Art as Medicine: Creating a Therapy of the Imagination
Shaun McNiff (1992) 235pages

Whenever illness is associated with loss of soul, the arts emerge spontaneously as remedies, soul medicine. Pairing art and medicine stimulates the creation of a discipline through which imagination treats itself and recycles its vitality back to daily living...The methods and philosophy in this book are based on principles of dialogue and interplay. Creation is interactive, and all of the players are instrumentalities of soul's instinctual process of ministering to itself... I intend this to be a practical book, based on life's experiences, but not limited to descriptions of those experiences. The book is itself a "doing," an action in which soul demonstrates how it moves within the individualized yet archytypal context of a person's life. - from the author's Introduction (Shambhala )

An Artist's Book of Inspiration: A Collection of Thoughts on Art, Artists, and Creativity
Compiled & Edited by Astrid Fitzgerald (1996) 239pages

Creative expression, invention, and the need to do a thing well are fundamental to human life. When in these pursuits we aspire to their highest goal, we indeed find our highest calling. Art, in its myriad forms, ennobles the maker and has the power to transform the beholder and, at times, society. Great architecture raises our consciousness, music vibrates in our hearts and minds, and dance delights and uplifts. We know with certainty that art is a necessity, that we come closest to God when we become creators. We also know that without art, we become dehumanized... This selection from my notebooks is offered with love and compassion to all those who are compelled to create and give of themselves to the world and all those who hunger for an art of the spirit. - from the author's Preface (Lindisfarne)

The Artist's Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity
Julia Cameron (1992) 222pages US$15.95 C$22.99

With the basic principle that creative expression is the natural direction of life, Julia Cameron leads you through a comprehensive twelve-week program to recover your creativity from a variety of blocks, including limiting beliefs, fear, self-sabotage, jealousy, guilt, addictions, and other inhibiting forces, replacing them with artistic confidence and productivity. The Artist's Way links creativity to spirituality by showing in nondenominational terms how to tap into the higher power that connects human creativity with the creative energies of the universe, and guides you through a variety of highly effective exercises and activities that spur imagination and capture new ideas. (Jeremy P. Tarcher / Putnam)

The Candle of Vision: Inner Worlds of the Imagination
A.E.

Creating Mandala: for Insight, Healing, and Self-Expression
Susanne F. Fincher (1991) 192pages

This book is a practical and inspiring guide to creating the circular drawings known as mandalas. The author introduces the history and ritual use of mandalas in cultures all over the world; offers guidance in choosing art materials, techniques, and colors for the creation of personal mandalas; and discusses the symbolism of colors, numbers, shapes, and motifs such as birds and flowers. She also presents several illustrated case histories of people who successfully used her techniques. The author writes in her Preface: "The mandala is a living presence in my life...Mandalas have been an anchor for me at times of darkness, pain, and confusion. Through mandalas I have reached a deeper understanding of myself and my place in the cosmos. They have been a gentle - and sometimes not so gentle - reminder that life goes on, and that the greatest celebration of life is wholehearted living. In this book I share what I know about mandalas. May this knowledge prove as useful for you as it has for me." (Shambhala)

Creative Healing: How to Heal Yourself by Tapping Your Hidden Creativity
Michael Samuels and Mary Rockwood Lane (1998 )289pages

Creative Healing is a book about freeing your inner healer by embracing the passionate creative artist that is within each of us. It is a book about healing yourself, others, or the earth by tapping into the creative energy that makes us and keeps us alive...This book is an invitation to you. it provides the support, tools, and suggestions for how to heal yourself or others with art. Creative Healing takes something you do every day and turns it into a spiritual path for going even deeper into the spiritual center of your life. Follow us inward to your heart. Let art, writing, music, and dance heal you and transform your life. - from the authors' Introduction (Harper San Francisco)

Creators on Creating: Awakening and Cultivating the Imaginative Mind
Ed. by Frank & Anthea Barron & Alfonso Montuori (1997) 245pages

A New Consciousness Reader. In this anthology consisting of 39 writings, Richard Feynman and Annie Dillard relate how they opened their minds to new insights, paths, and trajectories, and Federico Fellini and Henry Miller shed light on the passion that drove their creativity. Mary Shelley and Michael Foucault describe how they used their imagination to challenge existing assumptions, customs, and orders; Maya Angelou, Brian Eno, and Tony Kushner tell of the wisdom they garnered by working with in a creative ecology of people, ideas, and experiences; Leonardo da Vinci and Frank Zappa reveal how they balanced freedom and exploration with hard work and mastery of their craft; and Lawrence Olivier and Karen Finley give us the "courage to go naked." (Jeremy P.Tarcher)

A Dangerous Profession: A Book About the Writing Life
Frederick Busch (1998) 245pages

Frederick Busch, one of America's most distinguished novelists, has had an enduring love affair with great books and the the difficult, and sometimes personally dangerous, work that is required to produce them. For Busch, as he writes of his own career and those of his great elders, Dickens, Melville, Hemingway, and others, there was to be no other recourse save the dangerous profession. Writing out of experience of risk that is suffused with affection, Busch brilliantly explores the hazards of the writing life and its effect on the achievement of benchmark writers. (Broadway)

Free Play: Improvisation in Life and Art
Stephen Nachmanovitch (1990) 208pages

There is an old Sanskrit word, lila, which means play. Richer than our word, it means divine play, the play of creation, destruction, and re-creation, the folding and unfolding of the cosmos. Lila, free and deep, is both the delight and enjoyment of this moment, and the play of God. It also means love. Lila may be the simplest thing there is - spontaneous, childish, disarming. But as we grow and experience the complexities of life, it may also be the most difficult and hard-won achievement imaginable, and its coming to fruition is a kind of homecoming to our true selves. -from the author's Prologue: A New Flute (Jeremy P. Tarcher/Putnam, 1990)

Mandalas of the World: A Meditating & Painting Guide
Rudiger Dahlke (1985/1992) Drawings by Rudiger Dahlke & Katharina von Martius, 286pages

This book that you just opened is not even a finished book yet! In contrast to most other books, it needs your collaboration and willingness to find its true form. Yes, this time instead of reading a book, you actually entered on a path. Neither will you find a structure at the beginning - that structure or order will become evident on your path. This path also does not lead straight from the beginning to the end, but rotates in circles and spirals around the center - that center that is also your own. The path of this book will come close to the center and then withdraws from it - it will touch and let go again - it will travel around in a circle, according to the Mandala... This book wants to become the Adriadne -thread to guide you through your personal labyrinth: a guide to your own Mandalas, to the experience of the universe as Mandala. - from the author's Preface (Sterling)

The Mind Map Book: How to Use Radiant Thinking to Maximize Your Brain's Untapped Potential
Tony Buzan with Barry Buzan 320 pages

The New Diary: How to Use a Journal for Self-Guidance and Expanded Creativity
Tristine Rainer (1978) 323pages

The diary is the only form of writing that encourages total freedom of expression. Because of its very private nature, it has remained immune to any formal rules of content, structure, or style. As a result the diary can come closest to reproducing how people really think and how consciousness evolves... I have broadened the scope of my rich discoveries from diaries by including an eclectic synthesis of concepts from philosophy, literature, creative expression, and especially from psychology. I draw on theories of Jung, Freud, Transactional Analysis, Gestalt therapy, reality therapy, creative dreaming, and other therapeutic and personal growth techniques, and combine these with concepts from surrealism, New Criticism, and contemporary art. I also have the good fortune to be able to include many of the personal insights acquired through a lifetime of diary writing by Anais Nin ( who wrote the Preface), probably the most important diarist of this century. - from the author's Foreword (Jeremy P. Tarcher)

The New Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, 2nd Revised Edition
Betty Edwards (1979,1999)

This twentieth-anniversary edition of Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain has been revised, with more than fifty percent new material, including:
- Recent development in brain research that relate to drawing
- New insights on the use of drawing techniques in the corporate world and in education
- Instruction on self-expression through drawing
- Ways to step beyond black-and-white drawing into color
- Detailed advice on applying the five basic skills of drawing to solve problems

On Creativity
David Bohm, edited by Lee Nichol (1998) 125pages

On Creativity surveys two decades of David Bohm's reflections on what distinguishes creative processes from those which are merely mechanical. While much of the material in the volume explores the nature of human creativity, Bohm throughout links mind to the realm of natural process, ultimately suggesting that manifestations of creativity in human kind are not merely similar to the creative processes of nature. Rather, they are of the same intrinsic nature as the creative forces in the universe at large...Bohm draws on a variety of sources for the formation of his views - his forty-five years as a theoretical physicist; his affinity for the visual arts, and his relationships with artists themselves; his conviction that art, science, and the religious spirit are intrinsically related; and his perennial aspiration to articulate a philosophy of mind with creativity at its heart, a philosophy that could be concretely explored in the context of daily life. - from the editor's Foreword (Routledge)

One Continuous Mistake: Four Noble Truths for Writers
Gail Sher (1999) 204pages

Writing comes like an urge or a pulse, not to say something, but to be with words as they arise and then to shape them or craft them. The words could be wood. It makes no difference. One beats through me, pushes its way to the forefront and appears on a page. I care about this. I care about the clarity of myself as a vessel, the utensils used, the paper as receptor and the way the whole process unfolds. Silence for me is replete with possibility....My consciousness spins toward a vortex in the center of which is a word. It is mine and I write it down. I am steady, unperturbed. I have no feeling outside of this steadiness, a taut yet receptive state of being awake. Listening for the sound of a word I am totally still except for the slight motion of my hand guiding the pencil. - from the author's Introduction: Writing Saved My Life (Penguin Arkana)

Opening Our Moral Eye: Essays, Talks, & Poems Embracing Creativity & Community
M.C.Richards (1996) 203pages

My hunch is that morality is a strong sense of connection, that it is built in, as are connections themselves, and that the moral imagination may be awakened as the sense of wholeness is awakened. Our moral eye is the organ which understands connections between things, understands consequences, and attempts to maintain its commitment to the life of nature and humanity... "In art is a communion of worlds." For in this book are collected a series of pieces from the worlds of education, agriculture, moral philosophy, creation spirituality, poetry, social justice and social imagination, creativity, biography. - from the author's Foreword (Lindisfarne)

Stone Cats: includes instructions for creating your own stone cats!
Nagata Yoshimi (1993) 47pages

One bright morning I found myself walking along the seashore of Suma Bay when I noticed the pebbles at the shoreline, glittering like jewels in the morning sun as they were tugged back and forth by the waves. I picked up a handful and rolled them around in my palm. They seemed so familiar, and suddenly I realized why. As a boy, I used to lie on my back in a field, gazing at the puffy cumulus clouds that endlessly mutated in a myriad human and animal shapes as they passed overhead. looking down at the stones in my hand, I saw the same ever-changing forms, the same possibilities waiting to be born. - from the author's Foreword (Weatherhill, 1993)

Trust the Process: An Artist's Guide to Letting Go
Shaun McNiff (1998) 210pages

The discipline of creation is a mix of surrender and initiative. We let go of inhibitions, which breed rigidity, and we cultivate responsiveness to what is taking shape in the immediate situation. The creative person, like the energy of creation, is always moving. There is an understanding that the process must keep changing...The practice of imagination requires an ongoing interplay between many different and often contradictory elements. It is a gathering of forces, and the skilled creator knows when to plan and when to check this intelligence at the door. I believe that creativity is an intelligence that is broader than the experience of an individual person acting alone. It is an energy that exists within an environment, and as an artist, I strive to collaborate with it. The notion of "process" suggests a multiplicity of components with independent ways. But the word also carries within itself a sense of unity, a faith that all of our experiences gather together in a creative process that ultimately knows where it needs to go. - from author's instruction - License to Create ( Shambhala)

A Way of Working: The Spiritual Dimension of Craft
Edited by D.M.Dooling (1979) 127pages

In this book we are considering craft as the paradigm of human activity - a making, a doing, and an act of contemplation - as it refers to man the maker, man the user, and man the tool, man the receiver and transmitter of forces of creation much greater than himself...We wish to re-examine the traditional view of the sacred nature of craft as the symbol of man's potential wholeness, as well as his way toward that wholeness. - from the author's Introduction (Parabola ,1986)

The Work of Craft: An Inquiry into the Nature of Crafts and Craftsmanship Carla Needleman (1979) 142pages

Craft speaks to the heart and mind through the body, our universal home, and as, this book tries to show, the work of craft is an especially fine example of the work of life, our universal obligation. - from the author's 1993 Introduction (Kodansha)

The Writing Life
Annie Dillard (1989) 111pages

When you write, you lay out a line of words. The line of words is a miner's pick, a woodcarver's gouge, a surgeon's probe. You wield it, and it digs a path you follow. Soon you find yourself deep in new territory. Is it a dead end, or have you located the real subject? You will know tomorrow, or this time next year. - from the author's opening paragraph, Chapter One (HarperPerennial, 1989)