Art therapy helps with, grief, shock and loss
Integrative Arts Therapy can help with Grief and Shock
Every year I offer workshops for a local support group called ‘The Compassionate Friends’. They are a support network for parents whose children have died. This year they are supporting a lot of newly bereaved parents, and tomorrow I am delivering two workshops to help them manage their subtle body energies and clear shock. We will use healing, energy and art techniques.
GRIEF AND ITS EFFECTS
Whenever there is a loss of someone or something important in our lives it is normal to experience Grief. As we are all individuals, we experience grief in own, unique way and respond according to our beliefs, values, faith, self-awareness, personal experiences, and life circumstances. Therefore, there is no right or wrong way to feel grief, express grief or live with the effects of it in our day to day lives.
The initial effects of grief can be physically demanding and emotionally overwhelming, as we attempt to continue on with our lives without the other person, while our mind, body, spirit system, is dealing with the ‘shock’ of the loss. Our body can feel like we have been kicked, or punched. We may feel breathless, empty or overwhelmed, and struggle to have the energy to get through each minute of every day. Our thoughts can also be affected, where decision making, logical and sequential thinking processes and mental creativity can disappear in the stress of the emotions we are feeling. This impacts our capacity to live our lives, look after ourselves, and communicate with others. Sometimes we feel absolutely numb, void of all emotion and limited in our capacity to act or react, and this too affects our capacity to communicate and interact with others, as well as our ability to care for ourselves and others as we grieve.
So one of the first things I always do, when working with individuals or groups who are grieving, is help them and/or teach them, how to integrate and balance their subtle energy bodies.This will help them cope better with the effects of grief, and assist them mentally and physically with the daily demands of life. While I use shamanic and energetic healing techniques to begin this process, I then integrate clay and watercolour therapy as both help balance the energy bodies, and heal the etheric energy fields. www.matrixharmonics.com