THE ART OF SELF-DISCOVERY.

Art therapy is a very effective way to find out what your unconscious mind is trying to tell you.

Here is a simple but fascinating exercise to begin with.

Take a sheet of paper and draw your ideal home. Draw a dwelling place, a garden, a path and two animals nearby. You can make it as basic as you like, or you can take time to put in loving detail. It is your ideal. It does not matter how limited your artistic talent . Just have fun. You did it as a child and you have not forgotten how.

Then sit quietly and look at what you have drawn. What does it tell you about yourself ? Examine any thought that comes to mind. Don't censor anything. Enjoy the luxury of being as imaginative as you like.

Jenny is a painter. Her picture is quite delightful. In front of a small, round hut is a garden of vegetables and prickly, low-growing bushes. Behind is a lake- shore with palm trees. The hut is primitive, built of woven wattle with a palm-thatched roof. The door, however, is stout wood, firmly closed. The windows are barred. In the foreground are two animals, one on each side, looking strangely heraldic. A cobra rears its hooded head on the left. A scaly ant- eater guards the right. The artist has elaborated beautifully on her tropical paradise home, showing the sunlight on the lake with a golden path of shimmering dashes across the water. She has coloured the snake and armadillo with bright mosaic scales.

It is not until we have thought long and hard that we are able to see beyond the enchantment conjured up by a brilliant painter. But then we start to ask questions.

Why is the house so isolated and so small? There is only room for one person here.

Why are the windows barred and the door so stout?

Why is the garden planted with prickly shrubs?

Why do the two heraldic beasts seem to be on guard on either side of the entrance? Surely this is the home of a person who does not welcome company? What is there to fear?

In contrast, a second drawing, childishly simple, shows a huge, solid square stone house between two bare, gloomy hills. Behind them a black beetle of a tramp steamer pursues a wavering course across an otherwise empty sea.

It is no surprise to meet Alec, the dour, joyless, lonely man who drew it. But with thought we can also appreciate that the house is solid, safe and has the potential to be a comfortable family home, while the battered and ugly ship is setting out doggedly on hazardous seas with a real destination in mind.

Waleed has drawn a tent in an oasis. Around it the sun burns down relentlessly on barren sand. He explains, guilelessly, that he has lived in vast marble palaces with beautiful gardens, fountains and paved walks.

"But for myself, I would want a simple life, with my woman and my God."

The sincere words throw a new light on the sleekly handsome Arab entrepreneur.

What does your picture tell you about where you are starting from on your quest to find yourself?

Suspend your natural scepticism and think about the right brain, stuffed with knowledge it can only communicate to you through symbols such as these.

Carry on the exercise with a new piece of paper and draw a tree. This tree represents you. Again, it can be as simple or as elaborate as you wish. Then look at it and see if you can read the message from your unconscious self.

Keep both drawings where you will be able to see them over the next few weeks. You will learn more and more from them as time goes by.

Marguerite has drawn a tree, a solid, leafy haven for birds, but low down on the trunk is a huge round scar where a second thick branch has been sawn off. Asked to describe the tree as herself, she begins, " I am a tree. I am strong and enduring. I give shelter. My roots go deep."
After a while, she begins to weep as she tells us, "The scar is for my sister. We were very close. She died of leukemia last year."

Talking to ourselves in this way has been dignified with the title, "psychodrama" or "acting out" a situation so that we can see and experience it more fully. Because we can say to ourselves "I am only pretending" we can allow ourselves greater freedom to experience our feelings from a safe distance, as it were, behind a mask. This is also one of the great strengths of cyber-counselling. From the anonymity of cyberspace it is safe and quite permissible to explore being anyone we like!

Relax and imagine yourself fulfilled and succcessful. Then home in on the niggling doubts and discomforts. Talk to yourself about the way you feel. It is best to do this out loud. You may be surprised by some of the reservations that surface. You may even come to appreciate that there was a sound reason why you never really tried to achieve these dreams. You may even gain much more respect for your selves - both the self that has so far "failed" to live up to expectations and the self that constantly "sabotaged" you to prevent you from doing anything so foolish.

Sometimes we can identify obstacles that are preventing us from doing what we want. And sometimes we suddenly realise that we do not want what we thought we wanted - or that the real obstacles are not the ones we had imagined.

There are several different ways of tackling this problem. You can be purely logical, drawing three circles on your paper and writing in one all the things you want. In the second, write all the things that will be better if you get what you want. In the third, write all the things that could make you regret your success.

Then you can, if you wish, use one of the relaxation techniques you have learned to enter the meditative state.

Imagine yourself sitting in the woods or in a beautiful garden. Enjoy the view, the flowers, the scents and sounds of birds and insects and wait quietly until someone or something comes to you. This will be your wiser self. Ask it what you can do to improve your life. Talk about your hopes and dreams. Discuss the various possibilities that are open to you. Ask frankly about the things that worry you and do not dismiss the first answers that come to mind. Do not distract yourself with worries about it all being rather silly and nothing more than imagination. Your right brain IS imagination. It has spent many years observing, recording, amassing and collating information whilst your conscious mind has been too busy to notice. You are simply learning to use a new skill, to access lost files.

It is rather like a computer with a special files protected to prevent you erasing material that is of crucial importance. You will only be able to access and rearrange it when you have achieved a certain level of competence and can be trusted to know its worth.

A butterfly in the Amazon can affect the price of Wall Street shares, and our expectations shape our experiences in a physical way as well as by our emotional attitude. The more we are in tune with our unconscious minds, the more we will recognise external signals that will influence our life-choices.

It really helps to visualise ourselves doing the things we want to do. It encourages us on all levels to repeat mantras and affirmations to ourselves.

Years ago, there was a popular board game called the "Game of Life" in which you chose what proportion of fame, money, success or love you desired and then attempted to reach your stated objective. It was soon apparent that the easiest objectives to realise were those with a high proportion of love and a low proportion of fame or money. It did not take long to learn to be a consistent winner, although it might be at the expense of subduing your real ambitions in favour of what was relatively easy to achieve. That made it quite a socially manipulative activity. But the point was that you had to know what was possible and how to achieve it, and you had to make a clear statement of intent and then go for it.

You could choose a relatively safe but unambitious route, or you could gamble more excitingly on something harder to obtain. You made your own choice and then got on with it. Depending on your personality, motivation and strategy, it could be a thrilling game or positively a bore.

Just as if you were playing that game, try on a few variations of ambition, just for fun. Which feels best for you? Safety? Or thrills and spills? Care and caution? Or devil-may-care recklessness? How near is this to your usual strategy for living?

To begin in a small way, try a meditation about an ideal room. Picture yourself at ease in a room of your own, where every single item is there because it gives you pleasure. You can gradually build up this place in your imagination as a haven to which you can return to unwind in safety, to talk to your various expert selves and to grow and learn. Gradually, over a period of years, you will find that you are changing your real surroundings to match those of your ideal retreat and, one day, you will realise with astonishment that you do not need the retreat any longer, because reality is actually better now than that imaginary place.

In just the same way you can imagine changing other parts of your life - your health, your appearance, your job, your relationships. All will evolve together until you no longer need what you thought you wanted at the beginning - because what you have now is even more satisfying.

The process is a combination of a clear picture of where you want to be and a constant awareness of your feelings, satisfactions and doubts. This feedback enables you to update and refine your plan as you go along. So you are not stuck with something you have outgrown, but are constantly learning, progressing, reviewing and fine-tuning your guidance system.