Art as a Path to Wholeness
I have found that we humans seek, pursue, and exist in healing spaces to discover wholeness. The idea that in doing so, we will experience a reality where our life is an integrated, resolved state, where the fractures of past wounds have been neatly healed and tied in a bow. But in my experience as an artist, graduate student, and counseling intern, wholeness is not the erasure of brokenness. Rather, it is the capacity to hold what has been broken with hope, kindness, and curiosity restored.
But until this discovery was found, I, like many others, chose to believe the first path (the erasure path) was the way out. And found that I was willing to relentlessly do whatever it took to get there, by whatever means necessary.
This is where art found me, caught me falling, wrapped me up–while I kicked and screamed–and eventually comforted me while I submitted to the reality of what I didn’t want to believe was true. From there, art taught me that I am capable, worthy, and perhaps even destined to hold both grief and sorrow with celebration and joy, brokenness with beauty, and death with rebirth. Such expansion has reframed what it actually means to seek and find wholeness.
Art offers a language for what words often fail to hold. Art allows the body, the imagination, and the emotions to speak together. In the act of creating, something implicit is made visible. The chaos inside is externalized, not to be fixed immediately, but to be seen with compassion.
On the journey toward wholeness, art gently gathers fragmented experiences, left from the wounds of trauma, without forcing coherence too quickly. We find that talk therapy invites people to re-author their stories, but art allows those stories to emerge before they are fully formed. A line, a color, a texture can carry meaning long before it can be spoken.
Art as a path to wholeness is not about producing something beautiful or polished. It is about presence. It is about staying with what hurts long enough for it to be held in relationship—with the self, with others, and perhaps with God. In that holding, something shifts. Not everything is healed, but something becomes more integrated. Art offers us a window into greater curiosity and compassion for our broken pieces. It offers playful experimentation, joyful surprise, and whimsical freedom to reimagine our stories from fragmentation to being a human fully and wholly alive.
