Posts

Featured

Music Therapy (Week Ten)

-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fYVxHkpiUaA&embeds_referring_euri=https%3A%2F%     Above is a link to the Soundbath meditation video that I am referencing throughout this post.  This week’s topic of music therapy was one I have been really looking forward to. Music has played a major role in my life since childhood(my grandparents were music teachers.) In high school, I was in the marching band, where music consumed my every waking moment(and the asleep ones too). Playing the flute always came easy to me. Due to that, it never really took much thought on my part. Whenever I played I always felt like I left Earth and did not land back on my feet until the music stopped, I will never be able to describe what was going on in between, I just remember starting, floating, and then the music ends. The first reading for this week describes this phenomenon as a trance. More specifically the text states: "Music during trancing provides a vehicle by which trancing individual...
Post a Comment
Read more

Research as Filmmaking (Week Twelve)

-
Image
    For our last few classes, we have been working on a short film, which became a meditative film about finding your peace. My favorite part of this process was the day in class where we each got to list out to the class our examples of finding your peace, the whiteboard was completely filled with no space left to spare by the end of class. It was really rewarding to see. Everyone was so involved in the process and we each got to see that come to life. I really enjoyed getting to film clips on our own time, especially as it allowed us to use past video clips that made us feel at peace. I really enjoyed this project, it did not feel like we were doing research, it just felt like we were coming together as a class to do something that could help us and others. To add to our communal peace, I have attached a video of my cats sleeping, because for me at least that is the most peaceful thing there is.      The potential for this film is innumerable, especially due t...
Post a Comment
Read more

Social Advocacy (Week Eleven)

-
Image
            In class, we learned about liberation psychology. Liberation psychology is "raising critical consciousness about the harms of sociopolitical oppression and discovering avenues for empowerment and liberation"(Gupta, Lecture Eleven, 2023), to better understand this concept and how it connects to creativity, we were told to analyze/give our thoughts on the film we watched in class. The film was called "Back to Natural". It was a really moving film. Back to Natural is about the lived experiences of African Americans in connection to their natural hair. Through the film, you learn about how badly people of color are treated solely because of the hair that grows out of their heads.      The creator did such a beautiful job in helping people like myself who have never been through this horrific treatment truly understand what it is like. They are made to feel like they are not human beings, just because of their hair, one of many th...
Post a Comment
Read more

Creativity and Madness (Week Seven)

-
     For this week, we did "automatic writing" which to put it simply is the activity of writing without thinking, in hopes of writing from within your unconscious. The idea of writing from your unconscious is sort of mad within itself. This leads to the topic of this week's class, creativity and madness. The reading from this week describes the idea of going into our most mad and manic state of being as a way of tapping into our non-rational minds and thus in a sense taking away all logic. Art and creativity are in a sense- the act of ignoring what seems logical and avoiding rational thinking. In the reading, the author explained this phenomenon:  "In order for far-flung or chaotic thoughts to be transformed into works of art, original and meaningful connections (linkings, in the Aristotelian sense of 'dissimilarity with similarity') must be made." (Jamison, 1993).        For my example, I am using the automatic writing we did in our last class o...
Post a Comment
Read more

Art Therapy (Week Eight/Nine)

-
Image
     Art can be used as a therapeutic method of helping bring forth dialogue between the client and therapist. It works as a container for emotions, it brings forward and creates distance to confront and work through thoughts and experiences. While also allowing the client to find emotional clarification through interpreting their own art with guidance from their therapist. One of our readings for class describes this practice as; "Art psychotherapy seeks to create a safe, uncontaminated space and to enable the client to speak in a language they 'don't understand': to have new thoughts and experiences. The shift in modalities from orally retelling a distressing history to creatively exploring an untainted and alternative present often allows for stuck perspectives to be re-visioned or reframed and for new perceptions to appear." (Learmonth and Huckvale, 2008) To better understand the capacity that art therapy can have for a person/client we did a few different act...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Creative Person (Week Six)

-
Image
     This week's class was about our creative personality, and how complex that personality is, how someone can hold two traits that are seemingly opposite. Csikszentmihalyi discusses the idea that what makes someone creative is embracing all parts of ourselves, even if society would say that it is not possible to have two polar traits, Csikszentmihalyi says otherwise, "If I had to express in one word what makes their personalities different from others, it would be complexity. By this, I mean that they show tendencies of thought and action that in most people are segregated. They contain contradictory extremes- instead of being an "individual," each of them is a "multitude." Like the color white that includes all the hues in the spectrum, they tend to bring together the entire range of human possibilities within themselves." (Csikszentmihalyi, The Creative Personality.)      I adored the activity for this class, we were to pick four traits and the pol...
Post a Comment
Read more

Everyday Creativity (Week Two)

-
Image
     In class we did multiple activities, in small groups we were to find as many uses as possible for the chosen everyday object. As we continued doing different objects or even scenarios, each of us got more and more creative. It was really fun to turn something so small and mundane into something crazy or even a plot of a new movie. It was so much fun, I didn't feel like I was doing classwork, I was just enjoying coming up with the most outrageous things we could think of, and seeing how creative each of us could be in our story-telling.       This assignment let me consider how I use creativity every day, when I feel like I have too much on my plate (like now for example) I put into steps what I need to do, down to something small like getting out of bed. This is creative as it is finding ways to be able to do the things I need to do to survive even if I feel like I cannot.  I also notice it in how my friend thinks of creative ways to entertai...
Post a Comment
Read more