About Creative Healing Arts

My Creative Healing Story

Life is a beautiful experience, although we do not always recognize this when we are in the middle of challenges. I have been blessed with the discovery of a unique, creative process that has helped me to heal through the rough spots. I call it Creative Journaling. It is a way of using your creativity to make a creative garden for your soul, so that your true self may blossom as your life unfolds. I would like to share my story with others so that they may also learn to use their creativity and grow from their life challenges.

I come from a long line of gardeners and artists. I believe that our Creator was the very first creative gardener and created the very first garden. Kathryn and John Lukesic, my grandparents on my mother Sylvia's side, came on the boat from rural Croatia to their new homeland in America. They always had a garden, and it was their creativity and love. Grandma Katie canned the fruits and vegetables at the end of every season. We drank her healing remedy of Chamomile tea from the garden. Grandpa John created his garden and one for us in my parent's backyard. Grandma naturally used the metaphor of a tree, always telling us that we were her branches and she wanted us to grow up to be someone special in life. My mother continued the gardening tradition. She enjoyed gardening at home and church, making flower arrangement gifts of love. When my daughter Tiffany's golden retriever Max died, my mother made a garden in his memory. Gardening is a natural healing and life embracing activity.

Gardening is in my blood, (so to speak). This is probably why I loved to climb trees, hike in the woods and pick berries in the fields when I was young. It is also why I have worked out feelings of frustration many times by pulling weeds in my flowerbeds. There was a divine reason that my parents named me Susan, meaning Lily, a flower of beauty and purity, the Water Lily, the Day Lily, the Tiger Lily, the Lily of the Valley. I have come to realize that I am truly like a lily flower blossoming. I have learned that life is not a linear timeline in which we have to meet milestones and accumulate achievements to an end goal. Rather, life is a circling spiral, unfolding in its own time as a blossoming flower. Just as the lily comes into flower with each season, so I develop and become more of who I was created to be with each new season of life.

The creative arts are also in my blood. On my father Roger's side of the family, I come from a long line of creative artists. His mother Grandma Ella, made beautiful drawings, paintings, and ceramics. She loved animals and beautiful things like Royal Dalton china and had a wonderful collection of teacups. She passed on a tradition of appreciating and collecting beautiful things. She also loved to sing especially with her pet bird Lucky. My Grandpa George was a percussionist in a Cleveland radio city band. His chimes hang in my living room. Several of his brothers and uncles were musicians in the Cleveland Symphony Orchestra. My father carried out the long tradition of loving music. I remember him tapping with his fingers or his feet all of his life. My brother David continued the tradition by playing the drums and guitar and becoming a professor of the visual art of television production. I continued the tradition by playing the piano, making and teaching art, and writing poetry.

memories to climb by My story begins loving to be creative and explore nature as a child through the arts and creative play. I painted, drew, made crafts, played the piano, danced, and wrote poetry, I built castles in the sand box, waded in the creek, hiked in the woods and made tree houses. After high school I studied visual arts at Westminster College, nestled in the hills of western Pennsylvania. I loved walking the beautiful campus, painting the rolling hills, digging clay from the ground to make ceramic pots, and exploring nature.

While I was at college, my Grandmother Ella, moved to Naples, Florida. She experienced dementia and died at a great distance from me. I was able to express my grief and my love for her through a series of paintings. I painted a transformation of the comb she wore in her hair into a beautiful bird. The paintings are a metaphor for her transformation from life to death and into eternal life. It was my way of healing from seeing a disease that seemed to take her personality and life from her. This was my first experience using art as a part of a healing process to bring beauty, harmony and balance to my life.

After graduating, I searched to find a meaningful way to use my art. It was not enough to do this for myself. After reading her book Joni, I met Joni Eareckson Tada, a woman who learned to be an artist despite living with quadriplegia from a spinal cord injury. Her occupational therapist showed her how to use a mouth stick to paint and draw. She became a loving and faithful healing artist. She inspired me to return to graduate school to study occupational therapy at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, Michigan. Fellow artist, friend, and classmate Mary Ellen Meyer and I did our graduate research thesis using art to help people recovering from a stroke. During my internship I met my life partner Tony, one of the most loving and generous people I have ever known. We met in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains in Denver, Colorado. I learned 22 years later that we were married on the exact same day and year as Joni and her husband.

Tony and I created two beautiful children together, Sean and Tiffany. As a working mother, I created two gardens; one being our home and the other the healthcare clinics in which I worked as a therapist. Nurturing the creativity of my family and the people who I was assisting to heal, became my way of living out my purpose. I also taught university students how to use their creativity to be effective and caring health professionals.

memories to climb by Over the years I have experienced physical challenges within my body that I believe came to me as messengers. They included breach positioning of both my children, graves disease, gall bladder disease, breast and kidney cancer, and a category II spinal misalignment that created pain and an imbalance over my entire body. These physical challenges were giving me a message to connect more fully with my Creator and the purpose and gifts I was given. The most dramatic example occurred in the new millennium when I moved with my family to Southwest Florida with excitement and hope. Coming to Florida brought me pleasant memories of times with my grandmother. After being in Florida for 9 months, I found myself confronted by a life threatening illness....breast cancer. The night after my surgery to remove the tumor, I heard a voice in a dream say "Press every good out of evil."

At this time I met a wonderful healing artist, Dr. Wilma Bulkin Siegel, a painter and retired physician. Through her healing abilities as a physician-artist, Wilma gave me hope as a healing artist. She gave me the gift of painting my portrait. I discovered that in order to be better prepared to connect other people with their creative gifts, I first needed to be able to find creative healing for myself.

The illness gave me an opportunity to strengthen my relationship with my Creator, use my creativity and to heal. I started this process by doing a healing painting. Each time I laid alone in the radiation chamber, I closed my eyes and envisioned the radiation as a healing light. Then I created a small painting of the image seen during each treatment session.


Transforming Cancer: front	Transforming Cancer: back

On the opposite side of each painting, I created a series of meaningful objects and important people in my life. These paintings were woven together into one. The cancer inside of me symbolized the world's cancer of discrimination and the difficulty we sometimes have valuing all individuals as people first. My painting became a metaphor for healing the cancer in the world and transforming it into something new and beautiful. I entitled the painting Transforming Cancer: Press Every Good out of Evil.

My vision became to provide people with the opportunities and tools to use their own creativity to create beauty, harmony, and balance of their mind, body and spirit. I was given an opportunity at the Renaissance Academy of Florida Gulf Coast University to teach a course I designed called Connecting Creativity to Healthy Living. The response of the students was so positive that it convinced me to start my very first business. With the support of my husband, I established The Academy of Creative Healing Arts in October of 2001.

Two years later, shortly after I was proclaimed cancer free by my oncologist, cancer revisited me in the form of a grapefruit sized tumor in my kidney. I knew that grapefruit were plentiful in Florida, but I did not expect to find one in my kidney. As healthcare professionals started working with me to heal kidney cancer, I realized there was a lack of partnership with me. When I walked into a healthcare setting, I was confronted with people who did not seem to enjoy what they were doing. They seemed detached and only saw the physical bodily problem confronting them. They did not see who I truly was, a whole person with a body, mind and spirit.

In my work I had tried to form partnerships with people. When we shared our true selves and learned from each other, these were the most fulfilling partnerships. Because of the lack of caring I had experienced in many healthcare providers, I tried other methods of healing, sometimes called alternative or complementary. Healers who taught me about these practices seemed more caring and hopeful. However, I discovered that sometimes there were little scientific methods or proven result. Through my experience I learned that when hope and caring were combined with the necessary skills and scientific methods, it resulted in a more balanced healing process. The support, caring, and love of my family and friends have been one of the most important parts of my recovery.

Physical, mental and spiritual challenges including pain have taught me that we have been given a great healing potential. I am an interconnected and interdependent body, mind, and spirit with emotions and an environment around me that requires balance. I am connected with natural beauty and the spirits of animals. More importantly than a balance of art and science, I know that holistic healing comes from faith in our loving and merciful Creator. I realize the need to be more fully connected with my Creator and trusting of the process of life. I also need to stay focused on my purpose, balanced, and appreciative of everyone and everything in my life.

Creative journaling was a form of healing that helped me tremendously in bringing this all together. It is a unique, creative process of healing and a way of receiving wisdom and guidance from our Creator. Using this process we trust and ask about a particular concern or area of our life. Through meditation and guided visualization we wait for a healing image to appear in our mind's eye, and then create the image using art materials. Once the image is completed, words from the divine spirit are heard and written down.

This creative healing image is saying: "Heartfelt peace is won by diligent caramel-covered patience: with yourself; with others. Connect all your hearts and let them come to you in your web site. It is a site to see, a poem to hear, a feeling to touch. Fly away grief. I let you pass through my dream circle catcher. My spirit attracts only the most beautiful to its homeland...security is created in the rainbow of hope."

In the Dream Circle Catcher

I have created a series of healing cards with my creative journaling images and words so that others can experience their healing messages. My hope and dream is to teach creative journaling to others. I believe we all have some form of creativity within us through which we can fulfill our purpose and express our true self.

My most recent experience with kidney cancer in 2003, led me to a series of watercolor paintings inspired from learning to listen to nature. I believe the spirit of animals is one of the ways our Creator communicates and teaches us. Prior to knowing that I actually had kidney cancer, I was having back and abdominal pain, numbness and pains in my legs, fatigue and anxiety. Doctors were trying to treat me for gallstones and spinal misalignment, but I was experiencing limited relief. During this time, I found much comfort and wisdom from my meditation walks in nature around my home.

The Healing of the Butterflies The butterfly frequently joined me on my walks. It is the spirit of transformation, balance and grace. The butterfly transforms the flower by moving its nectar and allowing it to grow and multiply. I was inspired to paint Healing of the Butterflies. This painting is a metaphor for the butterfly's spirit of transformation, changing and helping me to grow from the experience of cancer and the 'butterflies in my stomach' feeling. As I became more aware of my animal friends, I began to paint more of them. I turned them into cards which I sent to friends and family who were ill. People found them healing and suggested that I get them professionally printed. This led to my current series of Creative Healing Cards.

As I have realized my interconnectness with everyone and everything, I have found that the beauty of nature, family and friends have joined me on the path of life. I am thankful for every one of you. My story does not have an ending...it is still blossoming as my Creator guides me along the path in the garden of life.