What can you do the next time you see rock art? The answer lies within this book by offering a unique way for viewing rock art that is stimulating, thought provoking, and inspires positive creative expression. What is known for sure about these mysterious petroglyphs and pictographs is that they must not be touched in order to assure preservation. Yet, rock art has a mysterious way of touching visitors by provoking feelings and inspiring imagination. Here you will find the ingenious blend of academic learning theory and strategies for reasoning that integrates emotional literacy (EQ), knowledge (IQ), and creativity for inspiring artistic expression to Native American rock art. The author, a speech language pathologist, models the richness of this approach by including her narrative free verse poetic contemplation to black and white rock art photography. In this way, this book is actually a workbook that guides you in a self-learning process for creative writing that blends feelings, emotions, and personal knowledge to create immediate solutions and plans for implementation. The book explains this unique approach as engaged learning through creative integration. Its purpose is to guide adolescents and adults towards experiencing confidence in talent, performance, and self-efficacy. Clear guidelines for integrating creativity lead you step-by-step. The author not only includes clear instructions for the process, she models the approach by sharing many of her insightful reflections to rock art with the purpose of inspiring your own thinking. The inclusion of narrative reflections in poetic cadence of voice demonstrates how blending this integrative approach with black and white images of ancient rock art can offer sustenance to the body, mind, and spirit through its capacity to stimulate feelings, inspire reflection, evoke new impressions, generate innovative questions, and produce practical solutions. Finally, it includes worksheets for you to use for practice with rock art images and worksheets for assessing your progress in integrating creativity within the arts as well academics. It is a provocative book that teaches how to view rock art in a way that highly respects these ancient artists and the settings in which their images reside.
About the Author: A clinical speech language pathologist since 1976, Dorothy Bohntinsky is a pioneer of integrative thinking and expression. Her work is on the leading edge for offering strategies that help people use life's challenges to create new opportunities for personal growth due to her experiences as past program director at a medical center, an ordained interfaith chaplain to the communicatively impaired, being married since 1971, and now a grandparent of three. As an artist and poet, Bohntinsky also reaches beyond traditional academic training due to her journeys through loss. She added grief work to her scope of practice by completing her doctorate of ministry in creation spirituality in San Francisco in 2006. That same year, she was ordained as an interfaith minister after completing a chaplaincy seminary in Berkeley, CA. This gives her a unique depth and breadth in the areas of communication, grieving, spiritual well-being, and personal achievement. Bohntinsky pursued her doctorate and ordination to expand her scope of practice to include helping others evolve through, not just survive, loss. Her dissertation, Transformational Healing through the Integration of Self, includes a groundbreaking process for integrating feelings with knowledge to enhance problem solving. She published her dissertation in 2016 after using it successfully with clients for a decade. Her inspiration for helping others grow through loss comes from experiences during the illness and death of her fourteen year-old daughter in 2000, closely followed by her parents' deaths. After her daughter died from a brief illness, physicians at Children's Hospital in Oakland, CA encouraged her to "share her wisdom." Her 2002 book, The Healing Room: Discovering Joy through the Journal was well received, and she began speaking at Borders Bookstores in the San Francisco Bay Area. In her uniquely personal and creative style, Bohntinsky now expands this approach to help others integrate personal knowledge, emotional literacy, and spirituality by integrating creative writing with Native American rock art. Her new book, Sustenance: Integrating Creativity with Rock Art, teaches self-learning strategies and shares her artistic expressions when engaging the work of ancient artists rather than simply saying not to touch it. Bohntinsky not only promotes rock art appreciation, she models the importance of respecting rock art and its sites while also enhancing critical problem solving and artistic expression.