Season 5, Episode 14: Art Therapy for Climate Resilience with Mor Keshet 

Written By Climate Change And Happiness
 

From Mor Keshet

Season 5, Episode 14: Art Therapy for Climate Resilience with Mor Keshet 

Thomas and Panu explored the intersection of art, creativity, and environmental psychology with art therapist Mor Keshet. Join us to discover practical art activities like mandalas and collage that help process climate emotions and foster identity and resilience.

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Transcript

Transcript edited for clarity and brevity.

Thomas Doherty: Well hello, I'm Thomas Doherty

Panu Pihkala: I am Panu Pihkala.

Doherty: And welcome to climate change and happiness. is our podcast. This is a show for people around the globe who are thinking and feeling deeply about climate change and other environmental issues. And this is a place where we open up to emotions. And today we're thinking about art and creativity and our connections with nature and expression of our feelings and also art as a therapeutic tool. And to help us in this conversation, we are really excited to have a special guest.

Keshet: Hi, I'm Mor Keshet.

Doherty: Mor is a colleague of mine and Panu's from New York City, Long Island. She will tell more about herself in a minute, but she's a well-established art therapist. And we're going to get into this. So this is a creative episode for you all listeners. So you might even want to have something if you're available, something to write with or sketch with as we're as we're talking, because you might have some ideas. Panu, do you want to get us started?

Pihkala: Welcome Mor also on my behalf. Lovely to meet you. I've been following your work online and noticed that you've been using the climate emotions wheel and that easily lends itself to various creative practices and when facilitating workshops, which is what I sometimes do, I love to explore various creative and somatic methods and so on. So I'm very interested in things that you have been doing, but we often start by asking our guests something about the journey towards the time and place and style where they are now. So would you like to share something about how did you end up becoming so engaged with environmental and climate matters and arts?

Keshet: Yeah, well first of all, thank you both so much for having me here. I'm a big admirer and I appreciate, earnestly appreciate everything that you've both contributed to this field and it's wonderful to be here with you in dialogue. So I've been an art therapist since 2005. I went to the School of Visual Arts for my master's in art therapy and I've always been working with people who've experienced overwhelming life events, right? So homeless adults who were mentally ill and chemically addicted, women who experienced sex trafficking, families who were facing separation from one another.

And this really kind of came from a backdrop of being a granddaughter of an Auschwitz survivor. And I've had this lifelong interest, very, very deep interest in what kind of separates people who simply survive and people who really thrive and feel a tremendous sense of belonging and placement in the world. So this lifelong pursuit. for many years, I was kind of developing this integrative creative arts therapy approach and when I came into private practice work, while I myself have a very deep connection to the natural world, I didn't really think about the overlap and how this lends itself, which is a massive understatement, to clinical practice.

When COVID came around and we were all kind of put in this space, working with people who were already experiencing, were prone to kind of acute levels of dissociation, I was kind of confounded by how even more detached, listless, unmoored, the people that I was working with had become when all of these identity-feeding silos of work and school were out of the picture. So on a whim I started suggesting to clients, this was in the spring, right? I started suggesting to clients that we meet in the park. And I didn't change anything. I brought the same materials. I replaced the big butcher block table with a couple of beach chairs and materials that were easy to take around. But I saw almost an immediate and palpable shift. Where all of a sudden, these kind of very narrow narratives of symptomology and trauma stories and kind of repeated patterns were opening. These channels were just opening and resourcing was expanding, sense of place, sense of presence was just becoming so much more apparent and I thought this is fascinating.

And I started reading, eco-psychology, eco-therapy, and more specifically, eco-art therapy, which is still very much a burgeoning field. This is all emergent, right? And I started thinking about how I can be far more intentional in integrating some of what I was learning into my practice. And I also just said, I'm going to start offering groups. Everyone is so freaked out and isolated and alienated during this COVID time, let's see if I can help in some way beyond my therapy practice. And the groups just really started to take off and I joined the Climate Psychology Alliance of North America where I quickly was asked to co-chair our expressive arts committee and to be a regional coordinator.

And I became a faculty member with the Climate Emotions Resilience Institute and just started doing a lot of public facing work with all different kinds of organizations for a nonprofit. And it seemed to kind of coalesce into this paper that I wrote for eco-psychology about integrative eco-art therapy and how specifically it's addressing humans fractured attachment to the natural world. The shift that I have seen over the last six years of bringing this framework into my practice of working with trauma, essentially, working with overwhelming experience, and we are all either experiencing or witnessing individual and collective trauma, you know, on our communities, on our planet, on the more than human world.

It's been a wonderful journey in progress.

Pihkala: Thank you for sharing that sounds fascinating and courageous to take it outside and almost instantly rewarding is what I hear you say. And Thomas, you have a very long history of taking therapy and psychology outdoors, so I know this resonates with a lot of things in your history and mind.

Doherty: Yeah, well, more your story resonates with almost every guest we have has a some sort of origin moment or origin series of moments. And so that's, that's part of it. You know, you know, in this case, we're talking about art therapy and someone's mission or goals there, but it could be almost any aspect of life or what people do for a living. But, but in this case, it's such a rich area.

In my book, I have a chapter on creativity and arts and it was, it was a really, it was one of the most enjoyable chapters that I worked on just because there was so many. I mean, when you, when we start to realize, well, just to step back and you know, we talk about this on our, on the podcast a lot, but this idea of our environmental identity. So we have this identity in relation to nature and the natural world, which for many people can be quite dormant. Like they haven't really been coached to talk about that aspect of their identity, they haven't been coached to talk about their, you know, environmental values or their aesthetic connections or the places that they love or places in nature that really call to them. It's quite common. So almost everyone has this experience.

But you know, it's just not something that's talked about even in school. You know, we tend to, you know, science is you look at nature through science or politics or justice or natural history which is which is all which are all great but there's a whole other piece here which is you know how my connection to nature is shaped by the books that I read and the paintings that I see and the music that I listen to and once you turn people onto that then it's almost endless all the different influences.

I think artists as artists have always been pioneers in environmental consciousness in any age of human civilization so we think of the romantic movement in Europe, the romantic poets or paintings or a poet like Emily Dickinson or, or Walt Whitman. These are, these are people that are masters at expressing all different kinds of thoughts and feelings around nature and the natural world. And, and then that, and we're talking about bringing this into our own lives, you know, us, us partaking of this. And so I think, I know with myself, I've always had to reassure people, you don't need to be some sort of fancy trained artist to do this kind of thing. Cause I think there's a lot of shame and inadequacy with environmental consciousness. Like, I'm not green enough. I'm not outdoorsy enough. I'm not this, I'm not that. So I, I imagine more that that there's something about empowering people to get past their, their limitations about their preconceived limitations about creativity and art.

Keshet: Absolutely, I mean a couple of things that I always tell people and I'm happy to share with your listeners is that we all have an innate desire to self-express. Christopher Henshelwood who is a famous archaeologist in uncovering and deciphering ancient cave paintings around the world. You know, he's talked about the unique symbolic mind of our species. We've seen to have, as far as I know, across species, it's truly singular to our species to create symbol in response to our experience. And symbol, of course, can be visual, it can be written, it can be spoken, it can be moved. So we've had this innate need to literally say with our hands on the wall, I was here and it meant something to me. This meant something. This meant something to me and to the people around me.

And that is a really unique experience, which you do not have to be Picasso to enjoy. And Picasso, of course, famously said that he painted his whole life to learn how to paint like a child. But there's also, there's so many different access points to one's creativity. I also tell people, I don't draw well. I love to be incredibly expressive and spontaneous. there is photography and there's collage and there's lots of different ways that we can give form to image and to symbolic meaning in our minds. It's right there. It's right under the surface. So much of it is just giving ourselves permission, just permission to begin to tap into that primordial, you know, this repertoire. Being creative, didn't used to be something that you had to pencil in. It wasn't a hobby. You it was just an innate quality of being human. And I think it's really time that we kind of recapture that for ourselves.

Doherty: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah.

Pihkala: Well said, well said. The arts and crafts is a fascinating example of this. We have a Finnish word for that. Using creativity when you are making tools that you need in your everyday life. Which used to be still common in the time of my grandfather in Finland. It's been a very rapid transition from the agricultural society to an industrial and urbanized one. And I think there's been many losses which have happened when we lost that ability to somatically and very holistically practice creativity in relation to the daily things we do. It's much more difficult to shape your laptop into something which reflects your style of being in the world. So heavily resonating with this theme of living very literally, I think, is a fundamental dimension here.

Keshet: Yeah, it's an orientation. It really is an orientation to one's life, right? It's Nietzsche's Ubermensch, where your orientation to life becomes that this is, it's all art. know, this is, we have this wild spontaneity, just like the universe and just like the natural world, to create. We are creative beings.

And we're co-creating right now in this dialogue. And if really that becomes our orientation, then in terms of environmental identity, that sense of interbeing, that sense of deep interconnection with the more than human world becomes so profound and so embodied. So embodied. Yeah.

Doherty: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So let's, let's talk about specific art activities, just to give, give us a flavor of it, even give listeners something that they could take away. I know I've been really interested in writing creative writing prompts, but more what are some examples of, you know, some of the things you do with people, some of the activities you do.

Keshet: Yeah, so I just, I want to preface it by saying that in eco-art therapy, we make art either in or with the natural world, right? So that means when we are actually in a natural landscape, in a blue or green or otherwise natural landscape, in response to the natural world, so through metaphor and symbolism. right, if a person can't easily access the outdoors for illness or being elderly and immobile or whatever it is, really kind of borrowing from nature in terms of metaphor and symbol, and also as material, borrowing from the natural world as material, whether it's incorporating natural objects into forms that we're creating or making pigments, earth pigments, almost anything that you engage with in the natural world can create pigmentation. Even water from different sources. Rainwater is going to have a very different pigment and biological makeup than saltwater and lake water and so on. So that's really kind of important to know, that you can make within this context, it's in response to or in or with the natural world. And in that sense, the natural world really kind of becomes your co-regulator and your co-therapist, so to speak. We as humans are incomparable to what the natural world can teach and lend us.

So the first prompt that I would like to share is the Climate Emotions Mandala Project which was of course inspired by Panu's research and the creation of the climate emotions wheel. When I first started doing climate cafes quite a few years ago now, it seemed kind of natural to me as an art therapist that we're gonna make mandalas. You know, this is not anything that I conceived of. Mandalas have been around for thousands of years and have been represented in just about every culture as a symbol of wholeness. Right? We have mandalas in the sky. It's the first shape. The circle is the first shape that a child recognizes in the face of their parent.

It's kind of this collective unconscious symbol of wholeness. And climate change and the polycrisis are, you know, it's anything, if it's anything, it's traumatic, it's fragmenting. So having this super accessible symbol for wholeness just seemed to be like a natural thing that can help resource people when they're talking about their feelings in response to climate change. So if you want to make your own climate emotions mandala, it's really so easy. You take a stencil, you can make it any size that you want.

But basically you can take like a paper plate or something round and make just a stencil of a circle on a piece of paper. I'm also happy to share my stencil with anyone that wants it. Kind of divorce yourself of anything that you've seen about mandalas, that they need to look symmetrical and eastern and totally balanced. That's not what this is about.

Doherty: Mm-hmm.

Keshet: What this is about is once you have that stencil, you notice that it has an outside and an inside, just like you have an outside and an inside. you are contending with that interface of how this changing climate, this rapidly changing world, is affecting the interiority of your experience. So you look at the climate emotions wheel. You see these different emotions, probably some if not all of which you yourself have experienced. And you set an intention, you simply set an intention to allow that to channel through you using line, shape, form, and color. There's no right or wrong. There's no right or wrong whatsoever. And you see what emerges.

And then an easy exercise that people can do in response to that, it's a Gestalt exercise where you look at the art piece, you look at your mandala, and you write down very quickly, as if this is not your piece, as if you're seeing it on a wall of a gallery, three to five adjectives that describe simply what it is that you see. And I'm almost tentative to say the second part of the prompt because I don't want for people to censor themselves. After you say these adjectives, you preface them with I am, right? So if you came up with these adjectives of colorful, complex, painful, jarred, overwhelmed, beautiful, right? You can start to see that you are in fact all of these things.

Doherty: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Keshet: You are, in fact, all of these things all at once, right? We can hold so much dichotomy at once. So that is a quick entree to the Climate Emotions mandala. And in terms of other projects, we're talking about the need for resilience, right? So a really kind of beautiful way for people to connect with their own innate resilience is to borrow from the natural world, right? So a prompt that I love to have people make is a river of resilience. What is within this river? Where is it flowing to? You know, what has made this river resilient? Is it the diversity that's there? Is it the foundation of the river? And really looking at that in terms of creating a map for yourself of resilience.

Then of course there is the incredible and always endlessly resourcing symbol of the tree. This is something that is symbolized in Kabbalah, in the world of the chakras, and the tree of life. The tree of life. And really kind of thinking about your roots, what is rooting you, what is foundational in your trunk? What are you reaching out towards? What is in your upper canopy? And what are you hoping to transcend for, right? So there's so many different ways that you can take or borrow from living systems and create art about them in a way that you both learn from these beings in the natural world and learn about yourself at the same time and thereby also create and deepen that environmental identity where you are in tune, you are attuned to the river, to the tree. And I mean, I can go on and on. There's so many different things.

Doherty: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. This is beautiful. Yeah. Yeah. So if you're, if you're following listeners, just, just to be clear, a mandala is typically a circular kind of image and it's often spiritual, but it could be used in a lot of ways just to make sure people knew that term mandala. And if you just Google mandala and look at different mandala figures, you can see it's a universal around the world, but we're talking about making your own. And I've done exercises like this over, over time. In fact, yeah, I can remember even when I was quite young, younger, first exploring my environmental identity, some of the first art exercise I did were quite impactful because some, we've never, we've never opened up this channel of, you say, externalizing, you know, some of our feelings and thoughts in symbols and in beautiful symbols. So, you know, I was looking up the definition of, I was trying to look up the definition of art because it one of these terms we use, but like, what is it actually, what's the definition and you know, one of the, you know, one of the parts of the definition is producing works to be appreciated primarily for their beauty or emotional power.

And I thought that was really helpful, you know, because it speaks to why the creativity is needed, because those are the things that are missing from our environmental experience a lot is beauty and emotional power, especially when you're thinking about climate change. And dangerous, dangerous issues, but also just our own connections with nature, you reclaiming. It doesn't mean there's not problems. And it doesn't mean that all the other parts of reality don't exist. But what we're doing is foregrounding these true authentic experiences of beauty, connection, interbeing, you know, or the boundary of myself and my identity is fluid with nature and place and stuff like that. And then of course, emotional power because there's just really emotions are so hard to express with words, sometimes a picture or a sound or a painting or a sculpture or a physical movement is much more expressive than any language, you know, we could use. So I think it's just speaks to the power of this. What do you think?

Keshet: Absolutely, I mean there's the science of awe, right? And being in the presence of something that exceeds your current understanding of the world. And you don't have to be standing in front of the Grand Canyon to experience awe. A teenage client that I work with told me a few months ago on their way home from school, it was that golden hour, and they saw on the side of a stop sign a fully intact spider's web and that golden light coming through the spider's web. And, you know, as a result of being engaged in this work and this process, they said to me more seeing this and just pondering for a moment what that required and that this creature knows how to do that. I just felt bigger on the inside. And that was, you know, that was so poignant because this process and being able to externalize that, again, either into written or symbolic form or moved form, you know, it allows for that awe to have a space to exist and for you to metabolize it and therefore integrate it.

Doherty: Yeah.

Keshet: And I want to say in regards to the definition, sometimes in response to climate change and the polycrisis art can be quite ugly. Not necessarily beautiful, not something beautiful to behold, right? It can be ugly, it can be scary, can be anything. But there's beauty in that too. There's truth in that too.

Doherty: Mm-hmm.

Pihkala: Mm, yeah.

Doherty: Mm-hmm.

Pihkala: Yeah, very interesting. I was about to comment the same, that beauty is a quite complex thing actually. I have some colleagues who work with environmental aesthetics. So that means conceptions of beauty and good and the human relationship with the modern human world. It's quite interesting stuff, know, if you have a powerful storm generated by global warming, anthropogenic global warming, are you allowed morally to feel awe in front of it, for example? So it can lead to complex ethical questions for people. I would say that it's always possible to experience quite a lot of emotions and they can be ambivalent, but if we start self-censoring ourselves, that's going to be problematic, but this could lead into a long discussion about beauty and aesthetics and so on.

But Mor, really love your examples and I see a lot of power in them and the interplay between inner and outer for example is so important here and physical objects can help people to grasp that. Collage is a method that I know some people are using like Claude Watfern, a climate psychologist from Australia and luckily as you said, the field is growing but still there's much to be done in this field. So I'm very grateful for the work you and many people are doing.

Doherty: Yeah. And I think it's helpful to realize that this is also a developmental process because once you do get involved with arts, then you develop, then you realize you have a style or you have an aesthetic or a sensibility that's unique to you. So you might, you might gravitate toward the non-stereotypically beautiful, beautiful images or the powerful images of the awful. Awe, like awe, you know, awe or awful, you know, it depends on how you look at it. So, you know, think about this also listeners, it's a developmental piece, you start, you have these epiphanies, and then you, when you do more exercises, you start to see patterns, and growth, and style, and then you then you need to learn, as all artists do to recognize, well, I have my style that I need to kind of stand for my identity, my particular message and truth, but then there are other truths. There are other styles and then there are other modalities like painting or music, whether you're a musician or an artist or a sculptor. And, and then even one exercise I have are things that I've drawn years ago that I'll look at and I'll learn something from today from many, many years ago. That's another piece to these things last over time.

I know in my writing exercises that I've done with people around environmental identity and their environmental timeline where people will, you know, pick out different key points of their life, key, key turning points or key experiences, and then maybe write about that particular experience, something happened when they were a child or something like that, or as a young person. But then, then I might ask them to then rewrite, rewrite that experience from a different perspective in the, in the time like maybe write it from the place's perspective or the other people's perspective or the animals perspective or the sky's perspective, then you could start to look at these experiences, you know, separating yourself out of them and seeing what the other voices are. And then we get into a truly ecological, you know, ecological perspective. And then you can translate that into a short story or a fiction or a poem. So there's no end. There's no end to it. It's just, it's really I think the key thing is permission to use the tools without, like you say, censoring yourself, which is why we need support and we need our therapists and groups and things like that, Yeah.

Keshet: Yeah. Yeah, Thomas, you said many important things just now, and one of them is that images and things that you create, they are like a relic, you know, it's a time stamp. And there's few things that are, I think, as encouraging for a person who has gone through a challenging time, a challenging journey to be able to look back at that journey and to see the evolution and the emergence of a far more coherent and resourced and connected human. And I have seen that across all the settings in which I have worked. And it is so utterly affirming to be able to see the things which have remained resonant because they are true to your authentic self and the things that you have really been able to emerge from. And that quality of physical creation is really unique and really powerful, especially as we are working to help instill cultural repair as people are really shifting away from this hyper-individualized sense of being to a far more expansive sense of being.

Pihkala: Thank you for voicing all that and the word relic is highly fascinating here also. Dear listeners, I hope you've got a lot of ideas that you could do yourself and know, inviting a couple of people you trust and then showing what you have been doing or developing something together. So at the best situation, there's gonna be an arts therapists available, but if not, get active and creative. There's a lot of very good methods and as usual, we'll be posting links to the podcast websites to things that Mor has been doing and others. As always, time flies. It would be very interesting to continue, but we soon have to wrap up.

Doherty: Yes. Yeah, Mor. Thank you so much. This was a great conversation. It's, you know, Panu and I do this podcast, at least me to energize myself and to remind myself of the creative ideas I need to function. hopefully listeners got some things out of this and we'll have a bunch of neat links in the show notes

Mor, Panu, and listeners everyone be well. Thank you very much.

Keshet: Thank you both.

 
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Season 5, Episode 13: Fostering “Good Mind”: Teaching for Climate Change with Maria Vamvalis