This panel engages the issues of embodied cognition, embodied healing, and the physical work of our hands. How does engagement with expressive arts and embodied practices (painting, sculpting, crafts, dance, music, gardening, farming, cooking) or other forms of physical labor/enjoyment facilitate psychological and religious healing or transformation? What is unique about "making" that impacts religious/psychological healing or formation?
In the face of the climate crisis, children and youth are experiencing rising levels of eco-anxiety and climate-related trauma. What would it look like to equip children who are growing up in this context with protective factors for resilience in the face of trauma? Combining insights from studies in children’s spirituality, with studies in psychological development and resilience, this paper explores gardening as an embodied spiritual practice that both facilitates spiritual creativity and combats eco-anxiety through ecological resistance. Drawing upon empirical studies in resilience, this paper correlates specific protective factors in resilience to the act of gardening. Further, the act of gardening as a spiritual practice will then be explored through the contextual work of starting a children’s spiritual garden in the city of Hamilton, Ontario—considering the ways that this embodied practice brings healing and hope in the face of eco-anxiety and climate trauma.
This paper will explore the 2016 movie Arrival as a sensorial metaphor for the processing of traumatic experience. Director Denis Villeneuve allows a slow unfolding of the disruption of time, story, and soundscape to guide the viewer into a “bottom up” experience “by allowing the body to have experiences that viscerally contradict the helplessness, rage, or collapse that result from trauma” (van der Kolk, TBKS, 3). The music of Jóhann Jóhannsson embodies the feeling of how trauma can dislodge meaning and bodily sense for a person, and then help to reintegrate the inexplicable into new ways of comprehension and being. This taps into the primacy of the language of music to how humans make sense of the world and of reality (McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary). This demonstrates well that, “people can never get better without knowing what they know and feeling what they feel” (TBKS, 27).
For marginalized communities, especially those such as black queer folk, digital “embodiment” is an/other form of storytelling which can lead to a deepened sense of identity and communal belonging. Primarily focused on the types of engagement that black queer folk have facilitated via social media, the virtual reality has deeply affected both individual psychology and broader relationships and formations. This paper seeks to investigate the ways in which social media serves as a conduit of formation and belonging through balanced engagement, material resources, and connections to the larger diaspora. Further, the paper explores how in this regard, digital embodiment, too, can serve as a modality of care, providing tangible resources and strategies for those in need, and expanding the “work of our hands” into the virtual world.
This paper is a practice informed theological reflection drawing on Ntozake Shange’s choreopoem structure and her play development process[1] to explore ways in which imagining reveals a care receiver’s individual and communal embedded theological epistemologies. Discovering a person’s theological epistemologies through imaginative process is critical to their healing and liberation as it presents possibilities for an individual to access their wholeness, which can benefit, by extension, their surrounding communities. I argue that Shange’s poetic exhortation infusing choreography, music and storytelling models an option for using a care receiver’s imaginative process for articulating their images of, relationship to, and communications with god in community.
[1] “New play development process” is a theatrical term used to describe crafting a play from inspiration to final production.