The Art of Resilience: Overcoming Pain and Obstacles

By Alexandra James

In a research publication on the National Institute of Health’s website called, The Connection Between Art, Healing and Public Health: A Review of Current Literature written by Heather L Stuckey, DEd and Jeremy Nobel, MD, MPH stated, "through creativity and imagination, we find our identity and our reservoir of healing. The more we understand the relationship between creative expression and healing, the more we will discover the healing power of the arts.” As a poet and lover of all forms of artistic expression, I can attest to the power of creativity to build resilience and bolster inner will, even in the most tragic and emotionally challenging situations. It has been in my darkest moments—the accidental death of my brother, one my closet friends being shot five times, the death of one my favorite aunts, the pain of the loss or watching someone I love suffer—that I have created my best artistic work. The same level of creativity also emerges when I witness the suffering and oppression facing countless families in our world. Art gives me a place to hold the gamut of emotions as well as the inspiration to remember the power of resilience, “being strong and flexible.” Some of the poems I have written during the chaos life brings have become mantras of sorts, pulling me into a space that we all have access to, but often forget in the middle of crises, the unbelievable power of the mind to override what is presently happening to see and experience something greater. This “something greater” is what artists and lovers of art have intuitively known and experienced since time immemorial, art changes your mind, lifts your energy, and transforms your perspective. 

Over the last 20 years, this intuitive knowing has been scientifically confirmed through psychological research and more recently through neuroscience.  Something happens in the brain when you create or enjoy any form of artistic expression. Neurons are fired up, the left and right hemisphere of the brain communicate, your brain floods your body with serotonin and your emotions are transformed. Research also shows that art sparks the part of the brain that thrives on social connections. This happens if you are creating or enjoying art alone and is magnified when you are participating in art with others such as play, an opera, concert, or open mic. Your mind is given a respite from the disconnection and constant bombardment of negative news cycles, the pain and obstacles in your in life or in that of someone you love and you are thrust into a space of connectedness and expansive consciousness.   

I believe the art helps you live all the Protective Factors and constantly pushes you to remember reassess and experience the beauty and fluidity of life: the lessons from the pain, the joy of triumph over obstacles, and the beauty of the human mind and spirit. Because of my profession, I am super excited that there is research showing that art specifically builds two of the five Protective Factors: Resilience and Social Connections. Imagine the programmatic possibilities for families, youth, and children to embed the Protective Factors not just through parenting education, Parent Cafés, workshops but through a two-generational artistic approach undergirded by the emerging research in neuroscience, psychology, and art. We have the ability now as artists, creatives and lovers of all things artistic to merge what we have intuitively known with science to usher in new era of family support and youth development that is not disconnected but integrated; that is not based on expertise, lecturing, provider power differential dynamics, but mutual healing of trauma and vicarious trauma, mutual respect. We do this by living what indigenous and ancient cultures have practiced for centuries:  as I heal you, I heal myself as we heal each other we heal the world. 

Earlier in this blog, I discussed how many of the poems have I written in painfully challenging  times in my life have become like mantras reminders to me to feel the pain acknowledge the pain but dust myself off and begin healing the pain by practicing the art of resilience. Below is one of those poems, enjoy!

 

To See Beyond What You See

Now sitting in solitude

Selecting thoughts that think themselves from eternal persistence

Leave questions answered in connecting 

Casual to controlled to conscious 

Life existence

Moving mountains of matter with one seed

The soul’s stable structure surges impulses of heed

That what is planted in pure heart and mind state

Creates

Into Earth atoms.

Alexandra James

 
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