ON THE EDGE OF CHAOS: Finding Flow & Resilience through Creativity & the Arts
Dates: April 7, 2013
Location: Los Angeles, California
Sunday April 7, 10 am-5 pm
UCLA Schoenberg Hall
Focusing on enhancing strengths, rather than reducing deficits, creativity and the arts are uniquely able to facilitate flow, mind-body wellness, and transformation. With the growing cost of healthcare and increasing demand for preventative, patient-centered, and chronic care, it is important for future healthcare professionals and artists to be aware of effective and creative positive psychological approaches for both healing and wellness.
Science: Leading experts present and discuss cutting-edge research on flow, creativity, stress, and self-regulation (including psychology, neurobiology, physiological functions, and emotional processes).
Performance: The CSUN dance and opera performances will portray key themes of social justice, equity and diversity related topics (autism, political detainees, chronic illness and loss). During the performance a dancer will wear a body suit that records her physiological responses to demonstrate, in real time, dissociation and flow in performing artists.
Application: Scientific researchers will present on the social-emotional and cognitive development of autism, mental illness, and trauma as well as conventional clinical interventions; creative arts therapists will discuss how they uniquely apply the creative arts to serve these populations.
Experience: Experiential breakout creative arts therapy workshops will give the conference participants active opportunities to engage, first hand, in two creative arts therapy workshops of their choice (art therapy, dance and music therapy, poetry therapy, and drama therapy).
Keynote Presenter – Dr. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
Martin Seligman, former president of the American Psychological Association, described Csikszentmihalyi as the world’s leading researcher on positive psychology. He is noted for his work in the study of happiness and creativity, but is best known as the architect of the notion of flow and for his years of research and writing on the topic. According to Csikszentmihalyi, people are most fulfilled when they are in a state of flow, the creative moment when a person is “completely involved in an activity for its own sake. The ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, movement, and thought follows inevitably from the previous one, like playing jazz. Your whole being is involved, and you’re using your skills to the utmost.”