Art and Healing : Using Expressive Art to Heal Your Body, Mind, and Spirit

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Summary: The next best thing to taking a workshop on Art and Healing.
Review: This book is an inspiration! The material is presented simply, clearly, and in a logical progression. Ater reading the first few chapters, which talk about how to use the art and healing process, and the differences in expressing emotions verbally and through imagery, I felt I had a much better understanding of the topic and the confidence to try the process for myself. One of the things I especially like about it, is that it contains plenty of anecdotal work with clients and includes the artwork that came out of their process (which helped relieve the insecurity I felt about my own art ability). At the end of each chapter, Ganim gives the reader exercises to try at home, along with guided visualizations to help relax you into each exercise. Then she provides self-dialoguing questions to help you understand what your images might mean. I found this book the next best thing to taking a workshop on Art and Healing. The only thing that would make it better would be to offer audio tapes with the guided visualizations on it, which would make it that much easier to work on this at home.

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Summary: A book to open your soul and heart, and expand your mind.
Review: This book is written beautifully and organized effectively. It is set-up for both professional and non-professionals to understand the process. Although clearly knowledge based, the information and structure was presented in a way that anyone interested in exploring this type of healing would be willing to try and succeed. It is truly an excellent addition to the field of healing modalities.

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Summary: Disappointing content
Review: This book promotes the idea that art is healing; those of us who use art for healing can certainly agree with that. However, the author becomes annoying when she also promotes beliefs such as "cancer is a gift". I happen to work as an expressive arts therapist with cancer patients and let me tell you, cancer is not a gift and it is insensitive and an insult to all cancer survivors to promote such new-age hogwash. Like art, everyone has their own experience of cancer and many never come to terms with it as a gift or blessing, especially those in extreme pain or discomfort. I also agree with the reviewer who noted that there are many unproven statements in this book about things that are better left to science and medicine. It is too bad the author resorted to these types of inaccurate statements, because the art itself in this book could have been a testimony to its healing powers.

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Summary: Wonderful guidebook for non-therapists!
Review: This is a great book for lay people. Many books of this type are too academic, densely written or boring to the average non-professional reader who might be interested in this topic. The writer makes the concept so easy to understand. It's filled with examples of interesting (and often beautiful) art work with words and stories by the creators. Very powerful to have the individuals who themselves have gone through life-threatening illnesses and traumatic situations talk about the healing power of art. Particularly fascinating to see examples of how art can be used globally and with the environment. Kudos to the all the people who shared so honestly their intimate stories and viewpoints, and congratulations to the author for compiling such a compelling body of work.