Painting Therapy: From Soul Paralysis to Healthy Inner Movement

with Karine Munk Finser

We live in a world where all of us feel powerless at times. Working with a carefully guided color journey and painting with vibrant watercolors on moist paper allows for new inner movement when there’s trauma or soul overwhelm. For more serious consequences of PTSD, a process of painting the inner stillness and emptyness and gently invite new movement and imagery to emerge, may bring comfort and support healing. 

 Physical ailments and the burdens of psychological trauma are connected and painting therapy can strengthen the forces of inner resilience and wholeness (salutogenesis). The  transformative healing process may be directed by carefully guided colors and the individual’s imagery. The artistic transformative process will lead to finding a healing motif that helps bring the individual into a place of greater inner wellbeing and harmony.

In this class, participants will be introduced to various color circles based upon Goethe, Steiner, and Liane Collot d’Herbois. We will be working with themes of wholeness, and the soul sorrow of trauma and the healing of trauma.  Fairy tales such as Little Red Riding Hood and Native American stories such as Shingebis, will be explored to help guide our color journey into the soul, while we address the strengthening of inner wholeness and the welcoming of new life forces.

To support self regulation for the healing educator, we will work with a small veil painting to address our own heartforces, and our openess to receive the warming healing properties of the colors in gentle movement, addressing the healing forces of resillience within us. 

This course stands on its own but can also be taken as an introduction to Kairos Institute: Vocational Training in artistic therapies. Please visit Kairos website for more information. 

Karine Munk Finser was born on the Baltic island of Bornholm, Denmark, and later lived in Belgium, France, Switzerland and England before finding her home in the United States. Karine is an art therapist with a diploma from the Medical Section, Goetheanum. She ran the Center for Anthroposophy’s Renewal Courses for 21 years while being employed as a faculty member at Antioch University New England. In 2014, she began the Transdisciplinary Studies in Healing Education program (TSHE).