Poetry To Relieve Pain
There are some moments in life when we feel like our heart is broken into a thousand pieces, our thinking fragmented, and our body exhausted. We find it difficult to open our eyes, and we plunge into deep suffering. We feel that the storm is going to stay at home.
In those moments we can resort to poetry, because thanks to it we can alleviate part of that pain. Join us and travel with us the wonderful link between art and health, discover how poetry can help unload part of the suffering that we carry in our emotional backpack.
Art and health
Art is a powerful vehicle that functions both as a support and as a medium to express conscious and unconscious matters. Through different art forms, we can show how we feel, what we think, and even how we are. This makes it easier for us to let the flow and reflect on ourselves.
Art is used in different fields of health to relieve pain. Through music, painting, photography, theater… Each one of us does better with an art form, but it can serve us all. For example, it makes people with terminal cancer feel better to see things with humor; therefore, in some hospitals they practice clownterapia . People with Alzheimer’s are stimulated with smells to release their emotions; also, through art therapy, many cope with their traumas.
This is not to say that art helps us to completely stop feeling pain. But let’s remember that health is an integral matter, which also has to do with the mental and social. Being interconnected, the sensation of pain can decrease.
Poetry to ease the pain
According to the Royal Academy of the Spanish Language, poetry is the ‘manifestation of beauty or aesthetic feeling by means of the word, in verse or in prose’. Words communicate emotions, thoughts, and actions. Through them we can reach a state of calm. How?
Poems are full of symbols, stories, and expressions that can touch our soul. They are so powerful that they become in tune with the depths of our being. Thus, we can come to feel that someone shares what is happening to us.
It is as if they will capture the moment. What we do not even know how to put into words, poetry narrates so clearly that it seems that they know our most intimate secrets.
Psychotherapy, school and community
Poetry as therapy
Poetry has been used for therapeutic purposes throughout human history. For example, Aristotle came to discuss catharsis through poetry for an emotional cure and, in the early 19th century, it was used at the psychiatric level as a reading recommendation for the mentally ill, thanks to Benjamin Rush.
The author of the poetry therapy was Eli Griefer, a poet who volunteered at Creedmor State Hospital in New York, led by psychiatrist Jack J. Leedy. They wrote the principles of this type of therapy and suggested the use of poetry in the treatment of emotional disorders.
In 1981, the National Poetry Therapy Association was established, which holds conferences around the United States each year. In recent years, more and more books on poetry and therapy appear, some of the most famous in which poetry has been recognized as a medium for psychotherapy are: “The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics”.
Now, to delve into recent scientific research, you can explore the Journal of Poetry Therapy .
Poetry allows us to express ourselves from a safe space and, little by little, we open up. Through metaphors it helps us to transcend the meanings of the word and connect from the depths, as well as to visualize what we feel, think and act.
Now, composing it also eases the pain. On the one hand, it allows us to sublimate the anguish and, on the other, to delve into symbols, words and images that help us to generate content that through everyday language we do not know how to put into words.
Poetry in education and in the community
Poetry can serve as an educational resource to enhance emotional intelligence in the classroom. A subject quite researched, but little applied in the academic field as well as as necessary as any other subject.
On the other hand, it promotes creative expression that helps self-knowledge, to express parts of our shadow, to be compassionate, to generate empathy, to create content with depth, to identify ourselves, to relieve tension and to turn suffering into learning, among other matters. .
When working with communities, poetry can also be used, since it can link the emotions, thoughts and actions of the subjects that compose it; in addition, it promotes creation based on one’s roots, traditions and beliefs.
Communities can be deepened through collective poems that unify and help transcend the community. In addition, they bring the population closer together by rescuing the value of ancestral metaphors in which stories loaded with learning are told.
In short, poetry brings us closer to our darkest places and helps us build a path through words to shed light on a new horizon. Soothe the soul through the expression of our shadows. A form of excavation and shine that soothes pain and helps us transform it, transcending.
