Where the Magic Happens: Art, Wellbeing, and Ancient Patterns of Being Alive
Life’s journey is beautiful, complex, and impossible to reduce. Yet we do just that, often for convenience, when we reduce our everyday experiences into words that often rely on binary ways of feeling and being. How did your day go? Did you feel happy or sad? Was work productive or boring? Did you feel healthy or sick? In fact, some days we do feel more or less alive—not just healthy, but somehow more ourselves, or closer to something inside of us that speaks to wellbeing.
When we think about being well, we often picture the absence of illness or the presence of good health. But wellbeing runs so much deeper than that. Wellbeing is more about connection: The emotions and memories in our body that connect us to life’s primordial source of vitality. This connection allows us to resource the same vital power in a physical body that creates galaxies and drives species forward across millennia.
Sometimes we lose touch with this vitality. Life can feel overwhelming and confusing. Unprocessed and unresolved emotions pile up. These blocks inhibit the vital dance inside our atoms, cells, body, mind and relationships. They can also manifest as emotional or physical disease, but on a deeper level these blocks always signify a reduced capacity to connect with our innate vital essence.
Often our bodies carry big blocks from unfinished formative experiences, from chronic patterns inherited from family, or from the stories our culture tells us about who and what we should or shouldn't be. Dissolving blocks, regaining connection, and remembering our own authentic, vital dance can feel like the work of a lifetime. It might mean facing intergenerational patterns of trauma or loss that have no concrete basis in our own memories and behaviors.
Fortunately, wellbeing is also about getting sick, facing challenges, and moving through heavy emotions. It's not about choosing health over sickness or happiness over sadness. When we're rooted in genuine wellbeing, our bodies and minds become incredibly adaptive, making every experience a vital opportunity. Wellbeing, in fact, is a state of consciousness described by an eagerness to encounter the present moment. It shows us that everything is here to help, to show us how to renew ourselves, to find the next great adventure...
Wellbeing is also an art. It mirrors the process an artist takes to dig deep for inspiration, connect with emotions, and express creative energies. Like wellbeing, art helps to confront, perceive, and dissolve vital blocks. Both art and wellbeing are about tapping into the source of creativity and life-affirming creative energies. They are processes filled with creative works but also creative being. When the source of creativity is tapped, the body and mind are also rejuvenated and realigned in the present moment.
In a philosophical way, art is about life expressing its own beauty, coherence, and meaning. It is both deeply personal and universally human. When a piece of music moves us to tears, or a painting stops us in our tracks, or words on a page make us feel immersed in an impossible world—art makes us vulnerable, allowing something deep and fundamental to resurface. Our ordinary inhibitions are suspended, allowing us to sense something vital emerging.
Art and wellbeing are not formulaic. We can follow all the right steps: perform perfectly, exercise religiously, study technique obsessively… and still miss the point. The powerful forces living inside of us that art and wellbeing depend upon can sometimes seem to hide from us. In reality, they are speaking to us all the time. We may have simply forgotten how to speak their language. To find our power again, we need to relearn the raw language of our deepest and most vulnerable authenticity. The power of wellbeing and art do not speak with words but in the mother tongue of primordial patterns of being alive.
When we speak or listen to this language it brings us into deep relationship with ourselves, both in abstract and immediate ways. This is the language of archetypes. They are the patterns of relationships, movements, and changes that run through all of life: the cycles of seasons, the dance between birth and death, the hero's quest, the healer's touch, the creator's vision.
Archetypes live in our dreams and in our waking lives too. They're the reservoirs that feed our deepest knowing, determining how we perceive, feel, remember, and choose. When artists talk about "the muse" or people describe being "in flow," they're touching these archetypal energies and, in the process, revitalizing themselves.
Our connection to these deep patterns, or our disconnection from them, affects everything. It's why one artist can't find inspiration while another creates effortlessly. It's why one person radiates wellness while another struggles despite doing everything "right." Our connection to the archetypal world is what the vital dance of wellness is all about. The vital dance is the first archetypal movement, made both by newly born stars and the wriggling limbs and cries of babies.
Learning how to connect to the archetype world more directly is where the magic happens: a powerful intersection of wellbeing, art, and ancient patterns of being alive. It's magical because it works like a technology, giving us access to the source of primordial vitality without inhibitions, distortions, or blocks. Ordinarily, accessing this source demands a genuine ability to truly know ourselves and to live fully and consciously in the present moment. A worthy but certainly demanding requirement!
However, using knowledge of wellbeing, art, and archetypes gives us a unique possibility. We can soften, and even temporarily overcome, the strict requirement needed to touch archetypal power. Throughout history, cultures have developed practices to help people access their archetypal source in this way. In ancient times, those who understood this intersection served as bridges, helping entire communities stay connected to the fountainhead of vitality. Today, these traditions continue in many forms: spiritual practices, indigenous wisdom, therapeutic exercises, and artistic innovation.
In the mountains of northern Italy, a fascinating community called Damanhur has devoted itself to finding even more direct ways to access archetypal power. They seek to both revive ancient traditions and pioneering new technologies to strengthen archetypal energies in the physical body. Among their many disciplines is an artform called Selfica: a practice of creating metal sculptures based on archetypal relationships, paintings with charged emotional properties, a complex symbolic language, and principles found in quantum physics and non-euclidean geometry.
The idea is simple but profound: to use art as a doorway to deeper states of wellbeing, tapping into archetypal reservoirs of power with precision and accuracy. Every Selfica is a doorway into another dimension, bringing one into contact with vital forces that help reawaken human potential. It is a kind of technology allowing one to see themselves, and all of reality, more clearly. On a personal level, it also shows one how to realize and harmonize their inner forces.
Different forms of Selfic art act like tools designed to amplify thought and intention. Because they are archetypal in nature, they also work like a mycelial network beneath a forest floor. They connect, communicate, and facilitate a flow of energy and information across vast distances of space and time. Some Selfica help with personal growth, health, prosperity, creativity, and cultivating empathy. Others harmonize spaces, making them more conducive to wellbeing for everyone and everything there. It is an intimate technology which bridges the physical and spiritual, individual and collective, surface and depth.
In a more rational and health-conscious society, people would place much greater value on archetypes—and the art and artistic innovation that keeps our connection with them alive. In this world, artists might be seen as healers, and when people felt sick, depressed, or purposeless, their “doctors” would tell them to go read stories, paint or dance with abandon, immerse in nature, experiment with new recipes, explore new vocations, and have wild, unexpected adventures. Feeling vital and alive is never an accident or a lucky break. It happens when we touch the world of archetypes and the source of our own authentic vital dance.
In a more rational society, cutting edge researchers would also pursue wellbeing through archetypal knowledge and application directly, as with the Damanhurian discipline of Selfica. Archetypal science represents a pursuit that is both ancient and futuristic, infusing knowledge of primordial interconnection with modern application and sensibility. The discipline of Selfica remains a great example of what advanced societies might one day value and pursue more commonly.
In the meantime, the invitation to listen closely to our own vital journey is always there. It calls us home, pushes us onward, and makes us feel truly alive. It’s an unmistakable sensation that need not be elusive or blocked. It is the vital dance found readily at the intersection of art, ancient knowledge, and wellbeing.