1.

Write Your Pain a Letter - In your art journal invite your "pain"
to write you a letter. If you are having trouble finding a voice for
your pain you might first want to personify it with an image or a
collage. Take some time to center into your pain and ask it to help
you choose your images.
2. Collage Your Values - Defining our values helps us make
conscious choices and determines the intensity and flow of our
psychological energies. If we do not define our highest values we
will be caught living from our habitual conditioned thinking and
emotional patterns.
3. Collage Your Appreciation - Our everyday mind constantly
demands that life make us happy in this way and that. This
dissatisfaction is the place from where all of our unecessary doing
comes from. From this place of demands we create false ideas
about what would make us happy - and all the seemingly
necessary tasks to go along with those false needs.
4. Draw and Collage Your Inner Critic - Underneath the critic's
voice is a fear of feeling shame and of feeling not good enough.
Our entire society is based on perfectionism, on having the right
things, on looking good. To give ourselves the permission to be
human and to know we are doing our best given our current
emotional circumstances and life situation helps our inner critic to
relax.
5. Moving Through Stuck Feelings with Journaling - On any
given day we are all likely to have half a dozen problems that
keep us stuck inside. Ask yourself. "What is bugging me?" Why
don't I feel wonderful right now?" "How is my life going?" "What is
the main thing for me right now?"
6. Journal Meditation for Increasing Self-Love - When we do
not have the feeling tone of self-love within we are forever looking
on the outside of ourselves for love.
7. Collage Your Emotional Setpoint - It is challenging but
possible to change our emotional set point. We all have varying
degrees of happiness, self-love and self-regard that our

"normal". Our "normal" is usually similar to the emotional climate

that we grew up in.
8. Dialogue Ballon Collage - Consider that we intuitively choose
characters that represent different parts of our psyche. For
instance we have many inner children, teen, and adult parts of our
psyche that represent where we have frozen emotions and nonintegrated life experiences.
9. Journal Your Blocks to Success - It common to try really
hard and not be successful with our efforts. We can often feel like
we are on a treadmill that is getting no results. To be successful in
any area you need to want with all of your heart.
10. Gestural Pastel - When you are finished your gestural pastel
drawing, meditate on it for five minutes. Allow yourself to free
associate and allow subconscious feelings and memories to arise
as you gaze at your drawing with soft eyes.

11. Found Poetry Collage - It is intriguing to use old books for

collage. I often buy old art and nature books and old novels in
libraries and thrift shops. I even search new books stores for
bargain picture books to cut up.
12. Collage Who You Admire - Often we have positive qualities
hidden within that are longing to emerge into our life. When we
disown our heightened possibilities we most often find them in our
intense admiration of other people. It is interesting to find an
image of someone you admire and contemplate why.
13. Word Collage - It is often quite revealing to randomly choose
words and phrases to spontaneously collage. Prepare a free-form
colored background for your word collage, using pastels or
watercolor paint.

14. Expressive Pastel - When I was in my thirties, I started

teaching expressive art groups to seniors. I was gifted with a true
artist in my class. She was in her early 90's and her name was
Tru! She had dementia and she had forgotten that she was an
artist. Yet when I gave her a box of fresh pastels and an inspiring
still life to look at she would begin to draw furiously and
passionately.
15.Collage a Mandala - Because mandalas are a contemplative
form of making art you can ask yourself a question about
something that you want to know about your life. A good question
to ask before beginning is, "What do I most need in my life right
now?"
16. Intuitive Doodling - Doodling can be taken to an eloquent
level of personal expression and is a good activity to do when you
feel emotions that you cannot put words to. Sometimes drawn
symbols can express and encompass a feeling more completely
than thoughts.
17. Expressive Self-Portrait - It is intriguing to create an
expressive self-portrait that focuses more on your inner state than
your outer appearance. This expressive art exercise is good when
you feel like one stage of your life is ending and you do not yet
know where you are going. Reflect on the question. "Who am I
right now?" Or you might ask, "Who am I becoming?"
18. Intuitive Watercolor - The medium of watercolor is
spontaneous by nature and is well suited for intuitive painting.
Watercolour behaves in an fresh and translucent way that is
different than other paint mediums that can be changed or painted
over. Watercolor - by the nature of the medium is a practice in
allowing what needs to happen - happen.
19. Collage Your Stillness - It is so challenging to be still, and
yet a quiet mind is essential to any kind of real creative growth.
There is a loud frantic quality to our busy minds that masks the
subtlety of the information that wants to come through. Spending
time in silence is a deeply creative thing to do as it allows

wholeness to speak instead of just our fragmented mental

chatter.
20. Fabric Assemblage - It is rare that we take the time to spend
a few quiet hours to simply play with color, pattern and texture
with no pre-designed end product in mind. Focusing on a simple
spontaneous assemblage can invite a relaxed awareness on the
simple tasks of arranging intuitive compostions, working with
color, juxtaposing textures, playing with interesting objects, and
sewing with a needle and thread.

21. Paint a Tree Spontaneously - A blank page can be daunting

for most people. Often at the beginning of a class, I will offer a
starting point. You could start with a simple shape such as circle,
or sense within for a figurative image that wants to be painted. If
nothing arises from your imagination, intuitively painting a tree
can be a good place to begin.
22. Warm Up: Paint Spontaneous Circles - If you have
forgotten how to paint spontaneously, start with simple shapes,
such as circles or squares. Concentrate on color, gesture and line
and allow yourself to practice painting in a loose, free way.
Expressive art is an exercise in becoming fully ourselves. Even a
simple painting can express individuality, feeling, and selfempowerment.
23. Resolving Fear Through Collage - Fear embeds itself into
our body musculature. Wherever there is a body blockage - there
is stored fear and a defensive strategy against love, growth and
new information. You can meditate into the tight and constricted
parts of your body with collage, and choose images that reflect
your fearful places.
24. Spontaneous Painting - Every human being has the deep
urge to express themselves honestly but we are not often

encouraged to be our most unique selves. Spontaneous painting

requires no special talent, skill or inspiration. Because your
natural, original style is already within, you are already good
enough to begin.
25. Explore Painting Simple Abstract Shapes - Sometimes less
is more, and simple abstract shapes can express the purity of a
singular feeling that can get confused in a more detailed painting.
26. Collage Together Past Paintings and Drawings - You can
start to keep a stack of drawings and paintings that have not quite
hit the truth of you. If there is even one element in your work that
feels strong, save your paintings and drawings and cut out what
feels intuitively eloquent of what you need to express.
27. Fine Art Collage - Art magazines offer a rich resource of
soulful and surprising subject matter for collage. Fine art imagery
inherently invites us to stretch the limits of our imagination.
28. Draw Your Essence - To take the time to focus in on what
our unique spiritual strength feels like can be something that we
reflexively avoid. All to often we can drown in feelings of lack,
emotional need and loneliness. When we meditate on what our
spiritual strength feels like, we can practice making our soul
strength larger than our problems.
29. Meditate on Color - Intuitively feeling what colors you are
drawn to is the first step towards creating a spontaneous
painting. Sometimes simply and intuitively choosing colors is a
relaxing and emotional releasing exercise in itself.
30. Collage Cards for Self-Discovery - We each have a
treasure trove of sub-personalities that live below our conscious
awareness. Each personality part has its own goals and dreams
for our happiness.This often sets up inner conflicts within and we
can preoccupy our time with inner struggle between opposing
parts of self. It is helpful to map out our inner world, so that we
can start to recognize what aspects of our psyche are dominating
our awareness at any given moment.

31. Spontaneous Watercolor Drops - Watercolor is a free

flowing medium that is fun to splash around in. Painting
watercolor drops is a practice of not forcing anything to happen
with your creativity.
32. Wet on Wet Freeform Watercolor - Our minds cannot really
think about color. We can only feel color. Color is prior to the birth
of imagery. In color we can steep in the mystery of our feelings.
And in spontaneous creativity, as in feeling, we must learn to
surrender control.
33. Mandala Coloring Therapy - Coloring pre-drawn mandala
patterns can be surprisingly soothing especially during times of
emotional distress. Psychotherapist Rudiger Dahlke - the "father"
of the the mandala coloring epidemic - found that working within a
predetermined framework promoted a sense of peace and inner
order.
34. Explore Feelings Through Intuitive Painting - Many intense
feelings cannot be put into words, yet painting into the unknown of
ourselves opens up new possibilities of understanding what
underlying feelings drive us to think and act the way we do. As we
"live into" and express an unknown feeling, something new and
creatively fresh will come into our awareness. We will feel
different, more real. We will remember and recover who we were
before we became emotionally stuck.
35. Visual Journaling - We can all make signs, symbols, and
marks on paper that express our inner feeling states. In fact with
visual journaling - the simpler the better.
36. Active Imagination Journaling - Usually, if we wait in
stillness long enough, an inner image will want to come forward
and want to speak to us. This happens when we sleep and dream

at night but it is possible to access our dream imagery during our

journaling process while we are awake.
37. Draw and Journal Your Anger - Anger holds tremendous
energy. The aim in processing anger is not to get rid of anger but
to get our emotionally stagnant energy moving in order to see
what we are not looking at within ourselves.
38. Color Body Mapping - We think we are our thoughts, but our
body does not think. It knows who we really are. The discrepancy
between the thoughts that fuel our social mask, and the feelings
that are our bodily truth, create pain, soreness, extra weight, and
illness in our body. Our body does not lie. It is incapable of being
inauthentic.
39. Body Stories with Collage - Our bodies are a living
metaphor of what we feel and think on subconscious and
unconscious levels. Our bodies hold many stories, dreams,
memories and purposes. Using collage to tell the story of our
body, either in part or in whole, reveals what is hidden from our
everyday thinking.
40. Painting with Music - In our ordinary workaday selves we
may long for something to take us into our creative
passion. Moving from mundane states of consciousness of
dissipation, boredom and negativity into inspiration and creative
expansion sometimes requires music.

41. Meditative Writing for Self-Reflection - When we selfexpress without deeper reflection, we release our emotional
accumulations without understanding them. Methods such as
free-form automatic writing and Artist's Way morning pages
support an emotional release or a "brain drain" but unless we
examine the deeper meaning of our thoughts and feelings, we will

continue to repeat the same patterns of self-expression without

knowing why.
42. Scribble Drawing - Florence Cane - the developer of the
scribble drawing - was influenced by the metaphysical teacher
George Gurdjieff, who coined the world essence as a term for
the intrinsic, unchanging authentic soul within each person. Cane
used drawing and painting to help people find their essence. She
felt that spontaneous art could take people beyond their driven,
compensatory, and conditioned behaviors.
43.Healing Grief through Art and Journaling Therapy - When
our unfinished grief is running our consciousness, we are seeing
through the eyes of the age that we were when we stopped up
our emotional release. We cannot heal grief when we are inside
of the defensive emotional patterning of the child, teen, or young
adult that stores and avoids our grief.
44. Map of Consciousness Collage - It is possible to explore our
personality dynamics by mapping them out visually with
spontaneous collage and drawing. More often than not, in a single
day, we can feel conflicted in our consciousness in several
different ways.
45. Healing Traumatic Memories with Embodied Writing - We
all have a protective, survival self that protects us from
emotionally charged memories which may include fear,
loneliness, overwhelm, powerlessness, lack of hope and
perspective, fury, shame, disgust, or guilt.
46. Portal into Possibilities with Collage - As we heal our lives
emotionally and psychologically, we progressively clear the way
to connect to the realm of larger possibilities. These possibilities
and potentialities are actually around us all of the time, but we can
easily disassociate from seeing them clearly if we are struggling
with emotional flooding, and the jumbled up thinking that results
from inner psychological conflict.
47. Transforming Your Inner Brat - Every separate and split-off
part of our mind has creative gifts and strengths that can be

tempered and included in relationship with others. Our inner brat

for example, knows what we want, and finds the drive to go and
get it. Being defiant, it is often willing to deviate from the norm. It
is creative, and even innovative about getting its needs met. The
inner brat is young in spirit, sassy, and willing to say what it wants
with great irreverence.
48. Free Association Pastel Drawings - Free association helps
to surprise us out of our familiar preference for maintaining the
status quo. Freud wrote, "Where there is a creative mind - reason
- so it seems to me - relaxes its watch upon the gates, and the
ideas rush in pell-mell."
49. Intuitive Zendoodle - Intense concentration can invoke the
deep pleasure of a still and integrated mind, where all conflicts,
worries, and inner struggles disappear for time. Zendoodling
could be considered a form of concentration meditation akin to
formal sitting meditation in the Zen Buddhist tradition.
50. Unburdening the Past with Expressive Art Therapy - Our
entire psychology is built on defending away from emotional pain.
So it could be said that our fundamental core conflict is to whether
or not we will choose to feel what is difficult within and transform
it.

51. Journal Process for Healing "Inner Demons"- We treat

what is uncomfortable within as the enemy to be kept at bay at all
costs, but what if we befriended our shadow parts of self?
52. Journaling Through Emotional Overwhelm - Stream of
Consciousness Writing - When we practice stream of
consciousness writing, our present moment awareness can
expand our contracted emotional field. We can gather the
strength that is only available through present moment attention

to bodily sensation. We can do this writing exercise to give our

tumultuous emotions and mental states a break.
53. Exploring Mixed Feelings Through Embodied
Storytelling - Because our psyche functions in pairs of opposites,
it is no surprise that we tend to get caught in inner conflict and
polarization much of the time. When we have mixed feelings we
become stuck and exhausted. We cannot move forward. The
purpose of not picking sides during an inner conflict is to see what
new creative solutions arise by sitting in the middle and listening
to both sides equally.
54. A Journal Process for Healing Negative Core Beliefs - In
essence, all of the negative voices that plague us are resisted
experiences. Negative core beliefs gain their foothold through our
resistance of them. When we internalize negative suggestions or
interpret events negatively as children, we spend our life energy
constantly working against them.
55. Understanding Physical Illness - Journaling with Your
Non-Dominant Hand - Dialoguing with both hands, over time,
deepens our understanding of the thought and emotional systems
of younger parts of self which are influencing our direction away
from good health.
56. An Emotional Approach to Healing Illness - A Painting
and Journaling Meditation - There is an emotional component
that accompanies every illness that can be listened to and learned
from. Transpersonally speaking, the separate self uses illness to
express problems, and to identify itself as a separate self that
suffers from emotional wounds that have not healed yet.
57. Create a Mandala for Healing - We can approach the
mandala making process as a way to activate the latent healing
powers of our mind to generate symbols for healing. As we allow
our inner symbols of healing to emerge from our unconscious
mind into tangible form we strengthen our will to heal.
58. Create and Intention Journal - Deliberately creating
ourselves forward into more inspiring ways of being is to create

something wholly new and fresh, and different from the past. The
movement away from entrenched, self-defeating and repeating
habits from the past requires determined practice to create new
affirming mental and emotional habits.
59. How to Create an Altered Book - Altered books can be used
to work through long standing emotional issues, to change
unhelpful psychological patterns of belief, to find and cultivate a
new strengths, or to process and accurately remember the past.
Altered books can be joyfully made to help climb out of
depressive cycles and to cultivate inspiration.
60. Processing Trauma Through Altered Book Making - When
we are emotionally flooded or emotionally blocked, we hold our
body trauma patterns in place by subconscious beliefs. Our body,
emotions and beliefs form an interlocking "trauma pattern" that
unconsciously repeats through our life, unless it can be
consciously interrupted and recreated into more life-affiming
patterns of living.

61. The Art of Setting Boundaries - A Painting Journal

Meditation - Often we will feel guilty when we begin to set
boundaries to protect our energy and time. During the process of
learning to set boundaries it helpful to understand that the true
aim of giving is to support emotional and psychological learning
and growth, not ego stagnancy - in ourselves and others.
62. Healing Grief and Loss with Expressive Drawing - When
grief cycles and does not seem to be healing, we can come to
understand that there is an unmet need or an unhelpful belief that
is feeding the grief. Expressing emotion through expressive
drawing can help to cathart the feelings of loss and grief, but it
does it not always heal the beliefs that feed into extended grief.

63. Exploring Age-Regression - An Integrative Journaling

Exercise - Most of us experience age-regression on a fairly
regular basis, especially when we are feeling stressed or
vulnerable within our life circumstances. In order to not integrate to resist - a traumatic experience, the child self freezes the body
by tightening the muscles and holding the breath in a particular
way to avoid feeling a difficult emotion.
64. Create a Calming Collage - Self-Soothing for Emotional
Overwhelm - During therapy, or if you are processing heavy
emotions on your own, it is often helpful to have self-soothing
tools to calm, regulate and slow down the overwhelm of arising
emotions.
65. Body Focusing Journal for Processing Difficult Feelings Over a period of daily journaling from the body, knowings piece
together into a larger whole. Daily fragments form larger
meanings, and what was once difficult to own and assimilate is
reclaimed and included into a fuller sense of self.
66. How to Create an Experimental Art Journal - Art journaling
invites and nurtures new awareness by playing with odd
combinations of words, metaphors and imagery to allow contact
with something new and fresh inside. By playing creatively in your
art journal, without judging or evaluating what emerges, new
information infuses old repeating patterns with fresh new life and
possibilities.
67. Healing Trauma - Art Journaling for Therapy - The aim of
processing memory through art journaling is not to revisit a
traumatic emotions over and over again, but to recognize where
we have stopped living forward, and clear what is blocked.
68. Restoring Passion Through Gestalt and Expressive
Movement - We do not need to go into memory to heal the past.
Any part of our mind or emotional body that is still hurting and
stuck in the past will always be available to express itself in the
present moment.

69. Art Therapy for Anxiety, Panic and Post Traumatic

Stress - If you did not receive the love and support you needed
when you experienced trauma, you can give yourself loving
support now. We can give ourselves the love and presence that
others in the past could not offer.
70. Exposure Journaling Therapy to Reduce Fear and
Anxiety - While avoidance tactics might provide a brief respite
from anxiety, prolonged exposure therapy is a kind of "fear
toleration" or "fear presence" practice that delves past anxiety
avoidance patterns so that fear can be faced and overcome.

71. Understanding the Transpersonal Therapy Process - The

process of inner psychological, emotional and spiritual work is to
unblock defenses, move the stuck energy in our body to create
healthy flow, and transform negative, distorted beliefs and
emotions back into the Core Authentic Self.
72. Meditation and Creativity for Obsessive Compulsive
Tendencies - Whenever we have mild or extremely exacting
fixating tendencies we can use the gift of such a meticulous mind
to concentrate on the positive practice of concentrated breathing
and mind training to increase inner peace and emotional healing.
73. Healing Perfectionism and Self-Rejection - Understanding
Your Idealized Mask - Because our mask is inauthentic, we
experience continual rejection. People often avoid inauthenticity,
and so this starts the struggle for perfection to create an even
more infallible mask, so that the emotional pain of rejection can
be avoided.
74. Physical Repetition to Calm Anxiety - Any emotional
memory that is difficult to look at will have intense anxiety "sitting
on top" of it. When discomforting emotions arise, and they feel too

difficult to be present for, it is often essential to "work them"

through the body first.
75. Spontaneous Collage Scrap Journal - Collages that take
very little thought, time or effort can inadvertantly evoke an
unknown feeling, a new idea, or a fresh longing. Leftover collage
scraps - colorful papers, magazine clippings, rubbings, words, old
drawings and paintings - can be created into quick, experimental
collages.
76. Freedom From Shame - A Journal Process - As children,
we innocently think that everyone else has a perfect family and
ideal home conditions but ourselves. Shame arises when we
believe that our challenging situation is unique, and that our entire
thought and emotional process has to be hidden away from
others.
77. What is Your Core Wound? - When we act from our core
pain it is possible to feel our energy extending forward out of our
center in a compensatory way that feels anxious, draining and
overly effortful.
78. Practicing Spontaneity - 100 Faces Journal Project - It
seems strange that we would have to "practice" being
spontaneous but most of us were encultured early on to become
rigid about about art-making. Most of us were bound by rules
about what "good art" is beginning in elementary school.
79. Intuitive Found Poetry - Embracing the paradoxes that arise
out of spontaneous poetry can open your mind to intuition and
new possibilities for growth. Poetry relies on non-linear logic.
80. Expressing Your Vulnerable Inner Child - Many people
believe, "I will not suffer if do not allow myself to feel." Yet,
allowing our feelings to come to the surface enables them to grow
up and mature.

81. Healing Negative Intentions - Because our hidden negativity

lives in our unconscious mind, it can easily thwart our good
intentions despite our best conscious efforts to improve and
progress.
82. Healing Sexual Distortions - One of the best ways to
understand our unconscious mind and our lower self is to take a
deep look at our sexual behavior and our sexual fantasies.
83. Cultivating Unselfconsciousness Through Zen Painting Unselfconsciusness is a state of psychological and emotional
integration. To achieve integration through art, we can paint until
we are no longer thinking. We can make brushstrokes until our
brush seems to paint all by itself.
84. Practicing Forgiveness With Hooponopono Ho'opononono is a Hawaiian spiritual healing method that
focuses on internal healing by taking full responsibility for our
outer problems with other people. It is especially helpful to use
when forgiveness and reconciliation with another person seems
impossible on an outer interpersonal level.
85. Learning the Language of Your Unconscious Mind - Our
unconscious mind stores and hides away everything what we
reject about ourselves. When we bring every split-off, lost, and
unloved piece of ourselves back into the home of our accepting
heart, our strength and vitality returns, and we experience a
genuine inner peace that is free of enforced positivity.
86. Understanding Your Defense Mechanisms - It almost goes
without saying that our defense mechanisms prevent us from
progressing in our psychological and emotional healing work. We
all have our own particular architecture of defense that keeps
uncomfortable thoughts and feelings at bay.

87. Writing Healing Stories - Through our words and by "remembering" our life, we gather together our disjointed, alienated,
and separated part of self, and begin to re-value what has been
hidden and disdained.
88. Develop Heart Awareness by Writing Your Life Review We are always either withdrawing our energy from life in defense
and hurt or extending outwardly in some kind of loving gesture.
When we are withdrawing our energy, we are trying to stay within
the familiarity of our comfort zone, and within our personal limits
of loving.
89. Integrating Your Shadow - Psychologist Carl Jung describes
the shadow as all the things inside of ourselves that we do not
accept, do not like about ourselves, or do not wish to look at.
90. Resolving Childhood Emotional Needs - Often, without
even knowing it, we attempt to get other to act in ways to meet
our emotional needs that were not met in childhood.
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