Self-Reflection on the Go

I created this ten-minute collage practice when I was working full-time as an art facilitator in healthcare. Feeling emotionally overwhelmed. I did not have much time to tend to my inner life. And I know, after years of teaching this course, that artists and non-artists alike can find surprising emotional freedom of expression through this simple daily creative practice.

Many of us tuck away and accumulate difficult emotions in the interest of properly functioning in our practical lives. In the process of growing up, you likely did not learn how to properly process your emotions in the first place, and unknowingly, you could be accumulating heavy emotions with each passing year.

My creativity has always given me a way to see, accept, and process all parts of myself in a loving visual way. For many years, I personally have used the practice of spontaneous self-expression to help me honour what I was not allowed to express when I was growing up and also to process the unexpressed emotions that accumulate in a busy, stressful life. 

Symbol Release

For most of my teen and early adult years, I depended on my private creativity journals to help me feel better emotionally. Unknowingly, I was implementing the process of what psychologist Carl Jung would refer to as "symbol release."

While I did not understand the emotions I was releasing through my creativity, I was nonetheless allowing a daily emotional clearing of my body and unconscious mind. I knew that if I were spontaneously creative each day, I would feel clearer, lighter, and freer.

This course was created during a period in my life when I could no longer fit my extensive expressive art practices into my life. When I began working full-time, I found that by the end of my working week, I would feel weighed down by emotional accumulation. So I began creating a ten-minute "morning collage" with my tea very early each morning, before getting myself off to work.

An Easy Creative Practice

To make your experience almost effortless, I invite you to have a stack of old magazines, books, and colourful patterned papers on hand so that you can make a ten-minute collage in the morning before you start getting ready for your day.

Even if you are going to be home for the day, make yourself a cup of tea or coffee first thing in the morning, and create your collage immediately after you wake up so you are as closely connected to your unconscious mind as possible. 

Two or three torn images, spontaneously chosen, along with a word, phrase, or two, is all that is required for your collage to reveal something new. I prefer to work with imagery, but if you want to play with coloured papers in spontaneous, abstract ways, do.