Therapy Supermarket

About the Book

All royalties from the sale of the Ebook (50% of the retail price) will benefit the Helen Keller National Centers, the Braille Institute, and the Centers for the Blind..

Therapy Supermarket Therapy Supermarket is a self-guided art therapy workbook for any person to use as an example of how we can create a resource manual for our own personal continual use—growing, interacting, changing, editing, and distilling.

The reader can use this volume as a framework for his or her own art-astherapy, creating a new, self–designed, unique version to fit their own needs, and including anything creative, as long as it is not harmful in any way to anyone. The purpose of this book is to create an environment for peace, both inner and outer peace and happiness, beginning here with me, now. This creative joy and loving-kindness can evolve in the process with each successive expression in many varied forms, branching out to reach the direction of evolution with a positive intention, making room for more loving-kindness, compassion, and the root of happiness for all creatures. Everything we do and say is important, and matters eventually, and we, in our own unique version of creativity, can use this gift to change our direction toward peace, both inner and outer peace for every creature. I start here, with myself, and the rest follows.

Jane McNeel Keller

About the Author

Jane McNeel Keller grew up on Texas ranches, sharing spacious countryside with her extended family in a community of Maverick clan in a world where there was no need for words such as “organic” or “natural,” because everything was that way to begin with. Jane’s father built the family home by hand out of fieldstones. Her mother, an artist, kept art materials available for the children to experiment with on their own, without suggestion. Jane started drawing pictures on the stone walls in the living room when she was a toddler, and instead of being scolded, she was praised by her mother. The murals were done in the same spirit as her ancestors’ cave paintings. All she needed was a chalk rock and any wall or sidewalk. It was a primitive and naive life—the perfect setting for creative expression. Now a grandmother, Jane cherishes this role and realizes how much her own grandmothers influenced her life. One granny operated an apartment house (B&B) downtown, where Jane and her sisters spent Saturday nights listening to police calls on the shortwave radio and waiting for the “Loreli” cocktail lounge across the street to be raided. Police cars would reel around the corner, sirens fracturing the silence, while grandchildren joined Granny peeking through the venetian blinds, waiting to see who was being picked up in the paddy wagon. The other granny read National Geographic and Chinese fairy tales to the girls and painted pictures of Buddha flanked by peacocks onto huge screens. With these ecumenical beginnings, Jane pursued philosophical, psychological, and spiritual directions, combined with artistic expression, throughout her lifetime. Married in 1952, the honeymoon was spent on 9,500-foot-high Martin Mountain Lookout Tower in Challis National Forest, Idaho. There were no modern conveniences—just a woodstove, an ax for chopping firewood, and 365 window panels to wash (the perfect spiritual and reflective retreat). After seven years of marriage and with two children, Katie and Jim, Jane was divorced and, while teaching art and working in art therapy with various institutions, finished her degree in art and philosophy at the University of the Incarnate Word, followed by graduate studies in counseling and guidance. Jane has traveled all over the world, particularly enjoying remote places such as Svalbard, Norway, Scotland’s Inverewe, the Orkneys, Tonga, Green Island (Great Barrier Reef, Australia), and Dominica, West Indies. It is Jane’s hope that this book brings a breath of fresh air to every reader, easing the ordinary suffering, extending compassion and love, and inspiring a light heart.