Experiential Awareness

By Dorit Netzer M.A. ATR-BC, LCAT

As an art therapist, there is nothing more rewarding for me than to witness a client gain experiential awareness through his/her own artwork. What I refer to is the moment in which a person looks at his/her own creation in wonder and amazement as there, right before his/her own eyes, lies the answer to an emotional entanglement and it not only looks clear, it is felt clearly as an image of deep personal knowledge. What I observe is, perhaps, elementary and familiar: that being taught or advised about ways of becoming healthier and more satisfied with one’s life is not as powerful as learning through one’s own experience.

Change through experience is moving, figuratively and literally. The experience becomes even more meaningful when the individual realizes that the direction of movement lies within. This realization sometimes occurs upon waking from a dream that makes sense. Like in a dream, the art making in art therapy entails a sense of authorship, of drawing on one’s own inner knowing. Different from a dream, the wakefulness in drawing and the artwork as a concrete testimony assist the individual in owning, embracing, and, likely, act on his/her own discovery.

If just open enough to trust that there is more to us than cerebral knowing, people experience their inner power through their art; the image surfacing unannounced, waiting to be noticed and acknowledged. Like a dream puzzle, which can be forgotten upon waking or remain an enigma, the drawing can remain a surface of color and form, an unexplained group of symbols. Yet the remembered experience of making it is independently empowering, in itself a fulfilling sense of being active and speaking one’s own voice.

Like children, adults who go back to drawing without too much self-consciousness are not concerned with imitating how things looks; rather, they point their gaze inward. The richness of the world they discover and are able to express two dimensionally in simple lines of crayon becomes a source of creativity and vitality in their multidimensional daily lives.