MAKING MEDICINE: CREATIVE SPIRITUAL PRACTICES FOR BECOMING by Yohana Junker

Description

This book emerged from teaching graduate courses in spiritual formation and repeatedly encountering the same pedagogical problem. I was always able to assign outstanding books on contemplative spirituality, practical theology, art practice, ritual, trauma, neuroarts, or decolonial thought, but I could not find a single text that invited students to move between scholarship and sustained creative/embodied/ practice. Students could learn about spiritual formation, creativity, embodiment, or healing, yet very few books invited them to inhabit these ideas through an intentional rhythm of weekly
practice, so this book is my response to that absence.

The central argument of Making Medicine is that creativity is one of humanity’s oldest spiritual technologies for becoming fully human together. Across cultures and throughout history, artistic practices have served as essential means of cultivating relationship, transmitting wisdom, processing collective grief, fostering resilience, and sustaining communities through periods of profound uncertainty. Modern Western culture has fragmented these practices into separate domains (art, therapy, spirituality, education, neuroscience) obscuring their deeply integrated origins and possibilities. This book argues that when creative practice is reclaimed as an embodied spiritual discipline, it becomes a powerful site of formation capable of nurturing individual and communal healing, ethical imagination, and collective flourishing. Rather than treating art as
self-expression, the book invites readers to understand creative practice as an act of attention, devotion, remembrance, and relationship to oneself, each other, and the earth. Art , then, becomes a way of inhabiting the world more fully, of remembering what the intellect forgets, and attuning to a deep intuition and ancestral knowledge that allow us to tap into the capacities necessary for healing, for imagining other ways of being and becoming, and connecting deeply with our bodies as the source of deep wisdom and connection to the sacred. Like the spider that carries divine gossamer within herself before she leaps, this book suggests that the human capacity for creativity precedes the work of repair. The contemplative and creative practices help the reader uncover and strengthen the threads of belonging, compassion, and imagination already woven into them.