insecurity came up, which was being judged for my drawing as a child. During the exercises, I started to compare my drawing techniques to others, and once that seed was planted, it quickly grew in my mind. I noticed that this had happened as I was driving and reflecting on why I was feeling a bit sad during class. So, I think I judged the way my inner child/subconscious was expressing herself rather than trusting my own unique process. When I realized I had done this, I apologized to myself and also gave myself grace for doing that. I am still learning to trust my own unique process. It's interesting because my inner child/subconscious did communicate with me and make herself known like I could see the visual in my head, but just struggled with overthinking it, and it happened in all 3 exercises, but it was harder to ignore in the 2nd and 3rd one.

 I would want to do an activity like this again with myself because I can see how it would strengthen my connection with my inner child/subconscious. Something else I learned from doing this activity is that I really like the color blue and being near or in a body of water is a safe place for me. 

I'll leave you with another quote I liked, 

"The imagination of childhood is the lost soul that we strive to regain in order to heal and live more complete lives" (McNiff, pg. 54). 

That's all for now!

XOXO,

Kemi Writes🌊💞💭