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AHN NEWS: May 2006
This issue of AHN News is dedicated to Creativity & Dreamwork. I interview Tristy Taylor -- the new Arts and Healing Network Web Site Coordinator -- about her experience with art, healing, dreamwork and the Church of Craft. I review the book, The Natural Artistry of Dreams by Jill Mellick. This month's featured links are to Jeremy Taylor's Dream Work Tool Kit and The Dream Tree.
Dreams can be such a source of wisdom and insight. May this issue inspire you to listen more deeply to your dreams, and allow them to be a catalyst for your healing and creative work.
Mary Daniel Hobson, Director, Arts and Healing Network
marydaniel@artheals.org
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AHN INTERVIEW:
Tristy Taylor
"Art can heal us emotionally, by working through childhood wounds and transforming them into healing. Art can heal us physically, by changing the way we perceive and use our bodies. Art can heal us spiritually, by offering new paths and turns on our journey that we may never have seen without it."
-Tristy Taylor.
Tristy Taylor is a community artist, interfaith minister, dreamworker, and founder of the Church of Craft. In March, Tristy joined the Arts and Healing Network as the new web site coordinator. I hope this interview offers you a chance to get to know Tristy better and helps you understand why we are so delighted to have her become part of the Arts and Healing Network team. You can also learn more about Tristy online at www.trismegista.com and www.churchofcraft.org.
Mary Daniel Hobson: Tristy, tell me a little bit about your background in the arts -- how did you get started in creative work? And what was it like growing up as the daughter of the famous dreamworker, Jeremy Taylor? |
Tristy: I was always a creator growing up. I loved making collages and learned at my father's knee. Every time he created a new dream journal, he would do a collage for it. It was like a ritual for him. He was also a cartoonist, and would read Tintin to me every night. I taught myself how to draw by looking at Tintin and also my dad's Crumb comics. But I never considered myself an artist.
The first art class I had was in kindergarten. They had us draw a bowl of fruit and I made the orange purple and the apple blue because it looked neat and I was thinking how cool it was to be able to draw something, but make it different than it was in reality. I was kicked out of the class and told not to come back until I "took drawing seriously." It's so funny and ridiculous now, but I took that to heart and believed that I wasn't a "serious artist" until I was about 25 years old.
An image from
Tristy's Dream Cards.
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That shift occurred when I took a painting class from a student of Michele Cassou. I re-discovered my passion for creating and the class helped me let go of many of my inhibitions around letting other people see what I create. That transformation lead me to JFK University and their Master's in Arts in Consciousness program, which helped me come completely into my own as an artist.
Mary Daniel: Can you share a little bit about what JFKU's Arts & Consciousness Program was like and what you learned there?
Tristy: It was incredible. I loved that program. I met the most amazing and inspiring people, students and teachers. Many of them are still my friends today. My classes were so "whole," including spirituality and healing. The process of making had more honor and discussion, not just the product. I also discovered the term "Community Art" and realized that I have been doing that kind of art for most of my adult life, including the radio shows I programmed in college and high school and the creation of the Church of Craft.
While at JFKU, I also received my certificate for Dream Studies, and studied with Fariba Bogzaran. Through my weaving in of that work, my art life as it connected to my dream world grew and transformed exponentially.
Mary Daniel: Can you tell me about how your experience with dreamwork informs your work with creativity and healing?
Tristy: I agree with my father's theory that dreams come in the service of health and wholeness. Nightmares are a great example of this theory. A dream is scary to get our attention, not to tell us that there are monsters chasing us or that we are going to accidentally be naked at work tomorrow. They are frightening and strong to help us think about it in our waking life and work with them. Just one example of ways I work with dreams and spirit and art is using a powerful Gestalt method of becoming a scary person or thing from a dream. When I do this work with my clients, I ask them to really embody the character, sometimes we make masks or drawings. Through this work, the secret gifts of this shadow figure are revealed, and they are often life-changing.
Another example is from my own personal work with my dreams. Right around the time I started at JFK University, I was dreaming about these blue beings. They always looked different (babies, spirits, trees, frogs), but they were always the exact same color of blue. In honor of the dream, I worked with that color blue, making art with it, researching the color in the history of art and discovered that people have been dreaming about these blue spirits since the beginning of recorded history. I found that same blue color in Hindu art, Tibetan art and Lakota art. I discovered that I myself was a "blue baby" when I was born, which I did not know consciously. I am continuing to work with the power of that color.
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Church of Craft, New York City
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Mary Daniel: What was the inspiration behind creating the Church of Craft? Tell me a little bit about this organization and what you do there.
Tristy: The Church of Craft was created in October 2000 in Brooklyn, NY. My friend Callie Janoff was feeling the call to ministry. She was marrying her friends and experiencing a deep desire to create a spiritual community around creating. She was throwing around this idea of a church that honored craft -- the Church of Craft. Meanwhile, in San Francisco, I was having what I called "Craft-Ons," which were basically a bunch of friends and friends of friends. We met once a month and made things. I started having these gatherings because so many of my friends would share things they had made with me and be so excited to show someone what they had made and simultaneously be kind of sad that they always make things by themselves, in their room, late at night, with no one to talk to. This felt like a spiritual need that was easily filled. When I shared the Craft-On ideas with Callie, we realized that those meetings were perfect "church" meetings for the Church of Craft, and so it was born.
Six years later, there are churches and gatherings all over the world, including Canada and Sweden! There are all ages and genders. People of all faiths are welcome. The only thing you have to believe in is that making can be a spiritual practice. Not that it has to be, but that it can be for some people.
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Church of Craft, San Francisco
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Mary Daniel: Do you believe art can heal and if so, how?
Tristy: Absolutely art can heal! Art can heal us emotionally, by working through childhood wounds and transforming them into healing. Art can heal us physically, by changing the way we perceive and use our bodies. Art can heal us spiritually, by offering new paths and turns on our journey that we may never have seen without it.
Mary Daniel: What drew you to work at the Arts and Healing Network? And tell us about your role here at www.artheals.org.
Tristy: I love working at the Arts and Healing Network! I was drawn here because it is such a fantastic and inspiring network of artists and projects and organizations. I wanted to help it grow and reach even more parts of the world. Art transforms the world. We need it now more than ever!
In my role, I am the first contact for anyone who contacts us and I love hearing about people's amazing community art projects or looking at incredible artwork or witnessing environmental healing projects. I keep the website updated and look for more resources to add. I try to connect people with each other. I try to keep the inspiration alive and vibrant!
Mary Daniel: What advice do you have for others who would like to weave together creativity, spirituality, and healing?
Tristy: Bringing together creativity, spirituality and healing is an individual journey and everyone has a different path, but to give just some general advice: Take fifteen minutes every day and do something to feed your spiritual/creative life. This could be drawing in your journal, or digging your hands in the dirt or staring at a passing cloud or listening to the discussion of the birds outside your window. The most important thing is that it is not productive in the traditional sense. I'm not talking about walking the dog, because you always have to walk to the dog. I'm talking about taking a fifteen-minute adventure with your dog. Bring the magic back into your life. Fifteen minutes a day is not a lot of time and you are worth it!
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Tristy with her Dream Cards
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Another suggestion is keeping a notebook in your pocket or purse. Write down every fantasy, idea, inspiration and project you have every had or wanted to do. The second it pops in your head, write it down. I learned this trick from Carol Lloyd's fantastic book, Creating a Life Worth Living. You will be amazed at how many ideas you have, really. And once you accomplish one of your projects, put a star next to it. I've only been doing it about two months, and I already have an entire journal of ideas, more than half of which I have accomplished...and I'm a busy lady! It's just about taking the time and honoring that part of your life.
And of course, track your dreams. Write them down in the morning, no matter how mundane you may think they are. Or draw a picture or write a poem or paste an image from a magazine that reminds you of the dream (this could be your fifteen minute creative project!). Your dreams will respond with just a little attention.
Mary Daniel: Lastly, Tristy, can you share with us some of your favorite books on creativity, healing and spirituality?
Tristy: Where do I begin? For a basic introduction to dreamwork, check out my dad, Jeremy Taylor's books Dreamwork and Where People Fly and Water Runs Uphill. For art and dreamwork, there is no better book than Jill Mellick's The Natural Artistry of Dreams (see book review below). For art and healing, I love Michael SamuelsŐ and Mary Rockwood Lane's Creative Healing: How to Heal Yourself by Tapping Your Hidden Creativity, Barbara Ganim's Art and Healing: Using Expressive Art to Heal Your Body, Mind and Spirit , and Michele Cassou's Point Zero: Creativity Without Limits. For excellent books about spiritual transformation through art, I love Vicki Noble's Shakti Woman: Feeling our Fire, Healing Our World, and Suzi Gablik's Living the Magical Life.
To learn more about Tristy, please visit her web site at www.trismegista.com or email her at the Arts and Healing Network at ahn@artheals.org.
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FEATURED BOOK:
The Natural Artistry of Dreams: Creative Ways to Bring the Wisdom of Dreams to Waking Life
By Jill Mellick
 This is a wonderful resource for exploring your dreams using creative processes such as painting, movement and writing. Jill Mellick's writing style is clear and descriptive, making the information fun and easy to absorb. She begins with an introduction to dreamwork, and then moves on to discuss the nature of creativity and how it can be used to work with dreams to integrate and harvest their wisdom. She outlines many approaches including mandalas, collage, painting, maskmaking, movement, ritual, and drama. Most of her exercises are designed to be done in less than fifteen minutes so that they are easy to integrate into a busy life. She discusses practical matters too such as creating a safe space, sharing your artwork and dreams with others, starting a Dream Arts Group, and more. She also shares many examples of specific dreams and how people used her excercises to help garner their wisdom. This book will be a treat for anyone who wishes to mine their dreams for greater insight and inspiration.
This 299-page softcover book was published by Conari Press in 1996. Unfortunately, it is now out of print. However there are several used copies available on Amazon, starting at only $1. Click here to order.
Jill Mellick also has a web site at www.jillmellick.com where you can learn more about her other publications, workshops, etc.
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Below is one exercise from the Natural Artistry of Dreams from "Chapter 7: Painting, Collage, and Sculpture"
The dream seems to reside in a fourth dimension, free of time and space limitations. When the dream enters into memory and into body sensations, it moves into a time and space-bound world. Just as a photograph translates the three-dimensional world into two on the developing paper, so we translate the experience of the dream. Our memories, emotions, and bodies translate the dream into three dimensions, and then hands and arms translate those sensations into two dimensions on paper.
In essence, through the vehicle of the body, we translate the energy of the dream into personal calligraphy that emerges in line and color. Energy translations usually take less time to do than to read here how to do them. They require no talent and few materials. You need only a few minutes to yourself, a blank page, and cheap oil pastels, colored markers, or crayons. Keep a set of colors beside the bed, together with pencil and a small bound, blank book. Write the main dream elements on one page and then draw on the opposite.
Translating the dream's energy:
After you write down the essence of the dream, close your eyes and replay the dream in imagination, allowing the feelings, ambience, and atmosphere to permeate your body. Dreams engender feeling and emotion, connectedness and disconnectedness, elation and despondency – every shade of affective response.
When you can re-experience the feelings in your body, half open your eyes, let your nondominant hand choose a color from the set, and use your breath to breathe the energy you are feeling in your body down through your arm, hand, and crayon and onto the page. Use your nondominant hand or both hands at the one time to choose colors and draw.
Keep your meditative focus on the feeling of the dream in the body and the images of the dream in your heart. Focus on your exhalations, using each one to direct inner sensations through your nondominant arm and hand. Continue this until you sense that all the dream had generated in your body has been breathed out through your arm, hand, and colors. Then stop.
Look rarely at and donŐt be concerned about what goes on the page – maintain just enough focus to keep yourself from running off the edges. Sometimes your hand will reach for another color if the dream has a change of feeling or direction. You might even turn the page and start a new sheet for a shift in feeling or direction. DonŐt decide this beforehand. This practice replays the dream through the instrument of your body. Let your creative unconscious make these spontaneous decisions.
When you have finished the energy translation, date it, name it (often the same name you have given the dream), and set aside the colors.
Briefly meditate on the page(s).
DonŐt interpret your paintings. And donŐt judge them. Free yourself from secret (and confining) hopes that your unconscious has produced a Kandinsky or Picasso out of the inspired content of your dreams. If I were to critique from an artistic standpoint the energy paintings I have done over the years, I would call them Mess I, Mess II, and so on. I canŐt make a contract with my creative unconscious to produce something impressive. I can only step aside so that the "embodied dreamer" can express itself in two dimensions.
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FEATURED LINK:
Dream Work Tool Kit by Jeremy Taylor
www.jeremytaylor.com/pages/toolkit.html
Here you will find celebrated dreamworker Jeremy Taylor's six basic hints about how to start "unpacking" and understanding dreams at some of their multiple, simultaneous levels of meaning.
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FEATURED LINK:
The Dream Tree
www.dreamtree.com
 "The Dream Tree is an online resource center for people interested in dreams. At The Dream Tree, you can discover the latest dream news, explore the world of dreaming, learn about the role of dreams in history and culture, and connect with other dreamers worldwide -- to share dreams, to network, or to exchange ideas." This site also includes dream-inspired artwork.
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READERS RESPOND
Please send us your thoughts and feedback on this issue of AHN News.
Was this issue of AHN News helpful and how?
Do you have other resources about dreamwork and creativity you would like to share?
Are there other topics you would like to see addressed in AHN News?
Please send your comments, ideas, and feedback to marydaniel@artheals.org.
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