Healing

Robert Royston: The Healing Power of Creative Work

My conversation with JC Miller yielded a remarkable lesson about creativity and healing. It came via his mentor, Robert Royston, one of California’s foremost Modernist landscape architects.

How to Have Patience (Mira Keras)

Last summer I fought long and hard for a new prosthetic leg after a surgery drastically changed the shape of my residual limb. Getting a new prosthetic required dozens of hours of phone calls and pleading with insurance company phone reps. I was waiting in doctor’s offices and waiting on hold with my insurance company…and all this came while I was really waiting to heal. This extended lesson in patience actually helped me to be more patient with others.

Johanna Under the Ice: With One Breath, We Are Part of It

Hoping to recover from a serious biking accident, free diver Johanna Norblad tried an extreme and challenging therapy: diving under the frozen Arctic ice. The astonishing world she found led to her discovery of a new field of exploration and changed her life. I

Finding Your Personal Medicine (Yayoi Kusama)

When we stumbled on an image of the polka-dot cloth-wrapped trees in Yayoi Kusama’s extraordinary Ascension of the Polka Dots on the Trees, we felt instant joy and astonishment and were reminded once again of Kusama’s use of art as her own medicine. It got us thinking about vocations, passions, practices, arts that actually help us to live in the world.

Microscopic Silk Poems Meant to Live Inside the Body

When visual artist and poet Jen Bervin learned that researchers were experimenting with nano-printed silk medical sensors for patients monitoring serious health conditions, she wondered, If I were to have a silk sensor embedded under MY skin, what would I want it to say? The story of her exploration and the results are astonishing and deeply heartening.

Hammocks for Healing, Indoors or Out

When a friend told me about research showing that gentle rocking can help heal nervous system, emotional and cognitive imbalances, I decided to install a hammock in my NYC space and test rocking out on myself.
I dove headlong into hammock investigations. Here’s what you need to know to hang a hammock inside or out.

A Time-Limited Mind Sharpening Practice

After our friend Tim Chegwidden suffered a stroke years ago at age 54, he had to painstakingly learn how to speak again. He immediately started figuring out systems to do the thing he loved most: express the complexities of what he read or saw. Not satisfied with the level of nuance of the words he used, he developed a powerful practice to deepen them.

Love is Tiny Actions of Affection + Kindness

This lovely image and commentary Girl Knew York reminded us of the practice of applying “random kindness” not only to others but to ourselves, and Stephen Levine’s principle of “soft eyes”.

Yamamoto’s Ephemeral Salt Sculptures “Futile Yet Necessary to His Healing”

(Video link here.) There is something very moving about watching artist Motoi Yamamoto painstakingly make his intricate, lacelike installations out of salt…perhaps because they are at once so intricate and so ephemeral. We discovered that the ordinary material we all have on hand is, in Japanese culture, a traditional symbol for mourning and purification. And that Motoi Yamamoto…

Yoko Ono: Mend an Object and Your Heart

Every morning, we’ve been reading a page from Yoko Ono’s tiny book of instructions, Acorn. We have been moved by many of the “instructions” we’ve come across. We find this one, which advices a practice of mending, both physical and emotional, especially compelling.

2 Practices to Help Heal Aching Backs + Other Illnesses

In Hidden Art + Reminders on a Medicine Cabinet Door, I showed the INSIDE of my sliver of a steel medicine cabinet door and its ever-changing mashup of tiny artworks and reminders fastened with magnets. The one constant is a summary I made over a decade ago of Dr. John Sarno’s approach to dealing with back (and…

Emergency Medicine: Love, in It’s Many Forms, Heals

This past week, after we accompanied a dear friend through a dire emergency in the hospital, we witnessed the many ways that friends and strangers “lent a hand” with what seemed like an overwhelming amount to handle. Neighbors put groceries in our fridge, friends brought dinner to the hospital, some, like Maria Robledo, sent us images that…

The Art of Yayoi Kusama: Obsession Becomes Medicine

Although we’ve long been fans of Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama, now in her nineties, we had no idea of the power of her influence, dedication and work until we saw this remarkable 7-minute video interview (which flies by). She shows how two maligned concepts — obsession and accumulation — have been the means of transformation and healing for her.

yayoi kusama’s art-medicine

In The Art of the Flame-Out, Carl Swanson writes about visionary Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama’s return to the New York Art scene after 40 years in a mental-hospital exile. But whatever you make of her retreat into a psych ward, her mantra was always “self-obliteration”—to lose herself in the work, or to the work, to save herself.…

amazing lego prosthesis + boston’s continuing recovery

Occupational therapist Christina Stephens, who had her foot amputated after a crash injury, created a prosthetic entirely out of Legos. She rose to the challenge when a co-worker in her research lab jokingly suggested she make a prosthetic leg out of the toy construction blocks. Awesome creative spirit there! This video at DesignBoom shows the…

sue austin’s wheelchair: ‘re-envisioning the familiar’

(Video link here.) When Sue Austin got a power chair 16 years ago after an extended illness, she felt a tremendous sense of freedom — yet others looked at her as though she had lost something. ‘Limitation’, ‘fear’, ‘pity’, ‘restriction’ were the words people used when they tried to imagine using a power chair. I was…

healing worry (via anne herbert)

From the always illuminating Peace and Love and Noticing the Details…

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