Can Doll Making Save Your Life?

​“If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.” from the Gospel of Thomas
 
Your life is a unique creation
Whatever it is that you do that brings you alive, is of value, especially in these times of upheaval and confusion. I am here to encourage you in whatever that new path might be. It might be changing something about how you wear your clothes, or how you arrange the furniture in your living room or it might be making up a song and performing it in a video It’s all good. 
 
A little bit about my own path…
When working as an art therapist in a Harvard affiliated hospital in a big New England city, I used to sit in team meetings, feeling frustrated. What I was thinking didn’t seem to fit with what was being discussed in the meetings. Too often I would sit mute, listening to all the words but not adding to the dialogue. Or if I spoke, I felt like I had to use my patients’ art as examples of pathology. The clinical language of finding their pathology, labeling it and then figuring out how to fix it felt wrong. In those discussions, learned as they were, and as compassionate as many of the other therapists in the room were, it didn’t seem to me that they were listening for the true voices of the patients.
Nowadays, the narrative in the world of therapy seems much more positive and patient focused. 
 
Art school, pregnancy and then exploration…
As I felt more and more that art therapy wasn’t my path, I returned to art school. I got pregnant, then moved several times to different states, following my husband’s work. After that many years of inner exploration followed: writing, experimenting with all kinds of healing methods, art making and, almost a decade ago, doll making. When I first started making dolls, I experienced truth and resonance in what the dolls were expressing. And when I showed my dolls to others, it seemed they too felt witnessed by my dolls. Even though a lot of what was being expressed in my dolls came out of a deep place inside of me, it seemed to also connect to something deep in others.
 

​Can doll making save your life?
Can doll making save your life? I make this provocative statement, believing it is true, as doll making saved mine. They gave me a voice nothing in my life before had ever done. When I started leading workshops, participants often developed their own voice as they made their dolls. 
 
Creating something new can feel scary, (like a path forward in the time of this pandemic) 
Many of us are scrambling to try to find a path forward in this crazy time. We are all challenged to create our lives anew. Recently, a post on Facebook I read about a lecture by a Native American wise woman said, and I am paraphrasing, that we have a choice of either sinking into the void of fear or rising to the challenge and using it to grow. This is a lot like the creative process.
 
Sometimes when starting a new doll, I can at first have that feeling of muteness that I remember from those clinical meetings. What is trying to come out is different from anything out in the world and at the birthing stage just feels alien and strange. But that is because it is alien. It is something alien and new and there is not, as yet, something in the world that exactly matches it. 
 
Just because it feels alien, doesn’t mean it isn’t of value
Creating something new, whether it be a work of art, a new recipe, a new career path, a different path in life than your childhood and upbringing has led you to, can feel scary and threatening. It can feel like there is no path forward, like you are going to fall off the edge of a cliff. But that isn’t true. Just because something hasn’t existed before, doesn’t mean it isn’t a viable being. It’s just new. And though new can feel scary, it doesn’t mean it’s not valuable. That isn’t known until it is out in the world and gets a chance to speak its voice. 
 

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​New offer on my website, flip dolls…
And if you would like to experiment with doll making, I am putting some offers on line, starting with a mini book about flip dolls to get you started. This would be the first in a series of mini books and teachings about flip dolls. Flip dolls are uniquely suited to the theme of this article because of their capacity to hold opposites. Those therapists back then were not wrong in trying to understand what the patients suffered. What was missing was the ability to see the patients’ strengths in balance with what might have been wrong. The magic of flip dolls is that they are uniquely suited to hold both the pain of an experience and the hidden strengths that experience might reveal. 

​If you have some extra time, are not out on the frontlines, having to care for children home from school, or otherwise committed, and this sounds compelling to you, please take a look at the offer and stay tuned for more.

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