Home
>
Spirituality
>
Heal Emotional Difficulties With Your Imagination

Heal Emotional Difficulties With Your Imagination

How did an artist accidently learn healing visualizations and improve his life? How can you do the same? Read on.

Last year a family counselor approached me and said, "You're an artist, why don't you do up some feeling cards for us?" Looking confused, I asked, "what are feeling cards?"

"When all else fails, she replied, we use them to stimulate therapeutic conversations with clients and their families." She showed me a set of improvised cards with pictures of facial expressions on them and on the bottom of each card was the appropriate emotion word: anger, happy, sad, etc.

"What's wrong with these?", I asked.

"For one, we don't have kids in the set, and for two, there aren't any female faces either."

I thought the idea was intriguing, and designed a set with her criteria in mind. She found my new set quite useful, and based on her positive evaluation, I decided to print up a batch and make them more widely available to service providers in helping professions.

Suddenly, I was in the "therapy" business, something I didn't know anything about, and worse, I didn't think that I would ever use my own product. The cards seemed too simplistic, and moreover, I just "made the faces up" and knew them all too well. If they didn't have value for me, how was I going to introduce them?

Was I surprised one day, while preparing for a counseling conference, to notice that attention to detail began to look a lot like unhealthy obsession over too many details. It hit me that my obsession had a name when one of the feeling card faces popped into my head.

Worry! The instant I "saw" and named the feeling, I immediately relaxed and found humor in my own reaction.

Wow! I thought, these family counselors are really on to something. I began to "see" other things as well. For example, my long time partner and confident happens to be very astute, generous, and unfailingly helpful. She could see that I was looking a little anxious and knew that I felt vulnerable as a reclusive artist about to exhibit at a professional convention for the first time.

While I may have looked anxious, I actually felt terrified. I spend most of my time in the studio, and as far as I was concerned, this was really "steppin' out. I irrationally interpreted her suggestions and ideas for improvements as criticism, as being wrong. I thought she was being mean and I reacted in kind. She, in turn, wondered what she was doing with such a jerk and began to get frustrated.

"You know," she said, by this time she was really angry, "there are lots of things you're good at, but you're not perfect, and you really need some help." "Stop being a nincompoop!"

"You mean like this?," and I crossed my eyes, pulled at my ears, and stuck out my tongue.

She was right of course. Our combined energies were so much more effective and powerful than anything I could do myself. Yet there I was, unconsciously sliding into fear, and the angry defensiveness that came with it. The more I began picturing anger or fear as a face, the more I began recognizing and naming the emotion as I was feeling it. The benefits were almost immediate.

We still disagree, being strong individuals with differing ideas, but the time spent "defending" diminishes with each glimpse of a bigger, more meaningful, picture. It is a satisfying feeling, and "coincides" with increasing moments of feeling thankful.

I don't think visualizing emotions is a cure, but it may well be a healing process. Irrational fear wounds, and any moment of emotional recognition, no matter how small, is an opening. In spiritual language, it represents a victory over the cold isolation and restriction of fear and a big move closer to the warm family of emotions centered in love.

Much has been written about love. Recently, my son Alex, a math and physics major at university, began telling me that he loved me. I felt uncomfortable to hear it at first. "What are they teaching you in math class?," I wondered out loud.

"Nothing about love, I can tell you that," he said, "and that's the problem. "In mathematics, we learn that the infinite exists, but that it doesn't have any purpose."

"What's that got to do with love?," I queried.

"Being centered in love," he said, "is like living with the infinite, which I think is divine."

"That's an interesting twist on science and math, I said, "you're talking about freedom with purpose."

"That's it, dad!" My son is smarter than his father, but I don't tell him that..I do, however, feel comfortable these days when he says, "I love you dad".

So, with help from Alex, I'm adding my personal observation to the vast literature on love by stating that love emerges when fear is conquered and the freedom of choice begins. How human is that?

Anyone deciding to visualize emotions can draw and paint facial expressions on their own. It doesn't matter what the art looks like, as long as it is personally meaningful. Assemble your separate faces on a poster and put them up on a wall for convenient reference. I highly recommend trying it out and you don't need to be an artist to do this.

Professional feeling faces are available, ranging from simple icons to the more complex and expressive depictions found at this writer's site.

Happy visualizations and may the Face be with you!

John Beder, BFA, AOCA, artist and kids book illustrator lives and walks his dogs on Vancouver Island, British Columbia. He began kids book illustrator last year.

best cleaning company Highland Park ..

In The News:

The ClickFix campaign disguises malware as legitimate Windows updates, using steganography to hide shellcode in PNG files and bypass security detection systems.

Researchers from Osaka Metropolitan University designed a 21-foot dome that combines aquaculture and hydroponics to create a self-sustaining urban food system.

The Fox News AI Newsletter gives readers the latest AI technology advancements, covering the challenges and opportunities AI presents.

ChatGPT data breach exposes personal info of users through partner Mixpanel. OpenAI confirms names, emails compromised in security incident.

Android rolls out Emergency Live Video for 911 calls, letting dispatchers see real-time scenes during emergencies. Great for holiday travel safety.

Malicious Chrome and Edge extensions collected browsing history, keystrokes and personal data from millions of users before Google and Microsoft removed them.

Google's new Call Reason feature lets Android users mark calls as urgent before dialing, displaying an urgent label to recipients using Phone by Google app.

Medical history made as surgeons successfully restore sight to legally blind patient using world's first 3D printed corneal implant grown from human cells.

Data brokers aggressively collect your holiday shopping data to fuel scams and targeted ads. Learn how to delete your digital profile before 2025 starts.

Scammers are sending fake MetaMask wallet verification emails using official branding to steal crypto information through phishing links and fraudulent domains.

Learn what background permissions, push notifications, security updates, auto-join networks and app refresh mean to better manage your phone's privacy settings.

Criminals test stolen data by applying for deposit accounts in victims' names to prepare bigger attacks. Learn why banks won't share fraud details.

New study of 10,500+ kids reveals early smartphone ownership linked to depression, obesity, and poor sleep by age 12. Earlier phones mean higher risks.

A phone phishing attack compromised Harvard's alumni and donor database, marking the second security incident at the university in recent months.

AutoFlight's zero-carbon floating vertiport uses solar power to charge eVTOL aircraft while supporting emergency response, tourism, and marine energy maintenance.

A new phone return scam targets recent buyers with fake carrier calls. Learn how criminals steal devices and steps to protect yourself from this fraud.

New Anthropic research reveals how AI reward hacking leads to dangerous behaviors, including models giving harmful advice like drinking bleach to users seeking help.

The Fox News AI Newsletter gives readers the latest AI technology advancements, covering the challenges and opportunities AI presents.

Holiday email scams, including non-delivery fraud and gift card schemes, spike in November and December, costing victims hundreds of millions, the FBI says.

Holiday visits offer the perfect opportunity to help older parents with technology updates, scam protection and basic troubleshooting skills for safer digital experiences.

Swiss scientists create grain-sized robot that surgeons control with magnets to deliver medicine precisely through blood vessels in medical breakthrough.

Researchers exploited WhatsApp's API vulnerability to scrape 3.5 billion phone numbers. Learn how this massive data breach happened and protect yourself.

Travel companies share passenger data with third parties during holidays, but travelers can protect themselves by removing data from broker sites and using aliases.

Xpeng's humanoid robot moves so realistically that crowds believed it was fake, marking a major advancement in robotics technology ahead of 2026 commercial launch.

Researchers discover phishing scam using invisible characters to evade email security, with protection tips including password managers and two-factor authentication.

Heal Emotional Difficulties With Your Imagination

Spirituality