Higher Powers are meant to keep us sober, to give us direction, to hold us and help us cast our burdens off. Higher Powers are for finding solace and peace when faced with the more arduous sides of life.
Turning your understanding of your Higher Power into a visual art piece is a powerfully anchoring activity, that will make your relationship with the divine more real, practical, and embodied. The following Art Therapy Exercise is intended for that purpose.
May the following Art Therapy Exercise for Connecting with a Higher Power be helpful for you on your path to a loving relationship with a truly helpful Higher Power!
Make a Higher Power Niche
A niche is sort of like an altar. It’s a place where you can display an image of your Higher Power, and place offerings such as flowers, messages on scraps of paper, or little presents. In this exercise you make your own niche (small altar in a box) to honor your personal understanding of your own Higher Power.
Materials you will need:
- An open-faced box. The containers that blueberries & other fruit come in, tofu containers, and pasta boxes all make good niche boxes, as do small wooden crates if you can find one. The box will eventually be affixed to a wall, with the open side facing outwards so that the viewer looks in at it.
- Acrylic Paint (Poster Paint), markers, paint pens, sharpies – whatever you have on hand
- Scissors for cutting collage images from magazines
- Modge podge or glue
- Paintbrushes for using the paint and glue
- Magazines you will cut up, filled with images of things that seem beautiful to you. Gardening, science, nature, art and travel magazines are good for this.
- Thumbtacks for pinning your niche to the wall
Step One: The Box
Choose an open-faced box that feels like it is a size you can relate to comfortably.
Step Two: Base Coat
Give your box a base coat of paint in a color that makes you feel relaxed and safe.
Step Three: Select Images
While the base coat is drying, cut out images you will use in your collage portrait of your Higher Power. Give yourself a time box of at least 20 minutes for collecting images, going through and just choosing anything, intuitively, that feels soothing, powerful, or pretty. Pictures of animals, plants and flowers, landscapes, gems, or skies are typically helpful for summoning the feeling of a Higher Power, but anything goes.
Step Four: Make a Silhouette of Your Higher Power
On the side of the box you will see when you look in at your niche, draw an outline that will be the outer containing line of your collage images. This is the main image of the box as you will look into the niche once it’s hung on a wall. In this area, draw the outline of a shape that makes you feel safe and contained. Circles are good for this, as are ovals, geometric and symmetrical forms, and faces, but do whatever feels right.
Step Five: Collage
Using glue and a paintbrush, begin collaging and filling in the silhouette of your Higher Power with the magazine images you collected. In the end it will appear that your Higher Power is filled up with these things. For example, my Higher Power Niche shows a Higher Power that’s part lioness, part ocean, part pine forest. Follow your own intuitive sense to create an image that summons up the inner feeling of your Higher Power. Glue the images down flat and put an extra layer of glue or modge podge over the images to help affix. If desired, you can also paint or draw on top of these images now, adding painterly aspects.
Step Six: Use Your Niche
Once your niche is dry, use the tacks to pin it on the wall. You can now start surrendering and dedicating topics to your Higher Power. Write your topics down on small pieces of paper and place the small papers inside the niche at the base of the image of your Higher Power. You may share something you’re worried about or some other burden you’re ready to cast off. Alternatively, you can write what you’re grateful for or name aspects of yourself you’re ready to consecrate to your spiritual path. By placing these little communications in the niche, you are symbolically letting yourself (and your Higher Power) know that you are willing to build relationship, to let go of the bindings of your life and to be supported at a greater and more powerful level by that which is truly on your side.