Heal yourself and your community with this proven 12-week program that uses the arts to awaken your innate healing abilities. From musicians in hospitals to quilts on the National Mall—art is already healing people all over the world. It is helping veterans recover, improving the quality of life for cancer patients, and bringing communities together to improve their neighborhoods. Now it’s your turn. Through art projects, including visual arts, dance, writing, and music, along with spiritual practices and guided imagery, Healing with the Arts gives you the tools to address what you need to heal in your life—physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual. An acclaimed twelve-week program lauded by hospitals and caretakers from around the world, Healing with the Arts gives you the ability to heal your family and your friends, as well as communities where you’ve always wanted to make a difference. Internationally known leaders in the arts in medicine movement, Michael Samuels, MD, and Mary Rockwood Lane, RN, PhD, show you how to use creativity and self-expression to pave the artist’s path to healing.

As well as providing an authoritative history of art therapy, it covers such diverse topics as the philosophy of art therapy, the way attitudes to insanity have changed, the role of art therapy in the context of post-war rehabilitation and the treatment of tuberculosis patients, Surrealism, and Britain's first therapeutic community.

Achaan Chah spent many years walking and meditating in the forest monastery of Wat Ba Pong, engaging in the uncomplicated and disciplined Buddhist practice called dhudanga. A Still Forest Pool reflects the quiet, intensive, and joyous practice of the forest monks of Thailand. Achaan Chah’s humble words, compiled by two Westerners who are former ordained monks, awaken the spirit of inquiry, wonderment, understanding, and deep inner peace. Attachment, according to Achaan Chah, causes all suffering. Understanding the impermanent, insecure, and selfless nature of life is the message he offers for human happiness and realization. To vividly grasp the meaning of attachment leads us to a new place of practice – the path of balance, the Middle Path.

A history of therapeutic practices, from ancient rituals to the age of computers, explores traditions from the East and the West, and argues that a combination of the Eastern and Western approaches would provide the best healing

Artist Kalman Aron has eclipsed evil and delved into visual truth and beauty. A Holocaust survivor, his experiences in concentration camps had a lifetime effect on his painting and his capability to convey the heart of his subjects. After the war, Aron's skills were acknowledged with a full scholarship to the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna and he received a master's in fine arts degree. At the end of 1949, he immigrated to America and settled in Los Angeles, a prolific and accomplished artist. Aron's media are varied and manifold - oils, pastels, acrylics, pen and ink, and watercolours - and his approach moves through a new arena of artistic expression with time. From his drawings of children, portraits, Los Angeles landscapes, and abstract drawings, among numerous other subjects, Aron has discovered healing through his art. His example is a symbol of hope and restoration. This beautifully illustrated book is a visual testament to that hope. AUTHOR: Susan Beilby Magee, graduate of Pomona College and Wharton and formerly a White House Fellow, is a certified hypnotherapist with 25 years experience in the healing arts. ILLUSTRATIONS: 200 colour & 50 b/w illustrations