change therapy

if you’re new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. thanks for visiting!who is an artist? that was a question posed yesterday.
here’s my working definition for today:

an artist is someone who repeatedly and over extended periods of time expresses her or his experience, knowledge, talent, skill or other internal processes […]

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pre-eminent psychologist mihaly cziszentmihalyi about the ten paradoxes of creative people. here’s an abbreviated version:
1. Creative people have a great deal of physical energy, but they’re also often quiet and at rest. … One manifestation of energy is sexuality. Creative people are paradoxical in this respect also. They seem to have quite a […]

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in this month of concentration on the arts, i’m amazed at the many topics i didn’t touch. here’s a few of them

the psychology of photography
the healing power of pottery
movement therapy for post-traumatic stress disorder
therapy for actors
anorexia among dancers
psychology and architecture
art and mental illness

… and what else could i have talked about?
isabella mori
counselling in vancouver

[…]

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this nervous running and rubbing,
gargling and popping of eyes,
fingers racing up and down, legs twitching,
coffee-coated tongue and smoke on grey teeth:
all in the service of
art.

yellow-stained thumb pressing down again and again
until the colour stays
- where is it where is it
i knew i had it here -
the glue, under the papers? fell in the garbage?
give […]

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for today, i want to interrupt our usual topics and post this letter here that my daughter just wrote to everyone she knows. the motto of my practice is making lives better, making better lives. let’s make better lives for the people in darfur.
Millions of people are at death’s door in Darfur right […]

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i was intrigued by levy’s comment on the art and alcohol posting a few days ago and thought it would be worthwhile to dedicate a blog entry to it. here is what he says:
I can appreciate the turn around stories of artists and I

addthis_url = ‘http%3A%2F%2Fwww.moritherapy.org%2Farticle%2Fthose-who-quit-drinking%2F’;
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as commented on earlier, creativity is certainly not limited to artists. or maybe it’s more that we need to enlarge our concept of who is an artist. these people here are IT/media artists.
doc searls, the man who is sometimes credited for coining the statement “markets are conversations” started

addthis_url […]

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tonight i’m preparing a presentation to teachers about alternative learners. alternative learners are people whose learning processes are different from most of their peers. they’re often called dyslexics, or people with learning disabilities. the problem with using the term “learning disabilities” is that it implies that

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these last few days i’ve been listening to quite a few people talk about their experience with alcohol misuse, either through their own struggles or because of alcoholism among their loved ones.
what is it about alcohol abuse that frightens us so? when i was younger, it was the strange and dangerous-seeming world that drunks […]

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internet lore has it that according to thomas cleary, one of the most prolific translators of buddhist and other eastern texts, yesterday’s strawberry story originally has a different ending.
in that version, the delicious strawberry that the cliff-hanger pops into his mouth is

addthis_url = ‘http%3A%2F%2Fwww.moritherapy.org%2Farticle%2Fwriting-our-own-story%2F’;
addthis_title = ‘writing+our+own+story’;
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skipping further along the path of storytelling, here is one of my favourite zen tales:
a man walking alone in the wild suddenly finds himself chased by a tiger. he starts to run but soon arrives at the edge of a cliff. with no way out, he jumps and, luckily, manages to grasp a […]

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so …. we keep on weaving our way here through the arts. from remembrance day to courage to storytelling … okay, let’s stay with storytelling for a while. i don’t know who said the words, “man is a storytelling animal” (hegel? derrida? tolkien? jung?)
stories – “narratives”, they call them in academia […]

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continuing on the remembrance day topic, this morning i caught the tail end of michael enright at CBC radio conversing with a historian and a soldier about the meaning of courage. one question was whether it was cowardly for vietnam draft dodgers to come to canada. there was a view that it was more […]

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after posting about remembrance day songs yesterday i went to my daughter’s remembrance day assembly. it was quite moving. and i thought, this is what will be a childhood memory for my daughter one day!
here are the songs

addthis_url = ‘http%3A%2F%2Fwww.moritherapy.org%2Farticle%2Fremembrance-day%2F’;
addthis_title = ‘remembrance+day+songs%2C+part+II’;
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marc robert north, one of my painter friends, just suggested this idea for remembrance day (november 11 here in canada):
1. — > what was your favourite or most fondly remembered remembrance day song and/or poem when you grew up ?
2. — > and if possible, why?
he says that his was buffy sainte-marie’s rendition of universal […]

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