Nineteenth International Conference on the Arts in Society

Abstract

In this paper, I introduce the workshop designed as an interdisciplinary approach to address the complexity of participants’ lives. Participants examine their lives by taking insights from various relevant disciplines such as linguistics, art, psychology, theory of emotions, values, and philosophy. Then, they integrate these insights into complex and coherent images of themselves and their lives. The workshop contains six meetings with two-week breaks between them. During meetings, participants become the actors when they tell or read their own stories and the receivers and interpreters when hear the stories of others. These activities allow them to build a connection between themselves by identifying parallels of their situations, conditions, and experiences. During two-week breaks, participants are encouraged to reflect on the deep level of experiences, such as their feelings, thoughts, memories, beliefs, choices, decisions, spirituality, and creativity, and then write about these experiences. Participants are asked to describe six essential life events to understand their psychological growth and connect them to the whole life story. The various forms of personal writing, such as journal keeping, diary entries, or non—fiction short stories, have been discussed. The workshop’s purpose is to encourage participants to open themselves to their own experiences, evoke an enjoyment of telling their own stories, see the beauty and uniqueness of their lives, and increase a connection between people and build a community.