BACH Symposium: The Arts of Compassion Program & Objectives
The Healing Empowerment Center Suzanne Hanser, Ed.D., MT-BC Berklee College of Music, Music Therapy
The Healing Empowerment Center is the vision of Samuel B. Hanser, a graduate of architecture and interior design at Parsons School of Design, who later received advanced training in Somatic Psychotherapy, tantra, and eastern healing practices. Mr. Hanser designed a physical space where individuals would be empowered to heal themselves, integrating a variety of eastern healing methods, meditation, creative arts psychotherapies, yoga, and body work.
The interior and exterior architecture of a space expresses the structure and function of the building. This presentation emphasizes the relationship of structure and function to the body and mind. With a building, it is hard to feel free inside it without open space, good air quality and access to natural light. The same principle applies equally to the body. Although the center has yet to be built, the ideology began as a building that would support the work of going inward and working with therapists who could meet their clients at the physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual levels of their being. A successful Healing Empowerment Center will transform all of its clients into their own centers of healing and empowerment.
After Mr. Hanser's untimely death in 2010, his mother, Dr. Suzanne Hanser has begun to present his theories and plans to build the Healing Empowerment Center. This presentation provides the plans for the physical center along with the integrative health model practiced within.
Learning Objectives:
* Participants will learn how creative arts, yoga, energy healing, body work, and traditional psychotherapy can be integrated into a holistic health model. * Participants will identify design elements that support ideals of integrative health. * Participants will experience creativity-based techniques that empower individuals to take responsibility for their health.
Teaching Teens Compassion through the Expressive Arts: The Giving Planet in Kenya Karen Wacks, Ed. M. Berklee College of Music
We live at a critical tipping point of contemporary civilization and recognize that informed thinking and responsible acting are needed to bring us to a new civilization that is truly peaceful and sustainable. A paradigm shift is needed to expand the collective awareness to fully understand the interdependence of human life. As stakeholders in the future, young people need increased access to programs that inspire, support and promote a healthy and tolerant future.
In May 2010, The Giving Planet Program, an experiential peace education project, worked with approximately 40 teenagers in Nairobi, Kenya to explore themes of peace building, global citizenship, multi-cultural awareness and social responsibility through the mediums of music and dance, meditation, discussion, writing and digital media and video conferencing. The program was based on the teachings of the Dalai Lama and was designed to offer guidance for developing individual and collective wisdom that empowers action capable of bringing about constructive change in the individual and global community. Through media and song, this presentation will demonstrate how compassion can be taught through the arts in a multi-cultural context.
Learning Objectives
* To prepare participants to engage in intercultural sharing through art and technology, by teaching participants to use artistic expression and digital media to communicate their identities, their hopes, dreams and challenges. * To prepare participants to engage in practices of reflection and meditation to understand how inner peace leads to peace building in the greater community across cultures. * To demonstrate how session plans, in the context of web classroom between countries, can be used for productive cultural sharing and unity consciousness.
Ars Moriendi: The 'Good' Death in the 21st Century Sandra Bertman, Ph.D., FT Mt. Ida College
"He who teaches me to die, teaches me to live. " -Montaigne
Science may give us the tools for curing; but it is the arts that give us the tools for caring. Engaging in the arts, as participant or observer is in itself a creative act, often catalyst enough to assist in the search for meaning, enables grief, initiate reflective practice and incite change. For even the most seasoned clinicians, insights from and dialogue with the arts are antidotes to burnout and compassion fatigue, sparking reconnection to the creativity, renewal and joy in one's chosen work. This presentation demonstrates how the arts challenge, instruct, and literally buttress us in our endeavor to stay present with another's suffering and to better understand our own.
National Center for Death Education Mount Ida College, 159 Ward St. Studio Newton, MA 0259
Learning objectives:
* Define the 'good' death. * Describe the current hallmarks of hospice and palliative care. * Evaluate the arts as both professional and personal resource.
Arts in Healthcare at Whittier Street Health Center Phillip Speiser, Ph.D. Daniela Aguilar Felix, MA Whittier Street Health Center
Whittier Street Health Center has been promoting the arts and creativity as catalysts for the development of individual and community health since 2006. The arts therapy department provides a multidisciplinary program of visual and performing arts for diverse populations to promote wellness and eliminate health and social disparities.
The programs integrate the arts into the delivery of care within the healthcare facility and the community.
This lecture/workshop will present 'best of practices' developed at Whittier in the areas of patient care, healthcare environments and community well-being. These practices provide the health center clients with opportunities to experience creative expressions that fortify their ability to cope with illness and treatment.
Participants will learn about arts programs that deal with specific areas and populations including: children with developmental, physical and behavioral challenges; obesity; violence prevention; and geriatrics. Ideas about how to start programs in various healthcare settings will be discussed. There will also be a 'hands on' experiential component to this presentation.
Whittier Street Health Center, 1125 Tremont Street, Roxbury MA 02120
Learning Objectives:
* Overview about arts in healthcare programs at Whittier Street Health Center. * How to work with specific populations including: developmental, physical and behavioral disabilities; obesity; and violence prevention. * Ideas about how to start programs at various healthcare settings.
Arts and Social Action: Creating Peace Arts Zones in the Community Mitchell Kossak, Ph.D., LMHC Lesley University
This presentation will describe two recent projects that took place in Boston, Massachusetts and Netanya, Israel creating Peace Arts Zones with adolescents. Peace-Arts Zones are defined as a personal vision and action plan to create a healthy and safe community. The first project was part of a two-day multi-arts arts based social action project for artists, arts educators, arts therapists, youth and elders held in the greater Boston area in August 2009. The second project took place in Netanya, Israel in April 2009. This project brought together Israeli and Palestinian youth as part of a conference focused on finding creative approaches to conflict. This group took place about a month after the recent military intervention in Gaza, which brought very difficult and unresolved emotions and made coming together particularly difficult. Both events were video taped and excerpts will be shown as part of this presentation.
Learning Objectives:
* Participants will learn about creating Peace art zones in their community * Participants will understand how the use of expressive arts therapies can help to facilitate understanding and empathy * Participants will learn about effective approaches to help address issues of conflict.
Very Special Arts, SAORI Nat Needle, Ed.D. Very Special Arts
All participants will have hands-on experience with improvisational SAORI hand-weaving. I will demonstrate SAORI loom attachments that allow people with various physical challenges to weave. I will narrate a digital slideshow of SAORI students with various health challenges and disabilities actually weaving, and show a video of interviews of students about how SAORI has had an impact upon their health. If permissible, we'd like to include a panel of some of our students who would answer questions about their SAORI experience. There will also be open reflective discussion among participants. Pre-enrollment for the sessions would help me determine how many looms to bring. Anticipating about 15-20 people, I plan to bring two looms. It may be possible for me to offer more than one session, if they are scheduled close together.
BACH member agency: VSA Massachusetts
Learning objectives:
* Participants will apply the basic techniques of SAORI to hands-on weaving, and experience the joyful, freeing, and relaxing creative quality of weaving. * Participants will learn about the philosophy of "no mistakes" and "learning from everyone in the group" that distinguishes SAORI from other fiber arts. * After observing and hearing, through slideshow and video: a) the mood and spirit of the SAORI Worcester studio b) people with health challenges both weaving and interacting with fellow weavers, and c) the self-assessments of SAORI weavers regarding the affect of SAORI on their well-being, participants will identify, through discussion, the aspects of the SAORI practice and philosophy that they deem most conducive to health.
Art, Alzheimer's & Creativity Sean Caulfield, Creative Director and Co-founder, ARTZ Artists for Alzheimers (ARTZ)
Art participation - whether it is abstract painting, writing poetry, or attending the symphony, can be a powerful form of treatment for people living with Alzheimer's disease and related dementia. Art participation can significantly reduce certain psycho-behavioral symptoms often associated with dementia - anxiety, aggression, agitation and apathy. Access to art and culture contributes to maintaining cognitive functioning, optimizing remaining capacities and utilizing areas of the brain that, without artistic/emotional stimulation, would be otherwise overlooked or ignored.
While Alzheimer's disease does affect short-term memory and the ability to complete some complex, sequential tasks - such as cooking a gourmet meal or driving an automobile - it has far less impact on perception, emotional awareness, and creative sensibilities. A person living with Alzheimer's can comprehend visual art, music, and performance art on a deep, emotional level - even though it may not be so apparent to a casual observer. In many ways, individuals with Alzheimer's are often more "in tune," if you will, with the subtleties and multi-layered complexities that art can convey. Simply put, art is a conduit that reaches out to the person with Alzheimer's and helps restore to them a sense of self, dignity, and connection with the outside world.
BACH member agency: ARTZ: Artists for Alzheimer'sˇ˝, an initiative of the Hearthstone Alzheimer's Foundation
Learning objectives:
* To understand how the brain of an individual with Alzheimer's responds to art participation * To understand how having greater access to arts and culture institutions can reduce some of the stigma that often accompanies an Alzheimer's diagnosis * To understand that emotional/spiritual/artistic memory can actually be heightened due to the symptoms of Alzheimer's and related dementia
"About Compassion and Arts" Harvey Zarren, M.D. President, Integrated Medicine Alliance
A PowerPoint aided presentation about wellness, whole-human physiology and the physiology of compassion, and how the Arts can be useful in restoring and maintaining wellness.
Learning Objectives:
* Attendees will be able to define Wellness as: physical, mental, emotional, spiritual and social,and will gain understanding about the integrated functioning of whole human being. * Attendees will learn about the physiology of Compassion * Attendees will learn some of the ways that the Arts can be used to alleviate suffering and restore and maintain wellness
Member Agency: The Integrative Medicine Alliance
LSO on Call Lisa M. Wong, M.D. President, Longwood Symphony Orchestra Harvard Medical School
LSO on Call is a community engagement program of Longwood Symphony Orchestra, a Boston-based orchestra of medical professionals dedicated to Healing Our Community through Music. This program brings monthly chamber music performances to hundreds of patients in varied healthcare settings each year, performed by LSO's own medical musicians. Patients and staff are healed by the music and regard these dedicated healthcare providers in a new light. At the same time, LSO musicians experience their own healing as they perform music and learn new ways to communicate with patients. The growing dependence on technology and medicalization of the patient experience has distanced patients from their caregivers. LSO on Call promotes humanism in medicine and benefits patients, staff, and medical musician.
LSO on Call was launched in 2008 with grant from Merck. Over a six-month period, LSO musicians performed in 8 health care settings for 500 patients. Many returned with anecdotal observations on the impact their performances had on patients and on themselves. The program was refined and formalized over the next year and an evaluation tool was designed to document and quantify these observations. We devised a pre- and post-performance survey to study the impact of the program on patient, caregiver and medical musician.
The program is a readily replicable model that can be tailored to audiences of different ages, socioeconomic levels and demographics. Chamber music allows for flexibility in instrument combinations and simultaneous multiple performances in different locations.
Music is the universal language and LSO on Call demonstrates its infinite power to heal. Music heals patients; playing music for patients heals the musicians themselves.
When words--or medicine--fail, there is still music.
Learning Objectives
* Participants will learn about the LSO on Call program and the impact of chamber music on patients * Participants will consider how the healing power of music can also affect caregivers and staff * Participants will learn to enhance the impact of music on performers, from the perspective of medical musicians