MysticMag has the pleasure of chatting with Annessa Morrison from Healing Through Art RX – the one and only guided healing program using fine art for right brain immersion. We discover how art can be used as a healing tool and how creativity can positively impact one’s health and well-being.
Your Journey from dealing with chronic illness to finding a path to recovery through art is inspiring. Can you share a bit more about the pivotal moment or realization that set you on this path, and how art played a role in your healing?
Diagnosed with Lupus, Fibromyalgia, CFS, and so many others I cannot even remember them… my days consisted of a great deal of pain. I could move about 30 minutes a day and that was usually through pain. I had tried years of what the traditional medical professionals had told me to do and found myself getting worse and worse. They kept talking about maintenance. I did not want to maintain feeling this way every day, muscle pain, brain fog, pressure, fatigue and hopelessness and when I told them that, I was recommended another antidepressant medication – 24 in total so I would feel better about losing my ability to lose my life while they would not even entertain the term “cure”.
My husband thought that it was Bucket List time. When you do not know if you can physically do anything you might like to do again, you try to start checking things off before they aren’t possible. I wanted to see the Impressionist painters, and the Denver Art Museum had the show. The cost did not matter even if I only got to see a room or two before I could not go any more, we just had to go. I saw that Pissarro left bare spots of canvas with no paint on them. I looked sideways at the Monet and marveled at how smooth the canvas was. When we got back to the car after the entire show my husband asked me what you always ask as the spouse of a person who is ill “How you feeling?” This time I stopped and had to think about it. “I feel pretty good”. We both looked at the clock in the dashboard and stared at each other dumbfounded. It had been three and a half hours.
There is something there. We rode home in mostly silence. Later we would talk of the show and the marvels of the individual pieces, now filled with the fact that the pain had stopped, I found some slight endurance and there was something to that.
The next day I looked up impressionist paintings on the computer and put the address somewhere I could get to it easily and I started looking at them every day. Then I started looking at them when I was in extreme pain. Then I started looking at them whenever any flair of any kind came up. One month later I started being able to exercise for 2 minutes a day. Then I started looking at other paintings, and tried to find what it was that made it work. This is just too darn simple. Looking at art is healing me! So, I started to research brain mechanisms. There are reasons for this to work that are based upon how we use our own operating system. Healing Through Art Rx has coined the program, now a decade old, “The Art Alternative” and it takes into consideration those who create as well as those who do not wish to, or those who do not want to study arts and still provides a path to a road I took that has seen me healed for 10 years now.
Your Program, Healing Through Art RX, offers a unique approach to wellness. Could you explain how art and creativity can positively impact one’s health and well-being, even for those who might not consider themselves artists?
I am not a doctor. I am not sure if I had been trained as a doctor, I could have come up with this. The empty room left could imagine things impossible for the medically educated mind. Through my own research I can say that I think this is how it works. Your left brain is the logical side, and it takes care of when you have to be places, schedules, bills, logistics, the fight or flight responses, and many of the running’s of a life that require thinking. This left side of the brain is also the part of the brain that kicks in the body’s natural healing mechanisms. It turns on your healing. This is a busy and overworked and frankly tired and stressed part of the brain. With so much going on, when does it have time to kick in natural healing or maintenance activities? It is getting little Johnny to ball practice and putting dinner on the table with time left for homework and those things that life in today’s world requires. There are only a couple of ways known to society to be able to calm that side of the brain or stop “Tornado Brain”. Meditation is a very good way, and it was almost completely beyond my grasp as a highly creative person. Another way is to fully engage the Right side of your brain. They sometimes call this artist brain. You lose track of time and anything else in the world while immersed in the process of creation. I found that you can get fully into the artist brain while simply looking at art and put together a list of 15 looking techniques for those who do not wish to create, can not physically do it right now, or don’t care why just show me how, so that anyone can spend 30 days on one painting and potentially get a full right brain immersion by looking.
Once you have immersed yourself into the act of looking at any artwork you enjoy, your left brain clears of the stressors and worries of the moment, fight or flight, and that clears the space for it to do scheduled maintenance and healing where healing needs to take place. We have refined the program to give directions to your own sub consciousness that for me has supercharged my own healing in as little as 15 minutes a day.
The process of creating art and using it as a healing tool seems fascinating. Can you describe some of the techniques or exercises individuals can expect to explore in your program, and what kind of results they might achieve?
I will happily give you the whole thing.
The 15-minute routine called “The Art Alternative”
The first two minutes you pump up your own personal frequency. Change the physiology of the body.
You spend 30 seconds on voicing your perfectly positive intent statement.
The next full minute is gathering your own personal energy. Visualization of gathering energy.
8 minutes is spent using one of the 15 techniques looking at an artwork for full immersion in the right brain.
One minute on a fully realized visioning of the action of the cure.
One minute on a fully realized visioning of the result of the cure.
90 seconds on the forgiveness and gratitude that free the blockages that cause illnesses.
You do it once or twice a day and change up the technique pieces daily. If you find a technique that works, stick with it for a while.
Under The umbrella of Healing Through Art RX we speak and offer consulting on each of these pieces for optimum results.
For those who want to create we have Therapy Art classes and consulting. This leads people on a path to create pieces that are personal creations using all 15 looking techniques on multiple skill levels to make your own artwork to use in “The Art Alternative “ healing program.
One of these Therapy Art classes is to find and create your own symbol driven artwork of your spirit animal. With the creator in the driver’s seat not only do you have a beautiful artwork, but you also know it contains the 15 looking technique pieces, personal meaning to you in symbolism and color, traits you have chosen to focus on that empower and embolden the individual in their own path.
There is a particular favorite of mine that works great in homes for people with cognitive challenges. The scribble class. You start with a directed couple of scribbles and whole stories emerge in a half abstract and entertaining piece of artwork at the other end. There is no end to what people find in artwork they never knew they could create. This is full immersion at its finest and simplest.
During this past year we have added personal body/vehicle services. I am doing color therapy sessions and Bill is doing 8 forms of massage and reiki from Swedish to lymphatic to pre-natal and offering add-ons like cupping and hot stones. This type of work is another way we are using artist expression and its tools to help people in their own personal healing process.
The greatest thing of all, our services and methods have no negative side effects. None. There has not been one incidence of harm or damage. I am convinced that they have no potential to harm at all. For a person who has been there, that is extremely important to me.
What we do hope that people achieve is just as simple as it is complicated. We operate in the hope that you can use your own natural and inside your already healing abilities to achieve a complete and life long cure. I am not a doctor, I am a person who has achieved a complete lifelong cure. If I can do it, I am pretty sure any old fool can. When did the term “Do no harm” go out of style anyway?
Caregiver fatigue is a significant challenge for many individuals. How does your program address and help those who are caregivers, and what advice can you offer to them in terms of utilizing art for self-care?
There is a current caregiver fatigue epidemic in our world today. First let’s understand some of the issues that lead to this problem.
Taking care of yourself is almost impossible when you have another depending on you at any moment of any day and most caregivers have no backup person or time off to incorporate self-care into their life. They have the care of someone who needs you desperately now and in a lot of cases are counting on you being there for their very survival. This is stress without any down time or relief that can be seen or planned on. This is the height of stress.
When you cannot plan time to go to a gym, or budget to buy only the best fuel at the grocery then planning a routine that is helpful to the caregiver must take that back seat. When a seizure or a bowel attack could happen at any moment you cannot take that exercise class you wanted to.
There is also a huge portion of being a caregiver that is powerless. You are counting on doctors to make it better and maybe it just gets worse. You count on the tv to give you enough time just to use the facilities for yourself. Any moment could hold another emergency where you must call in someone who knows more before anything tangible can be accomplished.
There are great reasons that caregivers experience fatigue on top of isolation, and hopeless powerlessness.
The Art Alternative program is something you can do with the patient as a caregiver while also doing for yourself. It is a sneaky and wonderfully simple way to help yourself while also helping your patient. I have found many caregivers who are ready and willing to help the patient with a new protocol or technique and push their own needs aside. The time of only 15 minutes can fit in numerous slots throughout the day without a huge time commitment. Only looking at art has no clean up or setup. You need no special drugs or apparatus. The search for a piece of art that suits your taste can be fun and rewarding as well.
To get caregivers to do it, it must be real simple and also help their patients. This program does.
My advice to caregivers based upon the input of Bill, my caregiver when I was ill is this. Help yourself while helping them 15 minutes a day with no possibility of harm. Fill out their pieces at the same time you fill out your own. Find artworks that inspire you both if you can, and if not keep a phone nearby for yours while theirs is on the wall or screen.
What motivated you to create Healing with Art programs, and what kind of transformation or impact have you seen in participants who have taken your courses?
After I once again became well, I used several years to define and incorporate the 15 looking techniques into artwork and make sure it was easy for a non-artist to grasp. We found out more information and added pieces as they became tried and tested and produced a better quicker result. This appealed to our mentality, and we enjoyed the search and trying. We put it all into 15 minutes and we thought we were done.
Still I come back to one truth. What kind of a person would I be if I found this way past chronic illness and all matters of discomfort that was not expensive, time consuming, difficult, or painful and I chose not to tell people? I never wanted to be in the medical profession. I was never called to be a saint, thank goodness. I think the reason I found this was that I was a creator and could understand the power of creative immersion and practice it to create a routine.
I have seen joints not hurt and move smoothly, I have seen seizures dissipate, I have seen epiphanies of beauty for the depressed, I have seen spaces of clarity for the cognitively impaired, I have seen self-esteem blossom for those with addiction problems, I have seen pain melt from a face of an art immersed person, I have seen my own cure without even an elevated ANA for a decade, I have seen entire rooms of people grasp their own healing abilities and also seen the face of those appreciating the world that once just beat them to a pulp.
I personally believe that our world is in a transition and that people are ready for the other option. WOO WOO is a term used to ridicule other options for a long time now and I would like to recoin the phrase to an acronym. What is the Other Option, What is the Other Option. Our fear should not be that we are powerless, but that we are all powerful and in healing it is always us at the end that is doing the healing. It is also true that artwork, be it funny or irreverent, scratchy, or smooth, affects people. The Art alternative and Healing through Art RX modalities have healed people. The most important question of the day is…are you the next person it will heal?
