Personal Background

I first became interested in connections between creativity, spirituality, and mental health while participating in a National Endowment for the Humanities summer seminar at Yale University in the summer of 1999. My professor, Dr. Mary Jacobus, included a text by psychoanalyst Marion Milner {On Not Being Able to Paint, 1950) among the course readings. Milner investigates the connections between her own unconscious processes, painting, and a body-oriented mysticism which she discusses in more detail in other writings. Her book peaked my interest, and I began to investigate the connection further.

Personally, creativity and religion overlapped in my childhood. Thanks to my grandmother, who inherited several violins from her late husband, I took violin lessons as a youth. I also sang in the church choir, took sculpture and other art classes, and later studied organ. As a girl I went to a Presbyterian church with my mother on a regular basis. Later I enrolled in seminary and went on to further graduate studies in religion.

When I was four years old I suffered third degree burns in a grill fire explosion, necessitating several operations. I spoke to virtually no one about the accident until