Art and heart are not alliterations for no reason. You can heal your heart, your emotions and mental health using art; and what better time to begin this than May—officially the mental health awareness month? Artists and art healers believe their craft can help people release their pent-up emotions through a healthy, intuitive and therapeutic outlet. Are you up for it?
How Akshita Gandhi, a Mumbai-based artist, whose works will be highlighted in her first solo-show at the Nehru Centre in London in Fall 2021, is a case in point. She owes her mental healing to art. “In 2016, a major personal setback made me turn to art. Expressing on a white canvas was a form of meditation, almost therapeutic for me. I started doing research on art’s transformative power. When nobody felt I could recover, art saved me. I read more about it online. Spoke about it to people from the artistic world. I realised art helps you connect with yourself as we are sometimes unable to do so ourselves.”
The 33-year-old artist has a morning routine where she paints in her drawing room with her favourite music playing in the background. “Some strokes made me connect with an old, unpleasant memory. I would not run away from it. Instead, I would paint that emotion. When I was cheerful, I would render that too on the canvas by splashing paint, making a mess of the room. But it was okay as I knew this was the path to recovery.”
Elaborating on how paint helped her heal her pain, Gandhi says, “I allowed it to haunt me. Soon, it had no power over me.” It was a deeply personal journey. It was a lot of self- work, not just self-love, according to her. In March 2020, with Covid-19 and the lockdown, Gandhi started offering free art therapy sessions on an online platform called Good Home for those struggling to grapple with the grim situation. She was happy to see how her participants embraced the ‘sky is pink’ concept and let their imagination
run wild.
Today, she conducts 60-minute sessions, which include meditation, mandala art and a guided painting session to allow emotions to flow easily. In the last one year, she has taught over 1,500 people from across the world, including those in New York and London, helping them overcome lockdown anxiety. She now charges Rs 600 (onwards) per hour for those interested in colour therapy, mandala therapy, and energy healing.
This May, Gandhi is conducting the ‘Fluid Art Series’ where she explores emotions via colourful art strokes; fluids, which represent the impermanence of time for her. She shares, “We live as though we have forever, but we only have ‘now’ because time is fictional. Time is a concept that only exists in space, that vacuum is all we really have. What we make of our confinement is in our hands.”
Shripuja S, consultant psychologist and art therapist based in Hyderabad, has been using art to help thousands of kids in government schools and slum areas to understand themselves and cure their phobias. “Through art one can let out all the suppressed energy. Once the session is complete, you experience relief and are able to express yourself truthfully to the world,” says Shripuja, adding, “I use it as an instrument to treat stubbornness, irritation and temper tantrums. I encourage children to express, create and build happiness, free up the mind and increase their intuitiveness.”
Sudha Ramani, on the other hand, has been a mentor for various batches of Diploma in Art Therapy conducted by Asha The Hope, Bengaluru. She has been doing this since May 2020. “In these sessions we use different assessment tools to identify the participant’s underlying issues and discuss why somebody is finding it difficult to express their emotions openly. After analysing and interpreting their drawings, we apply therapeutic tools along with talk therapy. We use several psychological assessment tools, which have proven to be extremely beneficial. Some of these are HTP (house-person-tree), Draw a Person test, Draw a Person in Rain test, in addition to scribbles,” she adds.
More power to the healing power of art!