Ten Minute Intuitive Collage

I created this ten-minute collage practice when I was working full-time as an art facilitator in healthcare. Feeling emotionally overwhelmed. I did not have much time to tend to my inner life. And I know, after years of teaching this practice, that artists and non-artists alike can find surprising emotional freedom of expression through this simple daily creative practice.

Many of us accumulate unprocessed emotions to function properly in our daily lives. In the process of growing up, you likely did not learn how to properly process your emotions in the first place, and unknowingly, you could be accumulating heavier emotions with each passing year.

My creativity has always provided a way for me to see, accept and visually process all parts of myself. For many years, I have personally used the practice of spontaneous self-expression to help me honour what I did not know how to express when I was growing up, and also to process the unexpressed emotions that accumulate in busy adult life. 

Symbol Release

For most of my teenage and early adult years, I relied on my private creative journals to help me feel better emotionally. Unknowingly, I was implementing the process of what psychologist Carl Jung would refer to as "symbol release."

While I did not understand the emotions I was releasing through my creativity, I was nonetheless allowing a daily emotional clearing of my body and unconscious mind. I knew that if I was spontaneously creative each day, I would feel clearer, lighter, and freer.

This practice was developed during a period in my life when I could no longer accommodate my extensive expressive art practices within my daily life. When I began working full-time, I found that by the end of my working week, I would feel weighed down by emotional accumulation. So I began creating a ten-minute "morning collage" with my tea very early each morning, before getting myself off to work.

An Easy Creative Practice

To make your experience almost effortless, I invite you to have a stack of old magazines, books, and colourful, patterned papers on hand, so you can create a ten-minute collage in the morning before starting your day.

Even if you plan to be home for the day, make yourself a cup of tea or coffee first thing in the morning, and create your collage immediately after waking up, so you can be as closely connected to your unconscious mind as possible. 

Two or three torn images, spontaneously chosen, a word, or a phrase, or even two phrases, is all that is required for your collage to reveal something new. I prefer to work with imagery, but if you want to play with coloured papers in spontaneous, abstract ways, do.