The Evolution of Healing Through Creativity Workshops

Early in my seven weeks of radiation therapy, my wife, Jo Ann encouraged me to write about what I was going through. When I sat down to do this, poetry was what came out. Much of what came out was about gratitude, positive focus and desired outcomes. When I shared what I had written, I found audiences to be very appreciative. Survivors and support people told me they felt the emotion in my words, and that my poems helped them to process what they were experiencing. Friends felt I should try to reach out and share what I had created with more people. Since then I have published some of the poems I wrote in a chapbook called Lemonade Notes To Cancer. I also found a number of periodicals and online cancer support sites willing to publish my work.

Over time I saw that the coping tools I accessed while defining and focusing on my desired outcomes could be valuable and relevant to most people facing major changes and challenges in their lives. I developed a Healing Through Creativity Workshop to share my poems and message. I soon recognized that the less these workshops became about me and my poems and the more they became about getting participants to use what I had learned in my healing for their own gain, the more everyone benefited in the process. My poems became prompts from which participants could think about and write from while defining what healing and creativity meant to them. The next step was to get participants talking with each other in breakout sessions. Feedback from these group sessions became the basis of a healing vocabulary list. At this time I began inviting participants to create something healing based on their collective definitions and to share what they created with their fellow participants