How Art Heals-WEB

59 25. Grace Gee WWW.GRACEGEEART.COM COLORADO, USA “I’ve lived most of my life ruled by what I thought I should be doing to be a good girl, a good sister, a good daughter, a good wife, a good mother, or a good friend. If ever there was a conf lict between my own desires and what I thought I should do, the ‘should’ won. “As I saw how much this robbed me of my freedom and my life, and how pervasive and insidious it was, I was simultaneously working to shed the ‘should’ and learn to honor myself and choose me . It wasn’t hard to access the deep layers of feelings about this while working on Coat of Shoulds , a book based on Rosemary Wahtola Trommer’s poem ‘Yet Another Layer.’” Hand-stitching is a meditative process, and, over an extended period of time, it allowed me to contemplate and integrate the new message with each stitch. I realized that when I’m not ruled by “should,” a whole world of possibility opens up and I see and feel wonderment. I created this spool book not only for my own healing, but also to share the power of this message with others. “While in the process of dissolving my twenty-two-year marriage, I began uncovering and letting go of old patterns and beliefs about relationships. I had been operating out of the paradigm that marriage is a transactional agreement and that I had to earn love, instead of it being gifted freely and generously.