Student Stories

Healing Icons® reveals the profound role the visual arts play in uncovering active and latent trauma. Our method activates the healing process enabling participants to move forward, empowering them with new coping strategies.

Meet Helen

“My first diagnosis was breast, ten years later it was ovarian. So I have entered into Healing Icons® twice and each time I have healed in a different manner.”

Meet Selena

“Breast cancer is only a part of my life. I strive to move forward, grow, and pass through doors previously thought closed. Healing Icons® has helped me do this.”

Meet Tara

I was sick for several years before I heard the words, you have stage four ovarian cancer. Doctors diagnosed me with everything from hypothyroid to fibromyalgia, but no one could tell me why I was in so much constant excruciating pain. My journey has been long and the pain and sickness I have lived with have caused my world constrict, becoming smaller, more isolated.

Being in treatment two to three times a week is difficult and leaves me feeling completely drained, lifeless. Healing Icons has given me a focus beyond the ticking clock that most of my doctors offer me. I am not my diagnosis, and Healing Icons has helped me realize that. Conventional medicine doesn’t offer cancer patients a way to deal with the emotional trauma that comes with cancer.

Here, we are able to creatively clarify our feelings and that gives us a basis, a foundation for rebuilding our lives. When I am in class I feel really alive and I forget about the pain as I become totally immersed in each moment of the creative process. This amazing program offers healing that is well beyond the scope of any other type of support group. The experience is inspiring.