Where Art and Healing Converge

“There is some confusion as to what magic actually is. I think this can be cleared up if you just look at the very earliest descriptions of magic. Magic in its earliest form is often referred to as ‘the art’. I believe this is completely literal. I believe that magic is art and that art, whether it be writing, music, sculpture, or any other form is literally magic. Art is, like magic, the science of manipulating symbols, words, or images, to achieve changes in consciousness. The very language about magic seems to be talking as much about writing or art as it is about supernatural events. A grimmoir for example, the book of spells is simply a fancy way of saying grammar. Indeed, to cast a spell, is simply to spell, to manipulate words, to change people's consciousness. And I believe that this is why an artist or writer is the closest thing in the contemporary world that you are likely to see to a Shaman.”

-Alan Moore

Numerous cultures around the world maintain living shamanic traditions that stretch back to prehistory. But even where those traditions have faded, if we look far enough into the past of almost any human culture, we find the figure of the shaman.

Before modern professional distinctions and categories, there was always someone who lived in the borderlands—between the visible world and the invisible one, between the material and the spiritual.

Because of their unusual sensitivities, this person could sense the deeper roots of suffering—often psychic, symbolic, or spiritual. They could also channel something back into the community: visions, songs, rituals, performances. Works that helped people witness, metabolize, and transform what had been too difficult to hold alone.

In the modern West, with our zeal for specialization and categorization, we have separated this role into two different figures: the healer and the artist. Two different people. Two different vocations.

But my soul has always resisted this division.

My soul has been inveterate in her knowing that these functions are not separate—and that I am meant to live at their intersection. In fact, I suspect I would not be healthy or happy if I did not.

I need to inhabit that liminal territory where art and healing converge.

The ancient offices of the shaman.

One of the places where this convergence becomes especially vivid is in a ritual practice known in some creative and somatic communities as Prayer-Formance.

In a Prayer-Formance, participants are invited to step into a creative ritual space. They may dress up if they wish. They may speak, sing, move, dance, recite poetry, or enact something that longs to be expressed.

A shadow voice.

An ecstatic poem.

A wound narrative.

A defiant reclamation of power and joy.

If an outsider were to wander into one of these gatherings, they might think they had stumbled upon some kind of underground arts festival. And in a sense, they would not be wrong.

But the process is also unmistakably therapeutic.

It often allows people to illuminate psycho-spiritual material that years of ordinary conversation never quite reached.

The creation of a visual or auditory prayer-object—using whatever artistic medium calls to someone—is another expression of this same impulse.

And truthfully, it feels almost unnecessary to list examples of how creative expression can be healing.

Most of us already know this.

Human beings have been singing, dancing, chanting, storytelling, and making images since the dawn of history. We do it to soothe ourselves. To metabolize collective trauma. To grapple with the mysteries that refuse to resolve themselves into tidy explanations.

In this sense, my role as a multi-trained, integrative, intuitive, somatic healing practitioner often feels remarkably similar to my role as a poet and artist.

In both practices, I sit firmly in the living present moment.

I listen for what wants to emerge.

I trust the subtle guidance of embodied intuition and follow where it leads.

And ultimately, both processes aim toward the same thing:

A fuller expression of the authentic, evolving self.

Perhaps this is why art and healing have always shared the same ancient territory.

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Now I’d like to offer you a few questions to sit with.

What in you is dying to live?

What longs to be cut loose, unleashed, set free?

Where do you feel pigeonholed, misunderstood, or flattened?

How might you cultivate a little more defiant joy?

And what stands in your way?

Now put on some music.

Let your body move back and forth between two states:

the part of you that longs to be unleashed…

and the forces that hold it back.

Notice the rhythm between contraction and expansion.

And see what happens when you allow both to speak.