A large study will soon be under way at San Francisco State University in collaboration with the Wise Wishes Institute to evaluate among other things, the Here You Are Process, as part of a larger research project that involves the Wise Wishes Retreats as an integral part of a violence intervention strategy. Thanks to the vision and compassion of Dr. Cherie Safapou, Director and Founder of the Wise Wishes Institute, senior scholar Dr. Kenneth Monteiro (Dean of the College of Ethnic Studies), and the project's lead investigator and director of the SF State University Cesar E. Chavez Institute (CCI), Dr. Belinda Reyes (Latina/o Studies; College of Ethnic Studies).
Following is a lengthy description of the Here You Are process, both in the Children's Book, as well as in the Here You Are Drawings and Meditation.
Following is a lengthy description of the Here You Are process, both in the Children's Book, as well as in the Here You Are Drawings and Meditation.
There is a certain process the mind goes through, when reading Here You Are, that leads to a moment of truth and peace in the reader, be it child or adult. The process is intentional and serves to confirm to children what they know in their hearts. The world they find themselves in aims to pull them away from their inner peace at all times, and Here You Are "takes them home". Children are marketed to on an around the clock basis creating endless desires, greed, envy and entertainment, causing a lack of grounding and inner peace. To children Here You Are becomes a sanctuary of sanity in an insane world, confirming what they know deep down in their heart is valid, true, eternal and can be trusted. I have seen the joy and relief in their eyes many times.
For adults who read Here You Are it feels like coming across a long lost feeling and knowing, accompanied by the same joy - or grief sometimes in adults - as in coming across a long lost friend or relative. Reactions to Here You Are upon first reading can be quite strong, while sadly some people are left completely untouched. These people live in their heads only, and have lost easy access to their hearts.
The way in which Here You Are takes the mind along a certain path to peace is also utilized in what I named the Here You Are Process, a method of clearing the mind for meditation I developed over the years as a meditation teacher. A before and after drawing is made to access certain areas of the mind that are directly connected to physical organ systems. Patterns are showing up in the drawings collected to date that clearly seem to indicate that people are indeed drawing a representation of the state of their organ systems - be it the kidney/bladder system, the liver/gallbladder system, reproductive system, or other systems. Most clearly this shows in drawings of people who had organs removed.
According to oriental understanding of health and well being, certain emotions and impulses are connected to each organ systems. Therefore emotional and mental adjustments can easily be made after these tensions and conflicts are presented in the drawings. This, in turn, results in deeper meditations that directly affect physical health, which in turn seems to be indicated by the significant changes in the second drawing after the three part Here You Are Meditation. These changes do not show up after simpler relaxation or contemplation techniques. Whatever changes on a physical basis - be it energy flow the way it is understood in acupuncture, hormones or other chemicals in the blood, is the reverse of what created disease if there is disease, or that would create disease in the future, if no changes are made on the mental and emotional levels. For that reason drawings have to be evaluated differently in young/healthy versus old/sick, or young/sick and old/healthy people. What was first - the chicken or the egg - the thought patterns or the disease - remains a Koan - but we know one is closely connected to the other, predictions can be made, and certain patterns show up reliably.
In the three-part Here You Are Meditation, participants are asked to stay conscious of their breath for five breaths. Then they report on the thought or image that interrupted their concentration. Depending on this interrupting thought/image, in tandem with the information from the first Here You Are Drawing, an instruction is given to relieve that tension and therefor open the door for a deeper and less interfered with meditation for the next round. By the third round this process usually results in a meditation deep enough to affect the physical system and show up in the second drawing. Sometimes there are emotional adjustments in the form or tears, laughter or anger, but usually the process is gradual enough that this can easily be managed even in a larger and more diverse group. Successes with severely traumatized people - rape, molestation, Hurricane Katrina victims, police officers, etc have been highly encouraging.
The Here You Are Process may offer a new form of art therapy in spite of the challenge of pouring fresh water into old pots. Art Therapy in its present form, and based on its present concepts, some of them outdated, may not be any more therapeutic than going fishing, the empowerment from catching a fish, and the insights received during a beautiful day of contemplation on a lake with a wise friend. Nothing to be scoffed at at all, but I think it could be much more. Art Therapy may even be harmful if it indulges patients in ruminations on their life's trauma instead of teaching them the way to dissolve all images, memories, thoughts and associations the way meditation instruction and practice can do. Art, when understood from a physiological and neurological point of view, though, can be a useful evaluation and therapy tool when meditation, rather than art, becomes the actual therapy. I am hoping to develop a Meditation Art Therapy that draws from the collected data of Art Therapy studies after re-evaluating this data from a physiological and neurological perspective using oriental teachings of mind/body(organ) connections and combining it with my own data, which although still limited, begs for further investigation due to the predictable patterns that are showing up.
The Here You Are Process, with the drawings and meditations, is based on the idea that our brain cannot only verbally express - "there's something wrong with my heart or kidnesy" but also in a drawing, visually - in the way the symbols are drawn and how they are drawn in relation to each other.
Not only will the brain at that point tell us that "the kidneys are troubled" but also put the state of the kidneys in the context of all the other organs. A drawing can say "my kidneys aren't functioning at their best because my heart is weak". Or "my heart is weak because my kidneys aren't functioning at their best". In the first case one has to treat the heart to strengthen the kidneys and in the second one has to treat the kidneys in order to strengthen the heart. This is done with the emotions connected to the two organs. In the first case, issues of fear, control, surrender and possibly sexual identity need to be addressed before meditation, while in the second case issues around authority, father, God and righteous anger at injustice need to be addressed in order to clear the way for ideal meditation. To do otherwise is either useless, or can in some cases be harmful. Even a blood test will only say - there is something wrong with the kidneys - and treat the kidneys directly, often causing a new imbalance elsewhere.
If a person, for example, comes into therapy and wants to deal with their issues around their mother the drawing can tell whether they really need to deal with their own narcissism instead, heal their pancreas, or whether their life dream and their ambitions are in conflict and need to be sorted out. If their large intestine element (Mother) of the drawing is fine, but their lung and reproductive organs are sabotaging each other, those sets of emotions and concepts need to be dealt with first. What someone "has on their minds" versus what the mind wants to dissolve to free itself are usually two different things. One will show up in talk, the other in the drawing. They are interrelated in ways that can be used to dissolve them for meditation and healing.
For example - a gentle, non-violent, regularly meditating Buddhist woman draws a drawing where one element devours all other elements, saying she drew this because of the idea of all things being impermanent - a Buddhist concept and teaching to help us with detachment from the fleeting world. A wonderful thing to talk about for an hour in art therapy! Most likely the conversation would address the opposite idea of "permanence" - those things we can count on - eternity, infinity, God - if the person is religious - and then move to the idea of "love", as both a permanent, eternal, as well as a fleeting part of our lives. People in her life she can and cannot count on, etc. From a psychological point of view the woman most likely had a lot of things to process and explore around the idea and conclusions she had made about love and people. All valid subjects - inspiring conversation and therapy - but on a more fundamental and physiological level there would not be much measurable change.
What the drawing says, though, is that the person has a significant liver problem ( as it was the liver element in the drawing that devoured all others), with significant rage issues. Once this was seen - a huge relief was felt, her eyes lit up with love and intelligence, and plans like taking a kick boxing class could have been made without her having to worry about "having anger issues" or "a violent character" which would be especially disconcerting to a Buddhist. The fundamental problem only needs to be understood and properly directed or handled. Of course, the many conclusions drawn over a lifetime of this imbalance can be addressed in regular fashion. Liver cleansing diet improvements, and vigorous exercise, will do more for a person like this than any form of therapy - even meditation. Weeks after this session I found out that she had been in therapy for her road rage - the only place where this kind woman could "get rid of" her liver imbalance, although not really, and she was deeply concerned for her own and other people's safety.
This case turned out badly at the time because a psychologist who was assisting Dr. Safapou in the workshop, felt her profession threatened by a process she didn't understand. She interfered at the exact wrong moment in the worst way possible, in order to protect her "expert professional" status. It was heartbreaking. The women left the workshop before the meditation - so we do not have a second drawing. The light, relief, and understanding that came into her eyes (which had triggered the psychologist's reaction, who had labeled the drawings as "reading tea leaves") - and considering that the woman already had extensive meditation experience, indicated that the benefits to her could have been substantial and would have shown up nicely in the second drawing.
Then there is the story of a young woman who was a
Hurricane Katrina survivor. She had been severely traumatized, especially from what she had
witnessed as an employee of a flower shop that had handled many funerals. She
had a wonderful mother who also attended Dr. Safapou’s workshop.
Many people were raped and brutalized
by their fellow human beings during the chaos of this flood and storm. The corpses showed this horrible abuse. She had decided
a) that humanity had lost its right to exist and b) that any of us who were
spared from witnessing what went on during Hurricane Katrina, were stupid and
naïve – and suspect of the same behavior given the same circumstances. This she
expressed in words in regular conversation. Her disdain for everyone in the
room was palpable.
The relationships of the elements in her drawing to each other showed
that her dream was to be a mother, but that she had decided to abandon that
dream completely. Even though motherhood was never discussed during the
entire time, but rather “flowers” which kept interrupting her concentration,
she suddenly realized that she had “killed and brutalized” flowers for pleasure
for years. This instantly restored her humility, resulting in a deep and long
meditation and consequently a drawing in which the dream of motherhood was not only restored but “embraced” and "celebrated".
As may be obvious from these examples, the Here You Are Process is easily confused with art therapy or other therapies, as there are certain over-lapses confusing the issue. The Here You Are Process has not undergone scientific, peer reviewed studies as of yet, but is about to, through the Wise Wishes/San Francisco State University Study - promising to make a significant contribution.
If you are interested in adding to this research personally, or have access to large groups of patients through your work, please contact me at hereyouarestudy @gmail.com. I am an NIH certified researcher, which qualifies me to conduct this kind of research. It obliges me to keep private information confidential the same way a doctor would have to. PErsonal files would be assigned an ID number and all personal information would disappear. How much information you give is completely flexible and up to you, as is further contact if you are interested in getting involved in the meditation part of the research.
The drawings from the general population, only try to further establish scientifically the validity of the idea that certain symbols in the drawings indeed relate to specific organs, while the San Francisco State University/Wise Wishes Study tries to evaluate the benefits of the workshops as a whole and meditation, specifically as "measured" by the drawings, in addition to all the other data collected.
Here are a list of things that would be helpful and most welcome:
I am interested to collect drawings from:
People who have had surgery or trauma to specific organs, limbs, or head
People who have cancers of specific organs
People who have other organ specific diseases
Healthy people - all age groups
Elderly people
Generational drawings - grandmother, adult daughter, child daughter - or grandfather, son, child-son
PTSD sufferers
People with brain tumors
People who have had brain surgery
People with thyroid disorders/surgeries
People with sleep disorders like Apnea and Insomnia
People with Migraines and other kind of headaches
People with diagnosed psychological disorders, especially depression and schizophrenia
People who drink sodas on a regular basis (one a day and more)
People who consume large amounts of ice creme (every day)
People who consume large amounts of chocolate (every day)
Smokers
Drug users
Present or past alcoholics
People with kidney or gall bladder stones
People with transplant organs
People with auto-immune diseases
People with blood diseases, especially Wagner's
People with MS
People who have recently lost loved ones
People who are about to make a major change in life (for a before and after drawing):
- before and after surgery, especially organ removal or transplant
- before and after breast surgery - cancer or cosmetic
- before and after nursing
- before and after natural child birth
- before and after C-section
- before and after starting on any drug
- before and after divorce
- before and after any therapy
- before and after a major diet change
- before and after root canals or other major dental treatments
- before and after acupuncture treatments especially for infertility
People who are searching for a diagnosis for as yet undiagnosed conditions
And if you are really brave - a drawing before and after you have sex (with orgasm) - this is a significant "movement of energy" through the body and all it's systems, and can alter the drawings which is great proof of the drawing showing physiological changes instantly. You may not think the drawing has changed but the way I look at the drawing it may well have, so please don't think "it's not worth sending"
Thank you in advance if you are willing to contribute. Before you contact me draw a picture in pencil of anything that comes to mind independent of any instructions I would send you after you contact me. Keep any drawings "that weren't good enough" also.
