Originally published on InTheRooms, May 2019
 
During my first attempt at recovery, I learned to play the guitar. At the time, I worked for a Catholic Parish and aid organization in post-war Bosnia-Hercegovina. There was a kind Irish priest (and former rock n’ roller) also in residence who knew that I liked to sing. However, the only instrument I played, the violin, didn’t lend itself well to accompaniment. So he very patiently taught me the art of making chords and strumming. I found that when I was bored in those early days of figuring out what to do with myself, practicing the chords and the necessary movements to move between them more fluidly kept me busy. Then one day, the chord progression I was working on provided me a back drop to create a tune. Led by that tune, I started singing the angst of my heart and calling out to my Higher Power, desperate for a deeper spiritual awakening.
 
Did I just write a song?
 
Playing music and writing music was a lifeline for me in my first few years of sobriety. I ended up taking my last drink less than a year after I stumbled upon what it meant to compose music that is deeply meaningful to my personal journey. Always a lover of reading and writing poetry, the thought of composing a song always felt impossibly complicated. Yet through my trial-and-error, coupled with some experimentation, I discovered just how accessible writing songs was for me as a form of expression. In the field of expressive arts therapy, we call this being in process. In other words, not having a fixed or forced outcome in mind. Rather, we set an intention to express and to explore, learning from our mistakes along the way. Being in process like this teaches us lessons we may have never dreamed possible.
 
In the field of expressive arts therapy, we encourage clients and people in the community to keep an open mind to exploring all forms of creativity and expression—music, dance/movement, writing, visual art, dramatics, you name it! We embrace an all-of-the-above approach. So while the creative form that may feel most accessible to you can be a great place to start (for me it was music and writing), the practices that feel outside your comfort zone may have the most to teach you. For me, I long believed that the visual arts were my “weak link,” because I was never any good at art in school. Yet when I began deepening my commitment to practicing all of the expressive arts for my own healing and recovering journey, I actually discovered that visual art had the most to teach me. Because I wasn’t focused on it being “good,” I was just able to have fun, be in my body, and learn to not beat myself up for making mistakes. As result, playing with the visual arts in the later years of recovery had just as much to teach me about myself and the healing journey as playing music did in those early days.
 
This all describes the magic that we call process in the world of expressive arts. You may have noticed that the title of my latest book Process Not Perfection: Expressive Arts Solutions in Trauma Recovery takes a twist on the recovery slogan “progress not perfection.” For me, both the power of process in expressive arts therapy and this wisdom at this slogan are trying to teach us the same thing—don’t force outcome. Learn from the process and the journey. In early 2017 as I begin stirring with ideas for bringing this book into existence, this poem came out of me that ended up revealing the title:
​
            In Process
 
Works of art in gestation
Are often called
Works in progress
The slogans and inspirational
Clichés call for
Progress not perfection
We judge students and employees
With the metric of a
Progress report

What if we were to change
Every use of the work "progress"
With the word "process"?
What if works of art in
Gestation are called
Works in process?
What if we encouraged
People to focus on
Process not perfection?
What if our metrics of
Evaluation took on the tone of
Process report?
What if we were to live our lives in process?

All life could transform
Into a journey of art making,
Fueled by the expressive spirit
We could refrain from
Judging ourselves so harshly
And instead savor the unknown
From the unknown and yes,
Even from our mistakes
We can discover a new way of being
From what we once labeled failures
We may unearth a new solution,
A new way to solve a problem
By creating in the moment and
Not forcing the big picture
May we encounter the essence of meaning.
 
If you are looking for meaningful ways to bring expressive practices into your recovery journey, please consider checking out Process Not Perfection. It is written for the general public in a voice that I hope allows you to feel safe enough to take this journey with me. I also have several opportunities where you can connect with a growing community of folks in recovery who also practice the expressive arts, specifically the Dancing Mindfulness and Expressive Arts Community Forum on Facebook. You are also welcome to visit my complimentary resources website at www.traumamadesimple.com for a wide selection of meditation, yoga, and other skill videos linked from my YouTube channel. And if you explore that YouTube channel (Jamie Marich) long enough (and go back far enough), you can also find some footage of me playing music! 

​I’m not ashamed to cry. Throughout my healing journey, I have singlehandedly kept the Kleenex and Puffs corporations thriving, so abundant are the tears I’ve shed. For me, releasing emotion with tears allows me to fully validate and feel emotions, a process that is vital to my transformation. While I recognize that sometimes I need to practice containment when the tears begin to flow (e.g., if I have an important work commitment), I generally don’t censor myself when my emotions flow in the form of tears. I’ve wept on a tarmac waiting for a delayed plane to take off, I’ve cried in a restaurant in full view of professional colleagues when I connect with a sad story I need to share, and I no longer fear what people think of me if tears begin to flow during a difficult conversation.
 
Every year I engage in deeper layers of my own healing and guide people through their own trauma work, I’m convinced that our emotions do not cause us as many problems as the things we do to keep those emotions stuffed down and buried. To honor the role that crying plays in my growth and transformation, an expressive arts practice recently came to me that I wish to share with you in this posting. I call the process “Transforming Our Tissues.” The process allows us to take the tissues that absorbed our tears during meaningful conversations and turn them into works of art. Not only can this work be a fun expressive arts practice, it is deeply symbolic of how true trauma healing happens at the level of our cells and tissues within our body.
 
In May 2019, I attended my first Ram Dass Spring on Maui retreat, where I was blessed to attend 12-step meetings with the writer Anne Lamott. Annie is very open about her involvement in 12-step recovery and did not think twice about welcoming those of us in recovery into her space for nightly meetings. During one of these meetings, I cried very deeply about the great struggle of my life connected to a person I love very deeply. I fought through some initial urges to censor myself (“Come on, Jamie, you’re in the presence of someone important”) and just let the pain of my heart flow. At some point during this very helpful catharsis, Annie handed me a tissue that I very badly needed. Later in the evening when I changed out of my clothes, I noticed that the tissue was still in my pocket. Of course, my fan girl side kicked in: “This is the tissue that Annie Lamott gave you! You can’t throw this away!”
 
In that moment, the inspiration struck me to use that very special tissue in my art journal, and in the coming weeks I accepted the challenge. Through some trial and error, I learned that tearing the tissue into workable pieces and matting it into my art journal with a substance called Gel Medium created a beautiful texture on my pages, over which I could paint. On that initial page, themed along healing my stuff in the six realms of experience on which the Buddhists teach, I marveled how painting over tissues with acrylics and gauche created the effect of a healing wound. And I realized that any special tissue that holds my literal and figurative blood, sweat, and tears could be repurposed in this manner!
 
Several weeks later, I experienced two similarly deep cries over love and grief with two of my oldest and dearest friends, Allie and Amber. I saved the tissue from the 12-step meeting at which I hung out with Allie on a July morning. The next day, I shared my tears with Amber at our local Panera (another instance of crying deeply in public with little regard to what those around me thought). As Amber validated my pain, she kept offering me brown Panera napkins. Our friendship offers a powerful container for me to share so honestly, and the vulnerability I can show with Amber has allowed me to make some of the deepest healing connections of my life. This day at Panera was no exception.
 
I decided to mount Allie’s tissue and Amber’s napkin on pages facing each other in my art journal. I affixed them to the page with gel medium (refer to the before pictures in the slide show). Like many pursuits in my expressive arts processes, I had no idea what the process would reveal. I just “went with it,” playing around with acrylic paints, using my fingers to apply them over the dried tissues. The tissue on the left from my conversation with Allie began to take on the character of a cell for me, appropriate since I am being called into a period of deeper rest and non-doing in my life. As I engage in more yoga nidra practices and periods of time where I challenge myself to put down the doing and embrace the being, I can feel myself healing at a cellular level. This challenge is very difficult for me as someone who has long struggled with beliefs like “I’m not doing enough,” or “I’m only valued because of what I do.” On the page that holds Amber’s tissue, I also see a cell, although one that is much more fluid and open to growth.
 
You can take a deeper look at the how-to of the process and the specific pages in the slide show that accompanies this blog. In the spirit of expressive arts therapy my aim isn’t to interpret these pages; rather, to treasure what they reveal for me personally. What I am learning from this revelation is that my tears and vulnerability are important to the overall process of transformation through release and rest. Healing my tissues—healing at the cellular level—invites me into all of the healing arts that I discussed in this blog. I appreciate that honoring my tears and what they represent is the core of all expressive art that flows through me.

I have survived a Dancing Mindfulness retreat! If you’re familiar with Dancing Mindfulness, you might look at that sentence and wonder what the big deal is or ask, “What on earth is so hard about surviving any form of expressive art at whose very core is non-judgment?” My response to that would be: absolutely NOTHING. And yet, at the very first Dancing Mindfulness class offered by its creator, who is also my best friend, I was quaking in my little yoga pants. I’d like to hope I would have been there even had I not been working as her Gal Friday at the time, but if I’m to be completely honest, I’m sure I would have found a way to pin my absence on my children if I could have. But since I was the mastermind’s assistant, there I was: participating but not embracing—feeling awkward in my own skin, as I always have; lacking inspiration in how to move from points A to B without looking like a total dork, judging nobody except myself, and harshly at that. The irony here is that DM was created to not only bring about mindful awareness, but also to heal the participants of issues like those I was afraid to face in myself and so many others. Give me choreography or give me death (unless you want to see my own personal rendition of Steve Martin’s character in The Jerk learning to dance when first hearing jazz!)
 A little background on me: I’m a recovering alcoholic/addict, victim of molestation, rape and abuse, child of addicts, survivor of a parent lost to suicide. I’ve also had an abortion and am a screwball in general. In short: I’ve been in therapy for years due to having a lot of traumatic baggage in need of healing. Let’s face it: we all have stories and baggage, some of which was dumped on us by others, but it’s up to us to do the work necessary in order to heal. I’ve been #blessed in life to have several close friends, the cosmic joke being the bulk of them are therapists. I’ve found myself inspired by them countless times over the years, and have followed some of the suggestions given by them and those I’ve seen professionally, but I’d kept DM at arm’s length. I have rather short arms, giving me a T-Rex complex to boot, so you’d think it wouldn’t have taken me so long to finally give in to my friends in the DM community asking me to show up for more than a cameo appearance, but I took my sweet time. Despite the countless testimonials I’d seen and heard, despite seeing the growth of a community of the most incredible women (men as well, but my closest pals involved has been a sisterhood of sorts), despite the indescribable glow radiating from the participants. “This just isn’t my thing. You dance and I’ll update the website about how amazing you all feel.”  My children eventually grew, making it possible for me to get away: nevertheless I resisted. This isn’t designed for Baryshnikov and the like, it was made for everyone to move however they wanted—but that was my very problem. What hit me this weekend was the realization that while I’m a creative person, I’ve had no consistent outlet for my creativity for decades. As a child I was frequently told I either wasn’t allowed to express myself or that, when I did, I was wrong/ridiculous/stupid/insert negative synonym here—and it took taking part in this retreat to realize that it wasn’t just my speaking that was affected by this load of crap I actually believed for the longest time. That hurt. A lot. Old beliefs I thought I had worked through were still right in the heart of me with exactly what was needed to release them right there in front of me FOR YEARS. Normally, this kind of proverbial bitch slap from reality would leave me questioning all the work I’d done over the years, eventually leading to a tailspin of depression and calling myself a failure. Lucky for me, I was in exactly the right place to process all of this. So many creative outlets twirling, painting, chanting, singing past me, well within my reach. I’d beat myself up over this like i usually do, but I’d rather heal.
Dancing Mindfulness IS MY THING. It’s for everyone and I finally understand that at soul level after having heard those very words too many times to count. I feel like Scrooge waking up on Christmas morning, elated to have his second chance. When your tribe is as amazing as mine, it’s hard to not be influenced by their positivity, and I acknowledge some growth on my part since they’ve come into my life; but I feel like whatever wall of resistance I still had remaining has been blown to pieces. I feel my heart exposed, and vulnerable at the thought of it, but loving the blank canvas of my life for once. I have a tribe, a safe place where I can be me and loved unconditionally for it, I can move from points A to B however I see fit to, and I’ll fucking thrive. 

​The process of unfolding and creating is gifted to us to gain a new perspective on our wholeness that already dwells within. Though the human mind, the human spirit may only feel this connection to completeness for a sparing blip at a time - let us have faith and find comfort in the ever underlying vibration that dwells in us all.

Let us thank the Universal Power for all creation around us: the sun, the moon, the stars. The trees. The grass. The people and smiling faces who surround us. Let us give thanks for our own god-given ability to harness a piece of this creation to birth mementos of Joy, release, validation, and collaboration into the world. And in so doing, may we remember that our own lives are a delicate brush stroke on the canvas of life.

Thank you Divine Source. Thank you for eternal, unconditional love. Thank you for harmony. Thank you for balance in the Universe. Thank you for all of your creations and blessings. Thank you for bringing us all together this weekend to share our uniquely divine gifts.

Attune me to today
Let my words
Be your words
And may I respond
To life's challenged
From the fusion of
My humanity and
My divinity

​For years I was scared to buy paint. One of my college roommates was an art major, and it captivated me to watch her paint. She had the capacity to create such beautiful, museum-quality pieces with her amazing talent. I loved to watch her work her magic! To this day I am proud to have several of her pieces and prints in my home, as I’m reminded of those beautiful memories of watching her in-the-zone.
 
Like many people I’ve worked with through the years, my barrier to painting and to most visual art came from a sense of “I can’t do it,” or “I’m not good enough.” I never seemed to have this issue with music, dance, theater, or writing where there was at least some evidence of my competence, usually in the form of compliments or accolades received. I never had a problem calling myself a writer, for instance, winning many awards throughout middle school and high school. And then came the books…
 
But to call myself a visual artist? To call myself a painter? Hell no! After watching my roommate work, I still felt you had to have a special artist license to even buy paint…
 
There is one visual form I felt reasonably comfortably approaching: collage. Born out of my love for making travel scrapbooks, collaging spoke to me because there didn’t seem to be competence involved. And I very much enjoyed the process of taking scraps and allowing them to develop into something meaningful when put together. As I began working with my own expressive arts mentor Christine Valters Paintner, I began to get braver about working with visual arts. Sure, I’d long kept some basic drawing materials in the office for my clients and out at Dancing Mindfulness retreats. Yet when I began working with Christine and realizing just how much Dancing Mindfulness as a program connected with the all-of-the-above nature of the expressive arts, I got braver about exploring my edge as an expressive artist.
 
I continued with collage and ventured into working with pastels and markers. I quickly found that visual arts had even more to teach me because I didn’t approach them with any kind of expectation about the quality of the product. There’s something to be said about being the worst kid in art class who was never chosen for any shows. Because competence was never my focus in visual art, I was naturally more open to just enjoying it, to being in process, and learning from what making just for fun revealed.
 
I credit crossing the paint threshold to my ex-husband after he saw how much I liked coloring and pastels. When I was going through an especially rough patch in the Fall of 2016, he bought me a paint-by-numbers kit. Although initially skeptical, I soon found that I enjoyed it even more than coloring books. There was something soothing and containing about having lines in which to work, yet my hand responded to the sensation of moving paint along a canvas. I loved everything about it; the colors, the smells, and yes, even the feeling of accomplishment when I saw the final product. There was some leftover paint and while at my local craft store on a run for some other supplies, I bought a small canvas and decided to use the leftover pain to express something original. I painted a mandala and it spoke to me very much.
 
I continued with this process for the next few months—finishing paint-by-numbers kits and then using the leftover paint to create something original. After a couple rounds of this process, I got brave enough to order some of my own paint off of Amazon and continue with my explorations. I approached it as something fun to do, something that let me play with color and texture and sensation and not be bound by the shackles of outcome.
 
A few months into this journey is where the painting that graces the cover of my latest book Process Not Perfection: Expressive Arts Solutions for Trauma Recovery revealed itself to me. And in this revelation came what is perhaps the greatest lesson that I ever received about the power of process: be open to where the unexpected, even the failures, may guide you. A pleasant surprise may blossom when you shed these expectations.  
 
I laid down a foundation in gauche, the first time I ever experimented with this unique form closely related to watercolor. I also played around with using some shimmery paints that you can apply with a spray bottle. I liked the mystical ocean of color that was coming into existence! Then the idea came to me—paint a Hand of Fatima! This blue magic would certainly be an ideal backdrop for this symbol I’d come to adore. I printed out a copy of the hand online to follow. This unique pattern, sometimes referred to as a Hand of Hamhsa, seemed relatively easy to copy or trace, even for someone as unskilled as I. When I looked at the lopsided result of my attempt to paint the hand in white acrylic with a fine brush, I was disheartened.
 
“See, I ruined my cool blue background,” I huffed in frustration.
 
In the spirit of process, I rolled with that frustration, angrily ripping away a paper towel and I just started rubbing. I hoped that enough of it would come off so that I might be able to salvage some of the base. What emerged was the cool, rather mystical white outline of a flower that you now see on the cover of the book.
 
“Wow, the hand now looks like a cloud, or a flower,” I said.
 
I noticed that my raging by paper towel maneuver also made some very interesting patterns on the canvas that I just began filling in with gold… and then with green. And then as I noticed the flower take shape, I finished off the core image with some of the pinkish-magenta that now composes the flower itself.
 
I stood back in amazement, declaring, “I did that! It’s beautiful!”
 
And it was totally an accident, the fruit of staying in process and not being fixated on outcome.
           
From the moment I began writing Process Not Perfection, I knew that this image would be my book’s cover. For being in the process that birthed this painting is when I truly fell in love with the magic of expressive arts. I adore how the practices of expressive arts therapy invite me into a focus on process rather than perfection, and I am so grateful to be surrounded by a community of other expressive artists who inspire me to carry this lesson into all areas of my life.
           
To the process, my friends! And to the inevitable magic that will unfold from living a life in process…

I’m tired and
I just want to go home
I am hungry all the time and
I constantly yearn to be touched
Not just by anyone--
By the one I adore more than I should
I crave the things I cannot have and
I resent having to wear this meat suit

My soul is already home
My body longs to catch up
My body is exhausted
My body still wanders
My body constantly feels teased
My body is hungry all the time and
My body yearns to be touched
Can’t she just get with the program?

I know I am not my body
My soul is who I truly am
When I recognize this truth, I am at peace
And it’s so fucking hard to stay there
When I live in this human shell
I am not my limbic brain and yet
I have a limbic brain, a brain that is tired
And just wants to go home

​

One of the things I love so much about our Dancing Mindfulness community is our inclusiveness.  We celebrate members of all shapes, sizes, colors, belief systems, spiritualities, genders, sexual orientations, and career paths.  I think this is one of the things that makes us strong and creates the safe container that we value so much within the community.

And yet.  Sometimes I see things that feel exclusionary happening in our community, that seem clique-ish.  Others have mentioned similar experiences of feeling excluded, feeling like outsiders.  I don’t believe that members of our community deliberately set out to exclude others, but sometimes it happens, regardless, and I strongly believe we need to guard against such behaviors.

I get it.  When I get around my safe people, my close friends, I want to be greedy and get as much connection with them as possible in the time we have.  Some of them I don’t get to see nearly as often as I’d like.  Sometimes I feel extra needy, because safe, healthy connections like I experience with these people were few and far between before I found this community.  I want to make the most of it when we are together.

The reality is that even within our community, there is a hierarchy.  Some of us have been in the community longer than others.  Some of us are closer to the “inner circle” by virtue of geographical proximity or affiliate status or working directly with Jamie.  Maybe the inner circle people, or the people who are close friends, need to find ways to spend time together, just us, more often than we have been.  When we come together with others who are further outside the inner circle, or others who are only just coming into contact with our community for the first time, each of us is in a position of power over those newer or more distantly connected members.  We need to behave accordingly.

Which means things like, we can’t all collect at one table that doesn’t offer enough seats for everyone. We can’t all cluster in small groups all the time we are together. We may feel that, of course we welcome anyone who wants to join us, so what’s the problem?  The problem is that not everyone will feel welcome to sit there, not everyone will feel brave enough to approach what feels like a clique or a closed group and ask to join.  It doesn’t matter how open you believe you are to letting anyone join you if they don’t feel able to approach you.  If you console yourself by saying, “I welcome anyone and if they don’t have the courage to ask to join, that’s their issue,” then you are misunderstanding or misusing your power within the community.  Because when you’re an affiliate and they’re not, you have more power than they do at our gatherings.  When you’re a personal friend of Jamie’s and they’re only an acquaintance or trainee of Jamie’s, you have more power than they do at any event where they are present.  When you’re a Dancing Mindfulness facilitator and they aren’t, you have more power than they do when they’re in the same room with a group of community members.
​
That may sound harsh and it is not my intention to shame, blame, or guilt anyone.  It is my intention to bring awareness to the fact that even within our open, welcoming, inclusive community, there are power differentials.  When we ignore them, we are excluding people.  We are making people feel like outsiders.  We look like cliques.  And that is not what this community is about.  We all bear the responsibility for exemplifying the messages of our community.  Please be mindful of the messages you’re sending, even with an action as seemingly innocent or mindless as choosing a seat at a table.  Please choose instead to reach out with invitations of connection to everyone who comes to our community events.  Let’s keep our web of connection growing and expanding and make everyone welcome.  Not all will choose to accept your invitation, but those who need us, those we need, will find us.