October / November 2009

I would like to welcome Arla Patch as this issue's cover artist. This issue's theme, Living Visions, brings to us an artist who creates just that, a living vision for those who have experienced intense trauma in their lives. I asked Arla to share her story with you, along with her process and that of the women she has worked with.

Thank you Arla for sharing this special way of connection; and to the women whose pictures we present, our gratitude and love.

Four hundred years ago I would have been burned at the stake, as I have visions and hear voices. But today I am safe to admit that I woke one morning with the vision of a woman made out of ferns.

As an artist, I knew this vision was a gift that could not be ignored. I set out to create it by photographing ferns with slide film, projecting that on to a black surface, getting in front of that with the slide focused on me and then taking a photo of that projection with a camera on a tripod.

This idea led to the creation of my first book A Body Story in 2005, which was nominated for Outstanding Book of the Year by the Independent Publishers in 2006. As a woman with a trauma history, the process was so healing for me – projecting nature onto my body, fusing with it and thereby reframing how I saw and felt about myself – that I wanted to share it.

The Nature Fusion Process™ was the result of this desire. It is a workshop that uses "photo-fusion" with group work, movement, writing, guided imagery and making a life-sized cast shadow drawing. I have been fortunate to share this process with women in prison at Mission Creek Correctional Center for Women in Washington State as well as with “troubled girls” in a therapeutic boarding school in Arizona. These experiences provided the material for my newest book Finding Ground: Girls and Women in Recovery. It contains the nature fusion images generated from the workshops, along with the writing created by each girl or women, as well as the context of her story.

Just being a woman on this planet can create a need to reframe our sense of self. Of particular interest to me, as an artist and facilitator of healing, are “troubled girls” and incarcerated women. Their wounds have been particularly intense and traumatizing. I have been inspired by how art can dramatically change our perception.

As an art teacher since 1972, I have repeatedly witnessed the power of shifting into our right brain hemisphere. When there is a history of trauma involved, the right brain – the visual, perceiving, intuitive world of our imagination – holds particularly potent possibilities for personal transformation. This was further validated by a talk given by Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor, a Harvard brain scientist who actually experienced a purely right brain reality during a stroke. (www.ted.com/talks/view/id/229) Whenever we access our right hemisphere, we have the opportunity to experience ourselves as more expansive and connected to everything around us. Our left hemisphere is the one that tells us we are separate. Through imagery we can see ourselves in this entirely new and beautiful way. We can access an understanding of ourselves that takes away judgment and replaces it with peacefulness and belonging. Here lies the seed of the Nature Fusion Process™.

It is said that imagery is the language of the soul. Our science is bearing that out. In Bessel van der Kolk’s book The Body Keeps the Score, the idea is presented that verbal therapies often can’t address memories that are stored in the body. Neuroimaging of the brain has shown that when people remember a traumatic event, the left frontal cortex – the centers of speech and language – shuts down. The right hemisphere lights up, especially the amygdala, which is associated with emotional states. It also showed that when people recount the trauma, frontal lobes become impaired and individuals have trouble thinking and speaking.

Doris Banowsky Arrington pointed out in Art, Angst and Trauma: Right Brain Interventions with Developmental Issues that “creative activity literally changes the traumatized topography of the brain.” The rational and verbal left-brain has usually constructed a matrix of protection and minimization about what needs to be healed. Creating images using the body opens the door to the emotions and spirit – that “place of no words” – allowing access to what might really be down deep in our inner well. Then we have the opportunity to love what we find there.

My experience with the teenage girls and women struggling to heal from the traumas of their past, has been deeply moving and rewarding. It’s also a comfort to know that the science supports what I have observed in how well this creative process works.

When I returned to the prison six months after the workshop, it was very encouraging to learn that the “shifts” that had occurred were still very much alive and operating for the women. During the workshop I had given them each a print of their photograph, which they were allowed to have on the wall in their cell, so they could constantly be reminded of this new way of seeing themselves.

One woman told me that she had always seen herself as a logical, analytical and controlled person. After my workshop, she realized that she was actually intuitive and creative. She has since had the chance to take a painting class in prison and has realized she has natural talent. Once she is released, she is determined to attend Art and Design School. She said she now realizes this more rigid and intellectual self-concept was a coping mechanism that masked her true nature.

With Nature as the physician and a prescription of creativity, beauty, and the individual’s own body, the Nature Fusion Process™ is a powerful tool for transformation. It proved especially useful in reframing the shame and self-loathing that comes with being a “troubled girl” or a prison inmate. This unique photographic process has given women and girls, working to reclaim their value, a visual anchor. When they lay eyes on themselves in this new transformed way there is a sense of coming home to who they really are. There is also the truth that a photograph doesn’t lie. These concrete images help them recognize their innate beauty and reclaim their fundamental value.

The positive results from the Nature Fusion Process™ work also springs from our heritage of living on this earth. We seem to carry a genetic memory of a time when our lives were completely intertwined with the conditions of nature. Our lives were in tune with its rhythms. That kind of grounding supports a sense of belonging, purpose and spiritual connection. It is the loss of this relationship with our ground – loosing our inborn compass – that creates the conditions for our lives to fall apart. Our identity is fragmented and we become disconnected from our true nature. We then try to find our ground in the wrong places and with endless substitutions. Our fusion with Nature has an authenticity and a wholeness that those in recovery are seeking.

One woman inmate who told me that she knew she had purposely returned to “God’s Hotel” (prison) for her second time in order to get clean from drug addiction and straightened out, said she saw a part of herself she had never seen before in the photograph I took. She had always seen herself as a tomboy growing up but when she saw herself made of flowers, she saw the feminine self she didn’t know that well. She said it was “the spirit in me wanting to blossom.” She told me she carries that image of herself around in her mind’s eye and it is really important to her now. She has an expanded sense of who she really is.

Another woman in prison said she realized that she deserved to be free of the resentment she carried toward her father, a heroin addict, who had sexually molested her from age 12-16. She decided to write him a letter forgiving him for what he had done. By some stroke of fate she had been moved back to another prison facility and assigned a new roommate. This new roommate knew her father. She gave her roommate the letter to give to her father.

A few years had passed since first working with one girl at the boarding school who is now 18. When we spoke on the phone she explained to me that her wilderness experience in recovery was where she first made the turn toward finding her “hope and inner power.” Being able to become one with nature in the photograph was an important symbol of that change. She is now working toward getting her high school diploma and is an apprentice to a massage therapist. She wants to study bodywork and massage.

“Change is certain, growth is optional,” is how a young woman serving a seven-and-a-half year sentence started her response on how she felt about the effects of the workshop.

She said the image confirmed who she has become during her incarceration. Even in her “worst state” she tries to be positive, because “you are what you think you are.” She said that who she really is, is not her crime. Prison may have “stagnated her potential but it will not stop her from succeeding.” She loves art and it is how she sees her spirit - creative and artistic. She felt the experience with me fanned the flame of the artist within her. It helped that part become more real. The photograph gave her the visual for what it looks like.

One woman who has been released from prison wrote me this in an email: “What I gained from the workshop was: it gave me an outlet to get back in touch with the creative life force inside of me. Something I lost in my addiction. I became one with the medium I was using and realized what I thought was lost was very much alive.”

The last essential piece of this process that needs mention is the community building. In the dark, having changed into skin tone colored leotards or tank tops, both girls and women face the anxiety of focusing on being in their bodies, standing up in front of the group, and having to trust the rest of us to care for and guide them. All seem to struggle with the internal messages that flood most of us about our unworthiness.

What they experience in this loving container of empathy is a shower of appreciation and spontaneous exclamations of their beauty. Bathing in the positivity of their peers is one of the most powerful parts of the healing in the workshop. The limitless creative possibilities of these fusions of nature with the beauty of the female form are infectious. With beauty as the seducer, we all enter into a creative gestalt with palpable excitement. I usually try three different slides and sometimes up to a total of 9-10 poses in all. This gives each person the chance to choose from a fairly large selection.

Especially for women, and particularly for those who have been violated, our bodies take the brunt. Whether from internalized loathing due to the cultural norms or a more powerful abusive incident, this toxicity so easily becomes our loathing directed inward. Our bodies are never good enough. But when we open to this fusion with the beauty of Nature, wearing her as our skin, we can recognize that the same life force she possesses also runs through our veins. We come to an elevated understanding of ourselves. We can begin to honor our own miraculousness. Societal standards no longer count. There is a higher order involved.

Arla Patch is an artist, educator, and facilitator of healing. For over thirty years she has taught others to find their own inner artist, acting as a “creativity midwife” for the purpose of transformation. She works with individuals, groups and teaches classes. Visit www.arlapatch.com. She is represented by www.VoxPhotographs.com. Her books A Body Story and Finding Ground: Girls and Women in Recovery are available on her website.