Event Blog #2

For my second event, I attended Leonardo Art Science Evening Rendezvous (LASER) presentations. We opened up with a presentation from Ping Ho, the founding executive director of the Arts and Healing Initiative. She started by handing out pieces of blank paper and asking us to show stress through them, like many others, I crumpled mine up. However I was very interested in the way a select few viewed stress in their life. Professor Vesna for instance only crumpled a corner of her paper, one woman in the audience simply drew on her paper, and another man punched a small hole in his paper. 

However, the main thing I wanted to talk about in this blog, was the presentation by Hanna Chusid, a Psychologist and Art Therapist. One of my best friends in high schools mother was an art therapist, and the line of work has always intrigued me. In fact, it even gave me a bit of an idea for my final project! Personally, I have always been more of what society considers a "math person". Seeing things more in black and white rather than a spectrum of colors like some. So when I first heard about art therapy, it kind of seemed like a joke to me. I never learned much about it in high school, but Hanna's ideas intrigued me. How integrating work with meditation can increase productivity, and how she actually works with different states of consciousness is insane. She works with her clients in the forms of dreaming, active imagination, and visualization. She works with people until the day they die as well. For instance, she worked with a 106 year old women until she tied, who said through art and this sort of thinking, she developed a new sense of empathy at the age of 100.

What she ended with was one of the most powerful things I have heard in a while. That every human being should have two pieces of paper in their pocket, one that says "The universe exists for me" and one that says "I am but a speck of dust in the universe". Because in many situations we feel more partially to one of these, and we need to remember that both can and will be true. 

Me attending the LASER presentations