The body is both an image and a maker of images. Through complex sensory relationships, creative practitioners dance, paint, and write in response to the world. "We now know that a highly charged image can create a correlative shift that stimulates changes in the body's chemistry, much as changes in body chemistry can alter moods and stimulate the imagination" (Woodman, 1997, p185). As Woodman points out, Carl Jung's assertion that the boundaries between psyche and soma are permeable, that creative archetypal forces manifest from the unconscious through human behavior, thought, and emotion, elucidates the phenomena of unconscious contents arising through the material world. One means by which archetypal images appear is through creative work.

For this project I used methods of active imagination to dialogue with various parts of the body. In addition to creating a full-sized body map, I approached each body part as a manifestation of psyche and wrote poetry in response. Rather than create poetry according to specific literary forms, I wrote from the perspective of specific body parts, lending each language and the opportunity to speak as an intelligent collections of cells that contained information and memory. What resulted was a painting titled Your Body is a Sacred River and a written collection titled The Body in Four Poems.

Woodman, M. and Dickson, E. (1997). Dancing in the flame: the dark goddess in the transformation of consciousness. Shambala Publishing.