Week 2 — Encouraging ourselves with finger paints and dream boxes

(Note: This post is about a formal Workshop that was held in the past. For information about the ongoing weekly Book Study at the New Orleans Healing Center, click here.)

This evening we had the second session of our Artist's Way in New Orleans workshop, and it was so fun. I felt closer to the women in the group than I had last week when we all first met. I found myself really looking forward to our gathering as I prepared throughout the day.

Here was our program for the evening:

• Check In

• Finger painting on Dream Boxes (boxes into which we will put our dreams for the future)

• Written exercises from the book:

Detective Work (Page 73 in The Artist's Way)

List 5 Traits You Liked About Yourself as a Child (Page 76, #2)

List 5 imaginary lives (Page 39)

Name something you could do this week that relates to one of those lives

• Artist's Share (great painting from a member of the group)

• Finish our Dream Boxes

The Dream Boxes project is something I invented just today. Initially I had planned to do our Poetry Walk, where we stroll around the neighborhood and write down certain words. But it was literally freezing outside and there was no way I could ask our class to do that. So I cooked up this new project. It's a combination of one of my favorite childhood art forms, finger painting, and what is called a God Box.

My thought was that when we're kids, or when we have kids, we put their hand prints on paper or in clay and really honor that image. The kid looks at that and feels so special, so important, so real. I thought, why don't we do that for our adult selves? Where is our "atta girl," or "keep strong," or "way to go"? Those encouragements are too rare. We must give them to ourselves. The box would serve as a place to contain our hopes and dreams, and also be a source of strength and self compassion.

To get everyone in the mood for finger painting, I played this little video I made earlier in the day:

Our task was to pour different colors of acrylic paint into our paper plate, press our hand in there, and make a print on the top of a nice box. We let the paint dry while we did our written exercises, then embellished our box with words from markers or from some rub-off letters I found at Michael's. Of course, the other participants in this exercise had their own ideas about how their box should look. The most pleasurable time for me was when we finished the boxes from 8 to 8:30 p.m.. We were all standing at the worktable, embellishing our boxes with kind words, and also talking and chatting the way women do. I knew some in the group had to get home for jobs in the morning and children and other responsibilities. But I wished that scene could have gone on much, much longer.

You can see our boxes below: