Living Your Questions
Finding One’s Joy through Painting
This grant to Turning Point: The Center for Hope and Healing, which serves the Kansas City metro area, illustrates MetaCancer’s commitment to creative expression as a way to improve the lives of people living with metastatic cancer. In this case, Turning Point hosted several sessions of a program titled “Living Your Questions Now: Finding One’s Joy through Painting.” The sessions were facilitated by Cindy Molini, M.A., co-founder of the nonprofit Center for Expressive Arts, and Dan Carrel, Ph.D., an artist who is the director of the Center’s Artists in Residence Program.
“Living Your Questions Now: Finding One’s Joy Through Painting” uses a painting process developed by Carrel, emphasizing the notion of chaos as a starting point. Making meaning out of chaos becomes the underlying metaphor for negotiating the world, particularly when faced with metastatic cancer. Participants learn how to literally see patterns in the chaos. The process does not require prior artistic training, but assumes that all people have the capacity to recognize these underlying patterns. Some painting techniques are minimally employed, but the clear emphasis is upon joyful discovery of one’s innate ability. The journaling aspect of the process is facilitated by Molini and uses various prompts from literature, organized around themes such as “Dealing with Chaos” and “Finding Peace in the Present Moment.”
Comments from participants:
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