Hi, it's Ashera.

Welcome to Radio Headspace and to Thursday.

I hope you've been having a great week.

Today I'm going to talk about how art can lead to self-discovery and how sometimes the

biggest revelations can happen when we don't follow the rules.

Art or let's just call it creativity is an amazing tool for self-discovery because you're

really giving yourself over to a process and you don't really know what's going to happen.

As an example, one project that's really close to my heart is the Hopeful Monsters Project,

which I started doing a few years ago right before the pandemic with an artist, Linus

Lancasteur and Healdsburg, at the Junior High and High School there, the public schools.

For me, this project was a way that kids could start to look at their own challenges and

then start to come to terms with them or befriend them in some way.

We made a list or did some writing about if I were a monster, what would make me so,

what would motivate me, how would I act and why.

From there, the writing went into a design process they actually created their own monster,

a hopeful monster that represented themselves.

Those were created out of felt and fabric.

They sewed eyes on and some of them had sutures and they were very textured and really, really

beautiful and had so much meaning imbued into them.

At the end of the Hopeful Monsters Project, kids would write an artist statement and one

student who, I believe was in sixth grade at the time, wrote,

when you think of a monster, you think of a mindless evil being who wants to kill you.

...