Showing posts with label Shamanic Arts. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Shamanic Arts. Show all posts

Friday, May 8, 2020

New Masks that Await Their Stories

"Mask for the Crossing of Dimensions (Center)"

Years ago I heard a famous Hopi potter talk about how many of the intricate designs on her bowls just "turn up" in her dreams,  and "bother her" until she makes them, and then they finally leave.  I  was very seriously and academically trying to figure out if  art could be "shamanic" at that time - this very simple explanation of visioning by a revered Native artist stuck with me.  No fuss, no muss, just day to day "instructions" that the artist received and translated into bowls that were full of "mana", full of essence.  

"The Healer (East)"  

It's been many years since then, and I find that I also seem to get "downloads", images that pop into my head, and won't go away until I make them.  I suppose it could be said that I'm a kind of mask shaman, although at present I have no tribe to serve, which I find frustrating.  Still, here is a collection of masks that came from.........well, I don't know where, but they wanted to be made.  I am hopeful that those who can use them, and find their stories, will turn up on the horizon in the future.  

"The Maker (South)"

Because masks are meant to be participatory, "vessels for story, vessels for transformation, vessels for invocation".  As I myself so often have said.................

"The Oracle (West)"

There is one last mask I need to make in the series, for North, and that would be "The Reaper",  the function of psychopomp, the one who helps people to make the transition from this life into the next.  Instead of a skull, I see a face with butterflies all around it. 

Wednesday, March 25, 2015

Interview with Coreopsis Magazine 2015

Vol 4 No. 1 Winter/Spring 2015
Earth Tales: The Challenge Ahead
 
Interview: Lauren Raine – Visionary
Profiled Artist
 
 
CJMT: What is the link to your site? Where can we see your work?
www.laurenraine.com as well as my blog
CJMT: What do you want the world to know about your work?
 I guess I would feel that I’ve succeeded if in some small way my work helps in the greater work of bringing reverence to the Earth, and to the arising of the Divine Feminine.
 
CJMT: Who – or what – do you see as your main influences?
 Early on I became influenced by the writings of Kandinsky (“Concerning the Spiritual in Art”) and others, and rejected what I saw as an aesthetic that disregarded spirituality and mysticism as being outside of “high art”. I find it ironic that spirituality was a significant impulse in the early development of Modernism. Theosophy, the Golden Dawn, Anthroposophy, as well as Einstein’s new physics, enormously inspired the work of such innovators as Mondrian, Kupka, Kandinsky, Arthur Dove, and others.
Later I discovered Joan Halifax (“Journey of the Wounded Healer”), met Alex and Allyson Grey (“The Sacred Mirrors”) and others, and began to think of art process in new terms. Art for healing, art for transformation of consciousness, art as a bridge between dimensions. During the 80’s I was involved with a group called the Transformative Arts Movement, and I even wrote a book based on interviews I did with visionary artists.
 Rachel Rosenthal developed a form of contemporary “shamanic theatre” that I found profound. I saw her perform Pangaian Dreams in 1987, and every hair on my body stood up. Sometimes, like a Sami shaman making the “yoik” she would allow sounds to come through her that were absolutely electric, sounds and words that charged the room. The Earth Spirit Community’s Twilight Covening introduced me to participatory ritual theatre and I made the Masks of the Goddess” collection for the Reclaiming Collective’s 20thAnnual Spiral Dance. I have great admiration for what these two groups have developed as ritual process.
 
CJMT: Much of what you do seems to tell a story – even the single, stand-alone pieces. Where do you think that comes from?
 The poet Muriel Rukeyser famously commented that “the Universe is made of stories, not atoms”.
 
I believe Native American mythology – and perhaps contemporary quantum physics – would agree with her. My patron Goddess is surely Spider Woman, the ubiquitous Weaver found throughout the Americas in one mysterious manifestation or another. Among the Pueblo peoples of the Southwest she was also called “Thought Woman” (Tse Che Nako). As a Creatrix she brought the world into being with the stories she told about it.
 
Myths and religions are stories, some more glorified, archetypal, literalized or contemporary than others. I think it is so important for artists of all kinds to recognize that we are weavers of the stories of our time, we are holding threads that recede behind us and extend beyond us into the future. We’re never weaving alone. So – what kind of stories are we shaping, collaborating with, how do we understand the gift of “telling the world” that Spider Woman has bestowed on us?
 
CJMT:  How would you describe your art…? (influences, history, school-of-art, your aesthetic) 
 
Perhaps “Cross disciplinary”? I seem to jump around a lot, from sculpture to ritual theatre to painting to…………….whatever seems to be the best medium of expression at the time. Different “languages”. I guess I could say that my art-making is my spiritual practice, whether it is done with community (as in theatre and ritual) or alone in my studio.
 
CJMT: What did you learn from working in theatre?
 
Being a visual artist is solitary, and I’ve always wanted art forms that were participatory, collaborative. Masks lead right into theatre, and questions about the traditional uses of masks as well. Masks are such metaphors – you can’t look at a mask, really look, without it suggesting some kind of being that wants to manifest through it. They are vessels for all kinds of stories.
 My colleagues (among them Macha Nightmare, Ann Waters, Mana Youngbear, Diane Darling) and I have developed some wonderful ways of working with masks and community theatre/ritual. In early Greek theatre a performance had three components – the musicians, the narrators or Chorus, and the masked performers, who would pantomime and dance the characters. We’ve often used that approach, particularly with a Theatre in the Round, a Circle.
 Because the masks are dedicated to the Goddess, we’ve brought neo-Pagan sensibilities to the ways we designed our performances. This can include creating a ritual entranceway so the audience enters a magical space, adding audience participatory components to the performances, calling the elemental Quarters and/or casting a Circle in theatrical ways, and concluding all performances with some kind of energy raising activity with the audience. In Wicca that’s called “raising the Cone of Power” and by so doing the blessing or overall intention is “released to do its work”, finishing with “de-vocation”, which is often a great conclusion with humor, or everyone gets up and dances, etc.
 
It’s actually very effective, and can be integrated as good theatre. For example, in “Restoring the Balance” (2004) we concluded with “Spider Woman”. While the music played and the narrators told the tale, “Spider Woman” wove invisible threads. With a rising crescendo of assistants, she wove a web with the entire audience. And indeed, for that moment of breathless intensity everyone in the theatre was literally connected, holding onto a thread “from the Great Web” with everyone else. The “Blessing” was experienced as part of the performance.
CJMT:  What would you like to say to other artists (of any genre)?

“Our job was not to just re-tell the ancient myths,
but to re-invent them for today. Artists are the myth makers.”
Katherine Josten,   The Global Art Project
 I agree entirely with Katherine Josten, who founded the Global Art Project in Tucson, Arizona – we are the myth makers of our time. So, what kind of myths are we disseminating? What are the new stories, how are the old stories still important – or not?
 We have become a global society, with a global crisis. I may sound like I’m preaching, but personally, I don’t want to experience any more art forms that are self-indulgent, nihilistic, violent forms that don’t further evolution into empathy in some way.
I’m not entirely comfortable when people speak of contemporary artists as “shamans” as I have too much respect for the long traditions of indigenous shamans, which have evolved within their particular cultures for thousands of years. But I do know artists can participate in healing and vision, and can find new contexts for creating new forms of what might be called contemporary shamanism.
 
I’d like to quote from a 1989 interview I did with the early performance artist, Rafael Montanez Ortiz. In the 80’s he studied energy healing, as well as working with some native shamans in the U.S. and South America. Raphael was also a great influence for me. In the conversation I recorded and transcribed, we were talking about what an “art of empathy” might be, and he spoke about his studies in native Shamanism:
 
“You feel what you do……….Within the participatory traditions found in (indigenous) art, there is no passive audience. That’s a recent idea, which is part of the compromise, the tears and breaks from art’s original intentions. Ancient art process was a transformative process; it wasn’t a show, it wasn’t entertainment.  We need to see ourselves again as part of a brilliant, shimmering web of life. An artist at some point has to face that issue. Is the art connecting us and others in some way, or is the art disconnecting us and others? I think it is not enough to just realign ourselves personally either – as we evolve, our art should also do that for others, and further happen outside of the abstract. It must be a process that in its form and content joins us with the life force in ourselves, and in others.” (1989)
 
CJMT:  Do you feel that the questions of the spirit influence what you do?
 
I think Spirit influences much of what I do, and I’m not alone in that by any means! There’s a many-layered conversation going on all the time when you open creative channels.
 
Working in the collective process of ritual theatre is always amazing. When you make a strong, vibrant container with performance that is alive and meaningful for the participants, then dreams and synchronicities abound, the “container” of the developing work becomes charged. “If you build it, they will come”.
 
I remember in Joseph Campbell’s “Power of Myth” interviews with Bill Moyers, he spoke about “invisible means of support”. I think we’re supported by quite mysterious sources all the time, and when an artist finds her or his “burning point”, or for that matter a group shares it, doors do seem to open where we did not think they would. 
CJMT:  Would you like to tackle your relationship to the fines artes?
 
Oh, I get a headache when I think about “the art world”! But I did get an MFA, I have been a part of it, and I’m probably unfair in my allergic reaction. It’s just that I think the premise of the “art world”, as it reflects capitalism, is way off from the original functions of art.
 
Of course artists need to be supported by their communities. But when art becomes an “investment” and value is determined as a financial commodity (witness some of those Sotheby Parke Bernet auctions) you enter into a form of “soul loss”. Within this construct there is no acknowledgement of the transformative dimension of art. The conversation is corrupted. People are taught to appreciate a work of art because it is hanging in a museum, or worse, it is “worth millions”.
 
I always cringe inwardly when I hear someone talk about a painting they have in terms of what they paid for it, or what they hope it may be “worth”. The real “worth” should be what pleasure, insight, meaning, and questions they derive from being in the presence of a work of art, from being able to live with it in some way.
 
I had a real revelation in Bali, where they really don’t have an understanding of what we call “being an artist” at all, let alone the rather “macho” myth of the alienated “great artist”. When I lived there, I found that virtually everyone made some kind of art, whether dance, offerings, music, etc., and virtually all of it was “dedicated to the Gods”. It all had a ceremonial/ritual purpose. Art to the Balinese is a way to pray.
They obviously make many things for money, including masks. But the “special masks”, the sacred masks, are kept in the Temples, commissioned and repaired by traditional Brahman mask makers. They are not made available for tourists except as they may be seen in performances of the traditional dramas such as the battle between light and dark represented by the dragon/lion Barong and the witch Rangda; after such uses they are “purified” with holy water before being returned to the Temple.
 
This revelation became an inspiration to create a contemporary, multi-cultural collection of “Temple Masks”.
 
That’s how I conceived of “The Masks of the Goddess” – as special masks dedicated to the Divine Feminine throughout world mythologies. 
 
CJMT:  A Couple of technical questions: 
a)   What is the process you undergo in creating a mask?
 
For the face masks I find a person with a face I like. Then I take a plaster impregnated bandage cast that becomes a plaster positive cast, and then I form the mask over that cast with a thin, flexible leather. The technique is very similar to the old Italian “del Arte” mask technique.
 
b)    How did you find *your* media and materials in the very beginning?
 
I’d like to think the masks found me. But I’m somewhat embarrassed to admit that in the very beginning I started making masks because I was broke. I was a jeweler at the Renaissance Faires and business was bad, so I started making masks hoping they would sell better. They did, and very soon they began to introduce me to a whole new world.
 
CJMT: What do you think the state of visionary art is today? 
 
There are some great visionary artists out there. Film in particular, with special effects technology, is quite astounding. Think about AVATAR – what an incredible feat, to create an entire cosmos in that way. The Life of Pi – astounding.
 
Ritual Theatre is an art form that is literally “visionary”, and I wish it was more widely experienced in mature, effective ways for audiences other than groups that are generally esoteric. As Americans, many feel we’ve lost our rituals by and large, or the ones we have don’t have much energy left in them. People are hungry for potent events that offer rites of passage, mythic enactment and immersion, and shared transpersonal, visionary experiences. It’s really a very ancient human heritage continually renewed.
 
I was thinking of a ritual I experienced with the Earth Spirit Community years ago close to Samhain, All Souls Day. We processed in the twilight through a field with candles into the ritual hall, accompanied by the distant sound of drums.
The final segment of the ritual involved everyone being seated on the cold floor, in a large dark room, and blindfolded. For what seemed like forever we heard distant voices, people brushed by us, hands moved us around, strange music was heard. It was powerfully disorienting, suggestive, and frightening. Then at last our blindfolds were removed, and we found ourselves in a room beautifully illuminated with candles. In the center of the room was a woman in white, surrounded with light, flowers, fruits, water – the Goddess herself, the “return of the light”. Finally, as we left we were greeted by figures with mirrors for faces: we beheld our own reflections.
 
I’ll tell you, you felt that experience! We had truly been “between the worlds”. When we left the ritual and gathered for food and drink, every one of us felt love for each other and joy for being alive.
 
CJMT:  Any final words? 
 
Here’s a quote I love:
 
“Stories are not abstractions from life but how we engage with it. We make stories and those stories make us human. We awaken into stories as we awaken into language, which is there before and after us. The question is not so much “What do I learn from stories” as it is “What stories do I want to live?” Insofar as I’m non-dual with my narratives, that question is just as much, “What stories want to come to life through me?
David R. Loy, “The World is Made of Stories


Coreopsis


Monday, February 11, 2013

The Power of Shamanic Art

 

My friend Denita is an artist, teacher, and psychologist who specializes in helping others access their deep creativity.  Recently she wrote this article for  AY Atelier Art  and Art 4 All People, and gave me permission to reprint her article here.  You can have a look at her  art as well  here.  Thanks Denita!



The Transformative Power of Shamanic Art 

by Denita Benyshek, PhD


Several years ago, I participated in a shamanic drum ceremony given by the anthropologist, Dr. Ruth-Inge Heinze. Her powerful, sustained drumming gave me a vivid, astounding, and meaningful series of visions. The progression of the visions and the symbolic conent of the visions were similar to what I experienced during artistic creativity. As I learned more about the calling, training, initiation, and practices of shamans, I recognized more and more similarities to my own artistic way of being. In shamanism, I found a model of how and why I make art.
Although I am formally trained as an artist (with both a BFA and an MFA in painting), I was so fascinated by the multiple relationships between artists and shamans, including the intent to heal, that I pursued a graduate certificate in the psychology of creativity, a masters degree in marriage and family therapy, and then a doctoral degree in humanistic and transpersonal psychology.

                                         



What is a Shamanic Artist?

My research (Benyshek, 2013a, 2013b, 2013c, 2013d) demonstrated how contemporary artists serve as shamans. Shamanic artists are socially designated spiritual practitioners who voluntarily regulate their attention for the purpose of obtaining information generally unavailable to their community, which is used for the benefit of communities and individual members of those communities.  All of these properties must be fulfilled for an artist to fully qualify as a shaman.

Artists might have some, but not all, of the shamanic properties. These artists can be thought of as having family resemblances to shamans. Like sisters who resemble their mother in certain ways, some artists are similar to, and also different than, shamans.

There are many different ways in which artists fulfill shamanic properties, such as dreams, prayer, ritual, purported psi experiences including divination and relationships with spirits, interaction with the Zeitgeist, genetic influences, neurological functions,  personality types, androgyny, learning to see, mastering craft, a symbolic kind of dismemberment and disintegration that is followed by reintegration and rebirth, relationships with nature, alternate states of consciousness, intent to heal, and much more! If you want additional information about artists and shamans, you may read some of my publications online.

For myself, formally studying artists as shamans confirmed my way of creating art and provided meaningful support. The model of shamanism “understood” how my psi experiences and dreams relate to my artistic creativity, how many ways of being and many realms and different times and memories and insights and immediacies are integrated into one work of art. In my paintings, poems, and performances, I represent a kind of visual/mythic/symbolic stream of consciousness, those seemingly disparate elements that are intimately associated in the imagination. I realized that I could perform my work, whether making art or conducting research, as a spiritual practice for the purpose of providing beauty, knowledge, meaning, and healing.


The Benefits of Art: 
Have You Taken Your Dose of Art Today?

Contemporary artists are most likely to fulfill the shamanic property related to providing benefits to their communities. These benefits are found in statements made by many artists as well as studies on the benefits provided by the arts. Art can provide for psychological, social, physiological, and/or spiritual needs of individuals and communities.
There are many studies showing positive effects result from art engagement.

The visual arts can provide topics for conversation that strengthen relationships and form community (see Wikström, Theorell, and Sandström, 1992). Novels like Black Beauty (Sewell, 1907), Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Stowe, 1852), and The Heroic Slave (Douglass, 1853/1975) contributed to major social changes. Artists today work to create beauty amidst despair, provide spiritual experiences to a materialistic society, build bridges between different ethnicities, help folks form deeper relationships with their own souls, and much more.

An artwork can provide a screen onto which an individual can project internal conflicts or emotions, safely experiencing dissociated emotions in an externalized form, for a limited time, within a beautiful container. Ecstatic catharsis can result, with greater insight resulting, and then these insights can be intergrated into an individual’s sense of self.

Listening to music resulted in surgical patients needing less anesthesia (Ayoub, Rizk, Yaacoub, Gaal, & Kain, 2005), reduced pain, anxiety, depression (Guétin et al., 2011), lowered heart rate and blood pressure in cardiology patients (Bradt, 2009), decreased anxiety from pressures to excel in gifted students (Cadwallader & Campbell, 2007),  positively effected intelligence, mental health, and immunity (Avanzini et al., 2006), and improved fluency, ease of movement, and levels of antibodies, while also decreasing levels of stress hormones in people with Parkinson disease (Enk, 2008).

When surgeons listen to their favorite music during surgery, their surgical skills improve. For two weeks, seniors listened to music from their youth. At the end of that time, they stood straighter, grew in height, were happier, and had improved physical signs of health. Amazing!
At a certain neurological level, the brains of people reading novels respond to stories as though the readers were really, physically part of the story. In the mind of the reader, fiction becomes reality. Is this a form of magic?

During receipt of benefits from spiritual, healing art, art audiences are partly functioning as shamanistic (shamanlike) communities. A contemporary audience might not label individual artists as shamans. Nonetheless, when an art audience receives benefits from a work of art, the work’s artist is implicitly designated as a shaman.

When an individual is engaged with art (as an artist, member of the audience, or collector), art can evoke memories, make new connections, heighten awareness, discharge repressed emotions, halt patterns of repression, lead to self-discovery, create empathy with individuals or cultures, remind society of social ills needing attention, and lead to individual and societal healing.


Audience members utilize their own creative processes during art engagement. The efficacy of shamanic art is quite dependent upon the talents (inborn) and skills (learned and developed) of individual art audience members. I believe that audience members and collectors will benefit even more from art as they learn how to invite, engage, undergo, and accept the transformative benefits offered by art.


The Role of Art Collectors

Art collectors play a critical role in the artist-artwork-audience-society system, providing a type of social support and acceptance to shamanic, healing artists that is unavailable elsewhere. Collectors give themselves opportunities to develop deeper  ongoing relationships with works of art, through repeated encounters and a prolonged, appreciative gaze. The artist has thrown the ball. The collector catches the ball. Both roles are important!

I’ve always found it fascinating that whenever I meet someone who owns my art, we are immediately elated and enjoy a deep sense of connection. It is a special relationship that continues no matter how far apart we are. Collectors purchase art that is personally expressive of who they are. Thus, my collectors and I have some quality, experience, memory, dream, some phenomena in common. Somewhere in the Venn diagram of spirituality, our souls overlap and unite.

Surrounding one’s self with art can strengthen one’s self knowledge and contribute to self actualization. Buying art is an unabashed act of personal strength, expressing individuality and freedom: This is what I like. This is what I choose to live with every day. This is who I am!

                                   



Sources of Inspiration, Doorways to Soul

If I find myself mentally thinking of some tune, I begin whistling or singing that tune, to bring it further out into the physical, sensate world. Moving my body with the tune strengthens the kind and level of integration with self. Sometimes such movements feed ideas for my works of art.  In my studio, I listen to music to establish mood, sustain creative flow, and facilitate entry into light creative trance. Listening to Joni Mitchell and Laura Nyro over and over and over supported me in making art that was profoundly personal, feminine, honest, strong, and caring. I also learned all of their songs and can sing every word of their lyrics, copying the singer’s inflections and expressions. But, when I play piano and sing Joni Mitchell’s songs, or sing Laura Nyro a cappella as a birthday gift for a friend, I offer my own interpretations and the songs are transformed into different shapes and colors.

When I was at the Ucross Art Foundation in Wyoming, I decided to paint spontaneously. Yet, while working on the oil painting, Woman and Man: The Human Animal, I realized I had dreamt about this painting – and my studio at the Ucross Foundation – months before I arrived. In the realm of dreams, I already knew what the art studio looked like.

In the graphite drawing, Prelude to Confluence, multiple sources of inspiration are present: wilderness and culture, male and female, growth and harvest, dream and fulfillment. Shamanically, I am bringing together phenomena considered opposite. In my drawing, the opposites dance in a conjunctio oppositorum, making love and creating beauty.   The large collage, Sonata in Joy Major, was created in response to works made by other artists that were dark, desultory, destructive, aggressive, or victimized. I wanted to make a work of art that was enlivened by color, movement, nature, that would give viewers a sense of joy. The watercolor Thanks Giving is a quiet and mystical celebration of the natural qualities of fecundity, pregnancy, possibility, birth, growth, and fruition. The Sacred Ladder of Light, engraved and collaged glass with embroidery, celebrates the spiritual, creative power of women.

My paintings can be seen as acts of celebration, wisdom, insight, and healing self-expression that are also intended to move and heal viewers, communities, and society, even relationships with nature. Many works, such as the drawing Beginning of a Long Journey, depict the journey of individuation or stages in the hero’s journey.


Invitation

I invite you to slow down and linger, gaze meditatively at my artwork. You can  discover your source of inspiration within the reality of my artwork. Enter through the painted door, cross the collaged threshold into a living realm of beauty, meaning, knowledge, experience, and reality of self, where you can meet your self and embrace your soul.
Many blessings,

Dr. Denita M. Benyshek
January 19, 2013, Snoqualmie Valley,
Washington


Biography

Dr. Denita Benyshek is a professional visionary artist, an internationally recognized researcher on contemporary artists as shamans, and a psychologist who provides psychotherapy and coaching services to artists and creative individuals. The artist-researcher-healer’s education includes a BFA and MFA in painting, training in dance and theatre, study at Pilchuck Glass School, a graduate certificate in the psychology of creativity, an MA in psychology – marriage and family therapy, and a Ph.D. in humanistic and transpersonal psychology.  
Dr. Benyshek’s conference presentations integrate scholarship, visual art, poetry, dance, and theatre. Articles, chapters, and PowerPoint presentations by Dr. Benyshek can be read and downloaded online.  

A recent study (Cardeña, Iribas-Rudin, & Reijman, 2012) entitled “Art and Psi,” published in The Journal of Parapsychology, described some of Dr. Benyshek’s precognitive and remote viewing experiences as part of the discussion about artists and paranormal phenomena.

  © 2013, Denita Benyshek


References:

Avanzini, G., Besta, C., Lopez, L., Litta, E., Koelsch, S., & Majno, M. (Eds.). (2006). The neurosciences and music II: From perception to performance (Vol. II). New York, NY: New York Academy of Sciences.
Ayoub, C. M., Rizk, L. B., Yaacoub, C. I., Gaal, D., & Kain, Z. N. (2005). Music and ambient operating room noise in patients undergoing spinal anesthesia. Anesthesia and analgesia, 5, 1316-1319.
Benyshek, D. (2013a). An archival exploration comparing contemporary artists and shamans. PhD, Saybrook University, San Francisco, CA.
Benyshek, D. (2013b). Art audience as shamanic community: How art meets psychological, social, and spiritual needs (Wang, Trans.). In G. Shuyun, W. Weibo & Q. Fang (Eds.), Modern artists and shamanism (Vol. II of Encyclopedia of shamanism). Beijing: 商務印書館 (The Commercial Press). Retrieved from Art Audience as Shamanic Community: How Art Meets Psychological Needs.
Benyshek, D. (2013c). An Overview of Western Ideas regarding the Artist as Shaman (Wang, Trans.). In G. Shuyun, W. Weibo & Q. Fang (Eds.), Modern artists and shamanism (Vol. II of Encyclopedia of shamanism). Beijing: 商務印書館 (The Commercial Press).
Benyshek, D. (2013d). The artist as shaman. ReVision, a Journal of Consciousness and Transformation, 32(2), 54-60.
Bradt, J. A. (2009). Music for stress and anxiety reduction in coronary heart disease patients Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews (Vol. 2). New York, NY: John Wiley.
Cadwallader, S., & Campbell, J. (2007). Gifted students beat the blues with heavy metal. Coventry, England: University of Warwick.
Cardeña , E., Iribas-Rudin, A., & Reijman, S. (2012). Art and psi. Journal of Parapsychology, 76(1), 3-23.
Douglass, F. H. (1879). The heroic slave. In J. Griffiths (Ed.), Autographs for freedom. Boston, MA: John P. Jewett
Enk, R., Franzke, P., Offermanns, K., Hohenadel, M., & Koelsch, S. (2008). Music and the immune system. Paper presented at the meeting of the 14th World Congress of Psychophysiology – The Olympics of the Brain, St. Petersburg, Russia. Retrieved  from http://pubman.mpdl.mpg.de
Guétin, S., Giniès, P., Siou, D. K., Picot, M. C., Pommié, C., Guldner, E., . . . Touchon, J. (2011). The effects of music intervention in the management of chronic pain: A single-blind, randomized, controlled trial. Clinical Journal of Pain. Retrieved from http://www.prohealth.com/ibs/library
Sewell, A. (1922). Black Beauty: The autobiography of a horse. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Page, & Company.
Stowe, H. B. (1852). Uncle Tom’s cabin or life among the lowly (Vol. I & II). Boston, MA: John P. Jewett & Company.
Wikström, B.-M., Theorell, T., & Sandström, S. (1992). Psychophysiological effects of stimulation with pictures of works of art in old age. International Journal of Psychosomatics, 39(4), 68-75.