Painting Your Breath: A New Approach to Processing Your Body’s Memories and Feelings
The emotional dis-regulation crisis that spans all ages, abilities, orientations, and ethnicities is great right now. We rely almost entirely on our brains for meaning-making, but the amount of words we know can limit how we process highly complex life experiences. Painting Your Breath slows the brain’s normal way of meaning-making and lets the body take the lead instead. My paintings and therapist co-lead workshops help participants learn how art can help them process complex feelings by listening and following our breath and nervous system. This workshop is an aid to the discovery of your body’s own un-spoken language through visual art. My goal is to establish a new, easily-accessible self-regulatory tool through art for personal and community use in, and especially, outside the walls of mental health establishments.
Rachel Grace Borntrager (she/her/hers) is a mixed media fine art painter. Rachel uses line and color in representative form based off a technique she is developing to externally map the body’s nervous system and breath. Her technique honors complex emotions and the body’s internalized, but deeply felt, language. Her hope is to use fine art to help others discover their body’s specific code for processing life, both the good and the hard. She makes art for therapists in the Fayetteville community, non-profits, charities, and churches. Rachel received her BA in Studio Art from College of the Ozarks, and professionally for 3 years now. Rachel grew up in Missouri, but has been a resident of Fayetteville, Arkansas for the last 12 years.