An artist who had stopped painting, Justine wrote to Jill after attending some regular group sessions for a few months:
“I wanted to write to say how much I value your work …
Over the last few months I think it has prompted me to acknowledge and ‘give voice’, privately, to emotions I have been sitting on for some time … and I am gradually feeling a deep sense of release.
More than that, something is happening at a deeper, soul level which I think is to do with trust in the universal order of things and I am feeling that I am indeed a part of the ‘whole’. For me this is very freeing and has both released me from a sense ofisolation/separateness and also ‘connected’ me again with the world and, spiritually, beyond. I feel I can now begin to tap my own inner creativity once more.
I can now walk more joyously alone and ‘see’ beautiful colour and light and am gathering paints and boards and brushes together to express this outer connecting and inner journeying.
I hope this, in some sense, expresses my gratitude for your deep understanding that the journey one needs to take towards healing is indeed, uniquely one’s own. I am currently working on a series of abstract paintings in which I am trying to express this concept and through which I am coming to understand things better.
So - the colours I sought to ‘hear’ in the early weeks are now taking form and I’m beginning to ‘taste the notes’! Things are fusing somehow and I want to be able to paint senses, feelings, thoughts, ideas.
I don’t want this to make sense as it’s very exploratory at the moment and I feel I’m on the edge of some new and important (for me) understanding of something …”