The mind is powerful. What we think can actually shape and transform our reality. It’s not just our conscious thoughts that have impact. Our subconscious thoughts can alter our reality even more profoundly because we’re not aware of them. Our lack of awareness allows the thoughts to affect our lives without any chance for intervention.
We can call a series of thoughts a story. We all create stories about the many facets of life—why our loved one disappointed us, why it rained on a day we were planning to go swimming, why I got a headache, why the headache went away . . . the story-making is endless. It’s part of human nature to want to make sense of things . . . so we create these stories.
Let’s look, in particular, at the stories we make up about illness. It’s important to make any of the unconscious thoughts and beliefs conscious so that we can examine them closely. Art is a great tool for doing this.
If we find through this process that the stories about our illness perpetuate a negative outcome, then we can—and must—rewrite them. Below are three drawings that demonstrate this process.
She Destroyed Herself
I made this drawing in 1992. It shows how I responded to life by blaming myself for all that went wrong. In the drawing, that self-hate eventually leads to my death. We see my name on the tombstone. I would say this “hate” could be called cancer.
Rewriting
In this drawing, made twenty-two years later, in 2014, I begin to break down the many components that led to the self-hate. By understanding and verbalizing the true thoughts and feelings underlying the self-hate, I began to rewrite my story. In this image, my name is no longer on the tombstone. Instead, written on the stone are old ways of thinking, old beliefs, and emotions connected to childhood trauma and to cancer. Those are the things that are now dying. And we get a glimpse of the bright light as the story and self-hate begin to transform.
She Nurtured Herself
I made this third drawing a week after the one above it. Here things become more simplified. The tombstone is summed up in one word—the past. Flowers grow out of the tombstone, showing how I turned my trauma and grief into something vibrant and life affirming. The story is rewritten, thought by thought.
She Destroyed Herself
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Rewriting
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She Nurtured Herself
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