Symbol of Healing

~ Dear One ~

We do not need to carry the past into the future. We have all experienced a pretty epic shift in our lives.
Loss, grief, despair, dismay, anger, confusion, inequity, illness, uncertainty, or all of the above combined.

Yet there is hope. Let us create a field of hope together.

The hope that is here for you, is in your specific relationship to your own healing journey and practice. Join me to create your own symbol of healing that is intimate, potent, and marks a day of change. Your capacity to step into the present on your own chosen terms is one of the most unique and magical things that humans have access to. Plus you will have a practice you can work with all year.

Experience a ceremony in collaboration with
Intentional Creativity® and somatic science, that creates not only a pattern interruption but an invitation to a framework of potential.

We get to choose our perspective on "what is".

We will be working simply with abstract expressionism and contemporary symbolism ideas with watercolor paper and paint. Supplies are minimal and affordable for first-timers who are working with us for this experience.

Let's move into the future as free as we can. Not bypassing what has happened, but choosing how we show up in the days ahead.

Let's explore the experience we plan to create together. First and foremost the class is in the energy of ceremony to mark the shift from where we were to where we are going. It can be difficult to feel optimistic if you are looking at the news and how our communities are being impacted. Really difficult. But.

Our message here at Musea, Center for Intentional Creativity is that we can choose hope and connection then practice it through our acts of loving creativity. The science backs up what we are doing in every way - neuroscience, gene expression, somatic resonance, coherency, telomere lengthening - all of it.

Creativity is the magic sauce for activating your healing potential.

Around here we have a saying, "healed enough" which means that while there may be more healing to do, we have already done a lot - so let's claim that. In our time together you will create a symbol that is abstract and intuitive that LITERALLY holds the energy release of the past and invites you into the present. Plus I will share the 9 phases of Medicine Painting so that when you walk away from this class, you have the template in your hands.

Imagine the night before starting this class getting your studio set up. Lighting a candle and blessing your canvas with water. When you sleep, you dream about where you are headed in your future. When class begins, we begin with the Trinity Meditation to create coherency and the Red Thread to create connection and then the first layers of the underpainting emerge.

Imagine an image emerging that holds the pain of the past in paint. Painting a layer of hope, allowing a fully intuitive symbolic language to surface. Then coding that onto your painting for one of the coolest things you have ever seen. Truly. You won't believe it. It is so fresh. It has never happened before. It is the artifact of where you have been and the invitation to the future. What have you got to lose? This isn't about new years resolutions and things you want to change about yourself. This is about marking a day of change in symbol, which is created by energy - and making it real.

You are at cause. What will you cause to mark a shift between the past and the future?
The choice is yours. We can't wait for circumstances to improve. The time to choose healing and hope is always right NOW. You will choose your future framework from within the field of hope - the energy of ceremony and community. Your theme will be well in motion with this daylong big Symbol of Healing experience.

One ticket for the whole family. I am confident we are going to have a good time, so come and join us for a Symbol of Healing, designed for you, specifically.

Let's create!

Shiloh Sophia

This event and similar MUSEA day-long events are $295 or more. We are offering $100 savings immediately to help this be an easy YES for you to join us!

Musea Members may use code member for an additional 20% savings.

For PRISMA 2022 Students, this class is included as part of your curriculum and details will be provided.

Interested in joining PRISMA? This event serves as one of the qualifying prerequisites for the upcoming year-long Intentional Creativity Practitioner Certification Training beginning Jan 1, 2022.

Event details will be provided to you upon completion of your registration.

ABOUT SCHOLARSHIPS: If you need an additional scholarship to help this course be possible, reach out to us at support@musea.org. Those who can afford the regular price make it possible for us to offer savings to others in need. We are a community that practices reciprocity. Thank you so much!

WE GUARANTEE OUR EXPERIENCES WILL KNOCK YOUR RED-STRIPED SOCKS OFF! We offer a 100% Money Back Guarantee if you complete your painting and do not experience a transformation in your story. You can view our refund policy here.

Medicine Painting is a practice woven throughout human history that we are seeing a revival in our modern times, as people are called to take healing into their own hands. Approaching painting as a healing journey can be thought of as a blooming branch of neo-shamanism (methods of seeking visions or healing) with roots that go back to healing rituals and ceremonial practices of storytelling, marking, dancing, singing, alchemy, and prayer. All of these can be considered tools for resiliency, connection, and insight during times of great change.

Medicine Painting is an intuitive journey that grants access to our internal guidance system - the inner healer. More often than not, we don't know what we know. With painting specifically, we do have a way to make what our subconscious or unconscious knows, visible. Imagination may be one of the most potent links to recovering from trauma and illness that we have available. Our hope is that our culture can begin to include this medicine painting as a valid pathway to healing, not as a fringe practice, or the domain of the gifted few, but as an integrative approach to self-healing.

Our Intentional Creativity approach to Medicine Painting is painting with an intent to heal and receive insight. Which activates an inherent life force for anyone to spark healing, not just artists, the talented, or those who feel they are creative. Creativity cannot be relegated to those with skill alone. We have been practicing this way of working in our creative lineage since the 1930s. I am thrilled to share that tens of thousands of women around the world work with our Intentional Creativity® methodology to embark on a healing journey through Medicine Painting.

The practice, process, and production of Medicine Painting is unique to every person. In this brief video, you will see some of the paintings I have worked with over the past few years that demonstrate my version of Medicine Painting, and some of the potential beneficial impacts. I have experienced these beneficial impacts personally and have had students share with me the incredible impacts they have experienced from their medicine painting journeys.

I encourage you to get a cup of tea and have 'cafe' with me. Take your time and see what arises for you. Perhaps you will feel called to bring Medicine Painting into your own healing journey.

Shamanism is one of the oldest forms of healing we have record of on earth and has been practiced in every part of the globe, by all tribes, regardless of race or place. They may call their healing work or healers by a different name or take distinct cultural approaches, yet the intention to heal is the common red thread. The essential ingredient of journeying to heal and transform is woven throughout the human existence.

In many cases, there is a specific shaman or group of healers who perform the work on behalf of those who need it. Yet increasingly, the idea of self healing, and the actual power to heal, is in the hands and minds of the individual who chooses to embark on a healing journey.

Here are just a few of the many examples of healing, trauma, and storytelling where symbolized painting or drawing is involved. While there are many ways art is used for healing, our focus is on painting.

The Shaman’s drums for the Saami people; Native American’s rugs woven with messages; traditional Chinese Medicine filled with the illustrations of how the body works; the healing icons of the Blessed Mother in Orthodoxy; paintings from ancient Rome in which the artist was charged to literally create the healing ‘scene’ while someone was healing, or after their death; the retablos, devotional paintings and the ex-votos of folk art in Mexico; the artistic medicine containers and talismans of Africa; the Aboriginal paintings which "show the prescriptions for thousands of years of traditional healing”; the Totem Poles created by the First Nations of the Pacific Northwest to represent and commemorate ancestry, histories, people, or events; Native Hawaiian traditional skin tattoos representing tribal stories and heritage; the paintings in India of countless Gods and Goddesses in positions of victory, pleasure and power; and the medicine buddhas within the Tibetan portable tankas, and Egyptian glyphs rich with teachings on healing.

Our human history is rich in medicine painting and medicine art-making.

There are SO many more references here - perhaps you can think of one from your ancestral lineage? Do a search for your bloodline or land, and put 'healing art' and see what you find.

The common thread that shows up across healing painting traditions the world over is the presence of symbolized elements, the sun, the moon, the stars, the path, and medicinal plants. Also common are scenes of healing in which the change or transmission is taking place. The image is thought to ‘carry’ the vibration of the actual healing for those looking on it, and it is thought that the artist 'charged' up the image for that intention. Perhaps not everyone was practicing painting themselves, yet artists and scribes created it on behalf of those seeking healing - in a sense, on behalf of the health of the collective.

This is the work of Hilma af Klint of Sweden, presented in New York at the Guggenheim, a collection called Paintings for the Temple.

She is considered one of the earliest Abstract Expressionists artists - she received instructions to create a body of work that came 'through her' in 1908. "The pictures were painted directly through me, without any preliminary drawings, and with great force. I had no idea what the paintings were supposed to depict; nevertheless, I worked swiftly and surely, without changing a single brush stroke."

Klint and a group of women would gather regularly to pray, meditate, draw and receive insight.

We know that holistic medicine asks us to see the entire human being as an integrated system - you are likely familiar with the mind, body, spirit language. Ancient practitioners knew this - but somewhere along the way with specialization, we started treating symptoms or parts instead of the whole. When there is something in the body that is hurt, it also exists in the mind, the spirit, and the field of energy around the person. Yes, all living things have fields of energy - it is not a spiritual idea but a scientific fact!

People who work with Intentional Creativity heal emotionally but also physically because of this. We literally add symbolic scars, cellular information, and marks for DNA - often picturing the wound and then creating an image where we ‘heal that wound’. In shamanic traditions, they know full well that to heal, an individual must invite healing in all of their systems. If this does not happen, the cure or medicine will not work as effectively as it could.

In Medicine Painting we have the clear awareness that the WHOLE person is involved regardless of whether they are working to heal something specific in the body, mind, or spirit. We invite all aspects of the being to be present. We work in the field, to heal, as well as in the body. We invite people to be at cause for their own healing by integrating and working in all the different aspects of themselves. We acknowledge that there is a field outside of the body, and a field emanating from the heart (see HeartMath Institute), and we bring conscious awareness and engagement here throughout the medicine painting process.

“I feel Intentional Creativity played a huge role in my healing from cancer....it was my first piece with you that kicked it off....and I feel it allowed me quickly to arise out of a dark place with diagnosis to a positive-minded Knowing to be healed thinking...and opened my mind and spirit to the messages of truth to come through ... healing thought and spirit and thus healing flesh.....my oncologist had no answer for my pathology reports to be so so much lower than when initially diagnosed......I am cancer-free and stay that way........”

~ K. McLane

“Shiloh McCloud is an exquisite artist, a great teacher, and a healer. In four hours she was able to heal 40 years of emotional wounding that kept me from painting. Her process is amazing. She draws out the spirit within and guides you in expressing your innermost knowing. Since studying with her I have painted on a regular basis and much to my surprise my work has been exhibited purchased, understood, and enjoyed by others. The time you spend with Shiloh is worth every minute of it. Do yourself a favor and pick up that paintbrush.”

~ Chief Luisah Teish

"Intentional Creativity has been a game-changer for me! I was blessed to create a physical healing while participating in one of Shiloh Sophia’s retreats. Recently I had been diagnosed with a serious life-threatening intestinal disorder. During my painting process at the retreat, I purposely decided to ‘place’ it into a container I had painted onto my canvas. As I made each brushstroke I declared: “my illness can live in here now” I approached this with a playful energy and no expectations. In order to truly believe in what I was doing, I even went off of my medication! My illness and symptoms have never returned and it’s been over a year ago! Such is the potential power of Intentional Creativity!"

~ Lisa Adriana

"I discovered Intentional Creativity in the darkest period of my life - I had just suffered a huge betrayal from my childhood church and my then-husband had cheated on me. IC gave me the tools I needed to survive that period and to finally pursue my own needs and interests. For the first time, I took responsibility for my own life. Three years after my first class, I am working in a field where I get to change lives...Intentional Creativity transformed my life. I don't say that lightly. Through creativity, I was able to reclaim parts of myself I had forgotten and was able to step back into the role of creator of my own future.”

~ Anonymous

93% experience creating as a relief/break that benefits their overall well being
90% have experienced a shift in recurring emotional pain through creative process
90% said that creativity helped them maintain a healthy outlook
89% said they bring insights into their life discovered while painting
88% said they experienced a shift in their personal story through creating with intention
86% said they have experienced breakthroughs and aha’s during painting
85% said they experienced an expanded sense of self
79% noticed an ease of physical symptoms while creating
77% said they choose painting specifically to work through a chosen breakthrough

A Symbol of Healing

Our Day Together

CEREMONY

designed to move you into the present.

CREATIVITY

focused on healing the past 'enough' to move on.

COMMUNITY

gathering together to create a field of hope.

CLEARING

your energy and your body of what holds you captive.

CONNECTING

internal invisible symbology with visible self-expression.

CELEBRATING

the power you have within you to choose your own framework.

Experience New Meditative Practices

Registration and Class Details

A Symbol of Healing

A daylong Medicine Painting Class and Ceremony where you will experience powerful processes in Coherence Meditation and Medicine Painting practices.