Women's wellbeing through creative arts and spiritual practice : reclaiming a space for the emergence of self within community

Abstract

Patriarchal systems have cast women's art and spiritual practices as ordinary, homebased practices as trivial and time spent on exploring inner life 'narcissist'. Embodied knowing, intuitive senses and the emotional are not highly valued. Instead, neoliberal systems reify profit over people. Inbuilt assumptions that women will provide the caring labour in society casts women as the keeper of hearth and home so that the system can continue to function efficiently. Women who wish to explore their own deeper questions of life or their creative and spiritual selves are left facing a conundrum of how to gain meaning and empowerment when they face structural realities of lower value placed on women's work and embodied wisdom. Any desire to acknowledge their embodied existence must be negotiated in light of the pressures of dominant ideals associated with women and work in a neoliberal global society. In this research, I have sought to explore how and why women engaged in creative and spiritual practices to gain meaning and empowerment in their lives. I explore questions of why women's creative practices have been considered less than, but move on from this to ask: How do women engaged in their creative practice within their own communities? and How does this influence their sense of wellbeing? The research questions how women might live in this world to thrive and flourish without feeling soulless, cut off from cultural traditions, identities and belonging or use self-nurturing practices such as sharing their stories, healing practices and women's wisdom as a storehouse of empowerment. The research took place at The Women's Room community arts group in the Lower Blue Mountains in New South Wales, Australia. This group was made up of women who attended groups and workshops, as well as smaller community arts groups that would come together at an annual arts festival to celebrate their artworks and share their experiences. I was not a bystander in this research but was deeply embedded in the organisation which I had founded in 2004; although by the time I came to pursue this research in 2009 the group was managed by an elected committee. My perspective as a researcher was complicated because my multiple roles often bled into each other, such as friend, President, artist, administrator, activist, wife, mother and researcher. The research methodology necessitated a critical feminist standpoint theory that acknowledged the points of view from the women and from my own decentring and centring in various roles. However, as the women were intently interested in exploring their relationships with self, community and nature, I also used arts-based and ecofeminist perspectives to unpack how these informed the research. As my role was participant observer, I needed to account for the power of 'the seeing eye' of the researcher and countered this with my own autoethnographic reflections.

Date of Award	2014
Original language	English