Reclaiming Your Virginity:Intuitive Inquiry
Using Creativity To Honour And Heal
Reverend Dinah Rachel Pemberton
Abstract
Reclaiming Your Virginity: Intuitive Inquiry, has helped to paint a picture of exploring how we can use creative materials such as art, dance, poetry, yoga, music, and meditation to express our healing journeys. This exploration took shape by looking into my personal healing journey, reflecting on my life and the creative tools I had used. Which began a journey with the literature to reclaim the research topic and the research question How can creativity honour the healing journeys of people’s lives?
Creative modalities that offer a non-verbal approach such as creativity, rituals, poetry, yoga, and art are not high on the list, of recommendations where I live in Manchester. The research set out to explore how creativity can complement traditional healing treatments for our health and well-being. Looking for a simplistic holistic approach intuitively through empathetic identification (Anderson & Braud, 2011), expressive arts therapy and spirituality brought together the mind, body, emotions, and spirit to honour each individual’s unique expressive style (Malchiodi, 2003). Which will be explored in more detail throughout the dissertation.
The methodology used was Intuitive Inquiry (Anderson & Braud, 2011) as it facilitates and assists the researcher in using the intuition, creative materials as sources of inspiration for the self and others, within a hermeneutic structure composed of five iterative cycles. That welcomes a ritual for transformation, healing, experiencing compassion and honouring. The data was collected from two creative workshops and a creative interview.
In the overall findings Reclaiming Your Virginity: Intuitive Inquiry offered a space to honour the Guests healing journeys. Where the Guests shared richly and deeply about their healing journeys and how creativity has helped them in their lives. Each Guest used creativity in their own unique individual way for instance, as a profession, a spiritual practice, for inspiration, or in privacy. Authentically and deeply, they shared the challenges and difficulties they faced in putting their healing journeys into words. And how creative materials such as Art, Yoga, and Music has been a gift, a curse, an adventure, sacred, healing, a special friend that has empowered them, inspired them, and accepted them for who they are.
Key words: Intuition, Creativity, Healing, Art, Poetry, Yoga, Spirituality, Transformation, Polarity, Honouring, Breath, Inspiration, and Empowerment.
Acknowledgments
During the past five years of studying, I would like to acknowledge some very special people who have helped me to make the submission of this dissertation possible. Firstly, I would like to thank my children for their patience, understanding, and unconditional love. As a family, we have grown together through the ups and downs that this dissertation and research project has offered and brought into our lives. I would like to also acknowledge and honour my Nana (Dulcina Pemberton), for her courage, bravery and strength, I would not be who I am today without you. I would like to thank and honour my supervisor Dr Jessica Bockler, Professor Les Lancaster, and the staff at Alef Trust who have supported me throughout the past five years. I would like to honour and thank my supervisor Dr Neil Deuchar for offering his free time to ensure and see that I have finished the dissertation right to the very end. I would also like to honour all the Guests for taking the time out to participate in the research project, it would have not been possible and the same without you. I honour you all very much, I will end all acknowledgments with an intuitive art drawing from my proposal and a poem.
I have Come At Last To Greet You
I've come
At last to greet you
Startling eyes shine upon you
I greet you
I greet you
You are a blessing
Blessed be for you have come to read these
Healing words
These words are not my own
They have know ownership
They are here to deliver
Deliver you a message
To your heart
Your pains
Your suffering
To say you are not alone
Far from it
We are here
Here with
You
Right
Now
Cycle 1 Clarifying The Research Topic
"Our vision will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes (Jung,1973). "
My Personal Journey
In 2009 I was given the opportunity to be a volunteer counsellor for children who faced emotional and behavioural difficulties. To develop a trusting relationship, we would use a variety of creative tools, puppets, and toys. In this period of helping children, I became aware that there was a little girl inside me that needed healing too. I would not have said that my creative healing journey started here, but maybe it did. Because at that time I would not have linked creativity, healing, and counselling together.
A Picture I was gifted from one of the children I worked with
Natalie Rogers (1999) established a connection between creativity and therapeutic processes. She combines various modalities such as dance, movement, art, writing, sculpting, drama, and music to deepen and transcend her traditional talk therapy, which is known as expressive art therapy. The foundation of expressive art therapy is based on her father Carl Rogers Person-Centred Counselling (Rogers, 1993). The healing and therapeutic purposes of expressive art therapy are used as an additional tool with the focus, not being on the artistic outcomes but rather on the process of creating, leading to a path of wholeness (Rogers,1999).
Three years later, on the 9th April 2012, I was invited to an ayahuasca retreat to the Amazon Rainforest. During the retreat, I was introduced to many creative healing tools, such as art, dance, singing icaros, and using singing bowls. I never knew at the time that these were healing tools, or that you could use creativity for ritual or in a ceremony. I would never have thought of joining spirituality and creativity together, I was oblivious to why these sacred tools were beneficial until I met people from diverse backgrounds who shared similar lived experiences like myself who used creativity to help them heal.
Having the opportunity to experience a variety of creative healing tools I had an intuitive connection to art. Dance and singing put me in the spotlight and it meant I had to face my fears of not being a good dancer or a singer. The Amazon rainforest brought art alive for me, where I felt safe and confident with the intuitive visuals that I saw and drew. The shaman's way of being and living gave me permission, to accept the way that I drew art. Their sacred drawings mandalas were unusual, unique, powerful, beautiful, healing, and made no sense whatsoever but that did not matter to the shamans and their tribes. And this inspired me, that whatever I drew was good enough, which gave me a sense of being at home.
Just like the shamans Halprin (2003) also believed that ceremony and rituals teach us that we have the remedy and medicine within us to translate our past lived experiences into dance, art, and many other creative modalities. Where the language is mainly nonverbal and is carried out through the language of the body, not by a language that has been shaped by the mind (Halprin, 2014). When I returned to England, I continued painting, the first picture I painted was for my Mother “a boat sailing in the ocean”.
However, my passion for art was short lived and life took over again. Today looking back all them years ago I was unaware that my creative healing journey has always been here with me.
An Image Of The First Picture I Painted In The Amazon Rainforest
Figure 1
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