Arts and Healing: A Group Process the

Arts and healing: A group process The group summary The group I chose to observe is one that focused on Arts, spirituality, and healing, called Personal Mythology. This was a weekend workshop to engage people in the theories and experiences that are presented by Feinstein & Krippner (1997) in The Mythic Path: Discovering the Guiding Stories of your past -- Creating a Vision for your Future.

The workshop was designed to serve 2 purposes as follows: (1) An intensive exposure to the work of personal mythology; (2) An intensive process of the work of personal mythology. People came together not only to engage with the intensive experience and begin the work of personal mythology but also in hopes of understanding how to make it an ongoing life process and help others in their spheres of influence to do the same.

In the Invitation of their book, Feinstein and Krippner (1997) describe one's personal mythology as follows: "Your personal mythology is the loom on which you weave the raw materials of daily experience into a coherent story. You live your life from within this mythology, drawing to yourself the characters and creating the scenes that correspond with its guiding theme. A great deal of this activity occurs outside your awareness. To discover and begin to transform your mythology is one of the most empowering choices open to you.

A renewed mythology calls up fresh perceptions, values, and a revitalized sense of purpose. When carefully examined, personal myths reveal themselves to be every bit as creative and imaginative as the most enterprising nighttime dream, setting the standards for success and failure, good and evil, heroism and villainy, while defining for you a unique roll in it all. The source of your mythology is also the source of your motivations, of your imagination, of your emotions, of awareness itself. It is the point at which consciousness springs into being." (p. 3).

Demographics, roles and dynamics The whole group consisted of 36 individuals, including 30 participants and 6 leaders. The group was split into 5 subgroups, each with 6 participants and 1 leader with 1 leader who remained in the facilitation role. The participants spent every waking and sleeping moments together. We were in our subgroups for all times outside of meditations (morning and afternoon), meals, and evening drumming, for which we were all (36) together in a large room.

The room was very warm and comfortable with couches, chairs, giant floor pillows, carpet squares, pillows, a stage, soft lighting, and tables for those who wanted a hard surface on which to write. The walls were covered with beautiful art and the decor was inviting. There seemed to be a great deal of thought going into the ways in which everything was laid out, the colors that were used, and the art pieces that were chosen.

The majority of the work in personal mythology is connecting with a certain presence of being and connecting with yourself at the deepest levels possible so the context in which this work is being done is quite important. This is also the room in which we ate our meals. Outside of the whole group being together, we had smaller rooms, designed in the same way for our subgroups.

There was an even mixture of ethnicities, languages, and family stories in the room but everyone held at least a high school diploma, 30 had college degrees, and 18 had graduate degrees (or in current pursuit of one), including all 6 of the leaders/facilitators. The ages of participants ranged from 26-52 and the leaders were between the ages of 57-74. Everyone's socio-economic status was somewhere in the middle class range, some a little lower or higher than others.

The work of personal mythology requires a certain depth of vulnerability, transparency, and courage that even the most normal self-help, therapy, or growth groups do not; thus, everyone had to find those points and push even further beyond what they believed their boundaries to be.

Interestingly, no one had a problem with this and I believe that is because (a) NO ONE knew each other coming into the weekend and NO ONE lived close enough to one another to overlap; (b) NO last names were used in the course of the weekend unless a participant chose to divulge; and (c) the facilitators were amazing. In this case, everyone had an equal responsibility to share and participate and the process was equally intense for everyone. Ward (2009) says that.