There’s a woman who comes to the small free art class I voluntarily teach on Saturday afternoons whose entire being lights up when she talks about gardens.  Not any old kind of garden, but rather truly beautiful ones, hidden ones, secret ones, places where people could come to find peace and beauty and untroubled sanctuary.

This same woman always thinks about gates and doorways at the same time.  The images are connected.  These gates are not ordinary, either.  Down here in the southwest we perhaps have more images in our minds about walled courtyards and gates that are sealed off from public view by all manner of creative and appealing gates.  Some have small windows in them up high where adults can peer through to see into the secret places.

This woman has never read the children’s story or seen the movie of ‘The Secret Garden,’ though I am recommending it to her as a homework assignment to discover this story.  While in art therapy graduate school we learned much about how the psyche of humanity communicates to us in and through image.  Neuroscientists are now beginning to suspect that our brains process all incoming information into memory storage in a poetic, metaphoric fashion.  All this information is stored in our limbic, emotion, right brain and is only available to our left ‘logical’ brain when we talk about something very specific that is in some way connected to our metaphoric memories.

In the case of secret gardens and private sealed off worlds, I think about the ‘bigger picture’ of the history of two things in our collective minds:  mazes and labyrinths.  Mazes are often about what amazes us.  This might be something that we have puzzled about and are at the edge of understanding but not quite there yet.  What kinds of things amaze us?  What things capture our imaginations and captivate our thoughts?  Things that we wonder about in the world.  Wonder is an amazing mental operation of its own, and something that I as a child abused from birth could not do.  I had no points of comparison so there was no wonder in my young life.

I think about Pelzer’s book, “A Child called It,” and about how he fought back against his abuse even in his mind.  One has to have some means to compare one’s own experience in their private world with what one knows others experience in the public world.  If a child is abused from birth and there is no reprieve, no opportunity to spend lengths of time in interaction with a sane caregiver, then that infant’s brain will simply accept as reality all that it has experienced and had built into its brain about what the world is like.  We never question a certain reality unless our minds have the freedom to reach toward and devour the possibility that there are worlds ‘out there’ that are different.

Along with this student’s delight in imagining secret gardens comes the collective imaginal idea of labyrinths.  If you do a Google search for “labyrinth minotaur” you will bring yourself face to face with a world of not only delightful possibilities, but also bring yourself to a place that presents a collective image of the monster within us.  At the center of the labyrinth our imagination holds there an image of the minotaur, a horrible creature that both scares us nearly to death and one that is also our strongest ally and protector.

Someone mentioned to me the other day that as I clarify and focus my blog and my thoughts about who I am really writing for, I will find that my section, + Art and Creativity, is out of place and does not belong on my site.  The brain of our species is the most complex and creative ‘object’ in existence on our planet.  I believe that to live our lives to the fullest we need to exercise our connection between the two hemispheres of our brain so that we know more and more about who we are and how we are in the world.

Through artistic exploration we allow the more hidden (in our American culture) aspects of ourselves access into our lives.  Most of us keep our own poetry, our own metaphor perspectives on our lives, sealed and walled off from the world in our internal secret gardens and labyrinths.  When we allow our images to come forth, even through the spoken word, we can honor ourselves by encouraging not only further and continued access, but also exploration of meaning for ourselves.

If a person has these particular hidden, secret garden and maze-labyrinth images popping around where they can actually recognize them consciously, then a further pursuit into the images can connect to all sorts of fascinating wisdom.

As the world acclaimed astrologer, Zane,’ (SEE: http://www.zanestein.com/CentaureanAstrology.htm) describes in relation to the asteroid Nessus, we all have a monster inside of ourselves that we usually cannot face.  In Carl Jung’s thinking, this monster lies sealed off in our personal shadow, a place that he says we put all that we are afraid of about ourselves — both the best of us and the worst of us.  If a student begins to allude through their art exploration to something like mazes and labyrinths, it becomes a fascinating study to encourage that student to pursue the images until they can present into consciousness the reality of whatever ‘mythological’ base they are connecting to.

Through the infant brain development and growth years a person learns what to do with the ‘devil and the angel’ within themselves.  Normally we make adjustments so that our mind knows (coming from the operation of our brain) how to live in a world of extremes.  An infant’s brain knows at a very early age, usually beginning clearly by the third month of life, who is safe to trust and who is not.  If an infant is growing in a malevolent world this distinction obviously becomes impossible to make in a useful and healthy way.

A growing child’s brain has to learn how to sequence and prioritize information — both what is coming in from the outside and what is accumulating in ever increasingly complex formats on their inside.  If an infant and then later a young child is being raised in an environment of conflict, torture, and terrorism, it is obvious that these processes are either aborted or completed in unhealthy and inadequate ways.

But we need to know that ALL of us have a Jungian shadow, and all of us have a secret garden and a secret labyrinth whose center contains a monster that we believe is us.  This monster has power — power to destroy and power to protect.  If our brains were allowed to at least develop a minimal pathway through our cortex that allows us to use our higher cortical thinking abilities, we do not allow the monster to wreck havoc in our own or anybody else’s life.  But because our relationship to these ‘states’ was set in motion from birth, we must work as adults to access all the information that we know about these things and bring them into consciousness as we learn who, in fact, we are, who we fear we are, who we fear we could become, who we hope we could become.

I don’t know what my student holds behind the secret door in her being.  If she chooses to explore through the images in art work what she knows ‘in there’ we will all be able to share in her process.  If a young child is being raised by monsters, the boundaries between one’s own monster/protector and the monster/protector of its caregivers will be all mixed together in some kind of very nasty and unpalatable soup.  But we can never just throw the whole pot out and start over.  We have to work with what we were given beginning at the time of our birth.

We have not only the ability to safely and wisely do this work, but we have the obligation and right to do it.  Safely is the key word here.  It is because we were not SAFE from birth that we have the nasty soup in the first place.  But even if we were safe, as social beings in a social world we all made distinctions between what was acceptable about us and what wasn’t.  Most of us never go back as adults and take a good, creative look behind the secret doorways.  We need to, because what motivates us and creates our highest priorities lies in there — whether we know it or not, or even WANT to know it or not.