The Meaning behind "Mosaics"
When I hear the word “mosaic,” what comes to mind is an image of my aunt in her paint-smeared overalls taking a bucket full of broken pieces of colored tile and creating the most beautiful, inviting, inspirational shower I have ever seen.
As a child, I was mesmerized by this. A bucket of jagged, broken pieces which could have easily been passed over as remnants from a home renovation to be collected by her local trash service was seen as something much more than that through my aunt’s eyes. Instead of trash, she saw potential and material to create a beautiful masterpiece.
Each of those pieces was carefully and intentionally selected one-by-one to play a part in the creation of her artwork. Each piece was moved from the dusty, cracked plastic bucket and put into its new place where it now belonged, where it now was an essential piece of this beautiful story she was telling through her art.
While it’s not a perfect metaphor, my mind seamlessly sees some similarities in the art of trauma therapy. When we experience things that overwhelm our brain, the information from the time can get stored in fragments. After the experience, our older, logic brain may know or have learned one thing, while other part(s) of us still have the information from the past.
Through EMDR, a client can access the old information and have it dissolved into the adaptive networks in the brain that have more or new information such as “I’m safe now,” “My needs are valid, “I am fine the way I am,” “I’m worthy/lovable,” “Things are different now.” In other words, when we begin our healing journey, we may show up with some broken pieces, and yet, as the healing begins and continues, our brain can move into wholeness.
What was once a junk drawer of information our brain wasn’t able to make sense of at the time becomes an adaptive whole self, free to thrive with the information now stored in appropriate filing cabinets in our brain. What’s more, we often find that it is because of the icky parts of our experience that we are equipped with a newfound depth of awareness and capacity for empathy and compassion, for ourselves and others.
It goes without saying that there are hurting and suffering people all around us. What better gift to give ourselves and the world than taking our broken pieces and letting our life and story be used as a work of art that inspires and instills hope, beauty out of brokenness, fragmentation to wholeness, and enslavement from the past into freedom to live organically in the present?
No matter what your story may be, there is healing, wholeness, and freedom that can be found if you decide to do some artwork.
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