Welcome to Art and Healing Wednesday!!
This morning I was thinking about spending time in my studio and I focused on my fabric stash. The fabric is neatly folded and sorted by color. I’ve got a drawer for each color so the closet looks like a rainbow. Once I thought about how the fabric is sorted I remembered an exercise I used to incorporate into my talks and workshops about color and the body.
I had copies of a paper doll on a sheet of paper. There was nothing other than an outline of a body, but by the line drawing you could tell if the figure was male or female. Aside from the gender each person was working with a blank slate.
Once each person had their blank slate figure I would ask them to select a crayon from those on the table. I always bought a new box of Crayolas so that we had the full spectrum of color for each participant. Once they selected the color I each person begin to color in their figure. After the initial color was used the participants could finish their color exploration with any color on the table.
What we found is that the colors the participants selected was directly related to how they felt in their body. Those who were experiencing pain tended to select a warm color (bright yellow, orange, or red) to express pain in their body. Remember, this was without asking them to color their pain, just to put color in the figure on the paper.
As we continued you could find that people selected colors and placed them in places on the figure to convey a message. In most cases, they colored the illness because it was first and foremost in their minds. I’m thinking what if we switched things up?
What if we were to color our health? What are the colors that you’d use to represent the healthy parts of you? Maybe you’re thinking only of the physical body, but what about your emotional or spiritual health…what color would they be? How can you increase your focus on the healthy aspects of your life instead of the illness aspects of your life?
Give it some thought and let me know or better yet e-mail your drawing at greg@survivingstrong.com. I’d love to see you color yourself healthy!!!
Pilgrim Pathway/Surviving Strong 