Why Make Healing Dolls

Winter Solstice created by Barb Kobe for a woman with Ovarian Cancer

This from a March 2013 Blogger post, The Art of Healing Dolls.

As I embark on another creative adventure of teaching The Medicine Doll online class, one I have taught for 10 years, I thought why not blog about it. I am excited about this class because it has something it never had before, seven Medicine Doll masters and mentors. These are women who have been in the previous Medicine Doll classes and want to bring the knowledge and skills to people who lives they touch. I also have an international group of participants in the Medicine Doll process and I am honored and blessed by their presence at this time in the development of the class.

​Why make healing dolls?
Dolls hold such wonderful and varied opportunities for image-making that can be explored by people of all backgrounds and levels of expertise. Feelings and concepts are easier to access through dollmaking. Pamela Hastings www.pamelahastings.com

A doll can be a tool, works on the artist as the artist works on it. It instructs, contains the sacred, represents the deep desire of the body to recreate itself, expresses every emotion from anger to love, pain to joy. It embellishes space. A doll allows you to see who you are.
 -  elinor peace bailey

"We need this connection with three-dimensional, more or less human-like creations. I believe that the dollmaking allows us to create our own personal model of the world and surround ourselves with energies and images that we enjoy."   adapted from Tatiana Baeva

Linda Hansen, a participant in a Medicine Doll group said, "I came to a point of my life when I was going deeper into my emotional healing and was finding that the traditional healing channels were not touching me as an artist. I needed the whole of me healed, and my art is the major form of how I communicate. I believe art is a form of language, and I needed all of my communication.skills to heal the whole of me."

We tend to see ourselves in the doll. It represents an aspect of the human condition. When one engages with the process of making a doll all kinds of possibilities come to the surface. Dollmaking is a way to free oneself of worries, struggles and emotions. Creating a doll, or any art, directly effects the automatic nervous system which controls body functions and the immune system.

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