We’re kicking off fall with a guest post from The Mindful Fertility Project’s Buffy Trupp, MA, LMFT, RCC. In this post, Buffy not only speaks to the transforming power of visual art, but invites you to participate in a virtual exhibit we are hosting this fall, using images from her new fertility coloring book, Coloring Conception: Stress Reduction for Fertility Success. Read on to learn more.
The Transforming Power of Visual Art
Buffy Trupp
Infertility certainly presents like macabre art: a genetic, physiological, hormonal condition that instantly obliterates our participation in the nature of things, the stream of time.
The attitudes and choices in how we each deal with infertility vary enormously, depending on age, gender, severity of diagnosis and many other personal factors. But regardless of the medical treatments we decide on, we also choose to adopt a story of infertility: how we got it, how we live with it or through it, and what it means to us in the greater context of our lives.
Stories are essential for human beings. The human psyche is hard-wired to make meaning. Unbeknownst to us, and throughout our lives, the psyche connects the seemingly random events that mark and shape our reality and weaves them into a series of images or stories.
These images have great power. They can make us or break us. They can make the difference between intolerable suffering or amazing grace. They can be medicine or poison.
We are born into some images, absorb them as children and live them out without ever knowing it. They live deep within our cells, in our ovaries, our uterus, in our heart and inform our every move. These stories can indeed be the most insidious.
But there are also healing images, healing stories; images that inspire and transform us, empower and renew us, restore and liberate us.
Apart from stirring our deepest, darkest fears of obliteration, is it possible that infertility also offers us a healing story? A story that frees us to heal our lives and shed old, unhealthy beliefs?
Many infertile women believe the death of the embryo, sperm, egg or new born child indicates they are unhealthy.
Did you know it is the ability to surrender, to yield, and the willingness to die for the
greater good that differentiates a healthy cell from an unhealthy cell?
When we allow something to die within us, the formations of our old life, fierce guardians of habit and pattern, fall away, giving birth to a new way of inhabiting our body and mind and we heal.
Death is essential to life.
When did we forget this?
When loss is understood as an essential aspect of health, women struggling to have children begin a healing story.
Healing stories transform even the most difficult of realities into affirmations of life.
Visual art captures this transformation.
The Mindful Fertility Project and The ART of Infertility believe that the art we create and the stories we tell while trying to conceive are central to our well-being.
We acknowledge both the necessity and benefit of art within the reproductive health field.
We are a move toward acknowledging creativity itself as healing.
And the result, while perhaps not quantifiable, can be measured by the quality of life and transformation experienced by all those who participate.
The images below are from a new fertility coloring book, Coloring Conception: Stress Reduction for Fertility Success.
The colored images and the brief narratives that accompany them are inspirational, evoking both a sense of beauty and an immersion in the most elemental aspects of nature. The words and visual images reveal that life can imitate art; that we can become the things that we see and imagine; that creation is established through our ongoing relationship with our body, with ourself.
“When I color, my body feels alive.”
“When I color, my body feels beautiful.”
“When I color, my body transforms.”
Be the artist of a new narrative – a new series of images. Let your canvas be the entirety of your embodied vulnerability, the tenderness of your heart, and the brilliance of your creativity. You can re-write your story, re-color your image, re-wire your nervous system, and find new meaning. No, this is not easy, and will take everything you have… and more.
But new life is already inside you.
While it may seem hopeless at times, you have capacities that you did not have as a child when the original stories, the original images were passed onto you: images of what it means to be a woman, how to metabolize unmet longing, what loss symbolizes, images of your place in the world.
Immerse yourself now in creativity. Choose a color and begin a new image, a new story. Feel a new pathway emerging. And allow it to come into consciousness – through your art, lighting up your body, your nervous system, and fertilizing your heart with love.
You have not lost your chance.
THIS IS A CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS!
The Mindful Fertility Project & The ART of Infertility are publishing a virtual exhibit this fall.
Go to www.mindfulfertilityproject.com/art and immediately download 4 FREE images from our new adult coloring book, Coloring Conception: Stress Reduction for Fertility Success.
Submit 1 colored image on or before December 15th to be featured in our virtual art exhibit AND for a chance to win 1 of 3 Mindful Fertility Journals valued at ($397) each.
The Mindful Fertility Journal is a virtual, mind-body fertility program that teaches you exactly how to optimize your fertile health naturally. It includes 28 unique mindfulness meditations, 14 easy-to-use self-acupressure videos, 12 easy-to-use yoga videos along with nutritional guidelines and meal plans. PLUS 6 incredible bonuses.
We will publish the virtual exhibit at the beginning of 2017; a compilation of all the colored images submitted.
Once the exhibit is published, we announce the winners of our Mindful Fertility Journal GIVEAWAY.
AGAIN, go to www.mindfulfertilityproject.com/art to immediately download 4 FREE images from Coloring Conception: Stress Reduction for Fertility Success, to learn more about our virtual art exhibit AND to be eligible to win 1 of 3 FREE virtual mind-body programs to optimize your fertile health naturally.
I hope you’ll join us.
All my very best, always,
Buffy Trupp