Healing Arts Scotland

Healing Arts Scotland is a biennial celebration of the role of the arts to improve health and wellbeing in collaboration with the World Health Organization.

Runforever has been regularly invited to take part in the event.

Can the arts heal?

Runforever’s answer is positive but brings a condition. We answer “Yes… when the arts are free….” This means not instrumentalizing the arts towards therapeutic outcomes and limiting evaluation which can affect and compromise the sense of safety and undermine the learning context (see Stephen Porges and the Importance of Feeling Safe, min 54’).

We claim that creativity needs to be used as a resistant action towards contemporary pressure from evaluative procedures to preserve art as the pratice of freedom.

Video inspiration – presented at HAS

We believe running and Feldenkrais can be forms of art with the potentiality of healing. These practices are generally known and publicised within frames of fitness. You run or do Feldenkrais because you want to feel well, be fit, free from pain, recover from injury or cure mental health. This is all true but there is more. We deeply thank HMPG for opening doors to the more and the unknown. Hopefully this can take us together on better paths to health.

Runforever doesn’t deliver teaching sessions in a face-to-face setting. Rather than confronting each other, we run and move in the same direction. In this way stories emerge which might help and heal. With the running club and especially with the new Feldenkrais course (started May 2024), we are collaborating with the HMPG Recovery and Outreach team to create a safe place within the prison, enabling the ground for health with a lot of implications for how we offer courses or programmes which cannot be conceived just as adding new skills in a block of classes fashion or exercises to do alone in the cells but by addressing the existential in a collective endeavour!

After a few years of work, we are now more aware of the potential of what we do. We bring beauty to people since the practices we offer touch on, open and mobilise the source of creativity present in everyone. These practices foster processes of self-discovery and healing through movement. They enable people to become more grounded and resilient human being, to flourish in their vitality and to connect with friends and families by fostering a community of support which works as a bridge between inside and outside the prison and provides the context where good and healthy social relationships can grow.

Because of this way of working we often have difficulties to foresee outcomes. As a good gardener we care for the ground, tune our sensitivity to recognize and welcome new flowers as unexpected outcomes. As a good example of this see the Writers in Residence .

Runforever at Healing Arts Scotland – 2026

Monday 15^th June

Suttie Centre for Teaching and Learning in Healthcare, Aberdeen, AB25 2ZN

Healing Arts Scotland Aberdeen Day | Healing Arts Scotland

This year we explained how the previous Healing Arts Scotland event 2024 helped in strengthening Runforever’s work and consolidating the collaboration with HMPG and establishing new partnerships with ACE Voices. We shared how the the Silent Run developed and the beautiful flower of the Writers in Residence emerged.

We also engaged the audience on crucial questions around evaluation. Runforever’s work is in fact 50% about transforming people in prison lives and 50% participating in systemic change and opening debate. The questions around evaluation are therefore fundamental especially for helping HMPG on a new path.

Runforever – Through These Walls

Dr Paolo Maccagno, Stephanie Morrison – Runforever, Alec Thomson Miller – ACE Voices, Paul Smith and Jillian McNeill – HMPG

First part 20 minutes – Presenting Runforever and partners’ work

Introduction, Can the arts heal? – Paolo Maccagno (Runforever)

The Silent Run – Alec Thompson Miller and Lucy Kennedy (ACE Voices)

The Writers in Residence – Stephanie Morrison (Runforever), Paul Smith and Jillian McNeill (HMPG)

Poem reading – Jamie Devine

Second part 20 minutes – Opening questions

Creating the ground for healing – Background and questions for the audience at Healing Arts Scotland

“If we agree that through our work, we create the ground for healing…

How can we bring evidence of our work?

How can we measure the impact?

How can we show results?

…. if these questions are the problem?

If creating the ground requires a totally different logic?

Runforever at Healing Arts Scotland – 2024

Thursday 22 August

This August, we’re thrilled to be part of Healing Arts Scotland, the first ever countrywide Healing Arts Week, happening all across the country 19-23 August, led by Scottish Ballet (@scottishballet) and the Jameel Arts & Health Lab (@jameelartshealthlab) in collaboration with the World Health Organisation (@who). HAS is a week-long celebration of arts and health events, highlighting the joy they bring to those who take part, and their importance to the nation’s physical, mental and social health.

RUNFOREVER – THROUGH THESE WALLS

22 AUGUST 2024 11:15AM-12:15PM

ABERDEEN ARTS CENTRE – 33 KING STREET, ABERDEEN, SCOTLAND, AB24 5AA

We will share stories from Runforever’s work at HMPG from both the experiences of running and Feldenkrais. These can hopefully be inspiring stories insisting on a truth that is not reducible to data but a fleshier, more lively truth that in its telling might draw us to care. We believe running and Feldenkrais can be forms of art with the potentiality of healing. These stories will show how these practices can make us imagine a different path towards health by acknowledging that “no one can be healthy alone” and that if “we would be able to care more, we would need less cure”. They will highlight the paradoxes we encounter if we don’t maintain awareness on logics governing programmes of rehabilitation and recovery when driven by their inseparable reductive evaluative procedures incapable of catching the interdependency of life and its existential value. In sharing our stories, we will show how the Runningstories radio show and the Photovoice have been creative ways for setting up a path into an unknown territory where values emerge on the way while we learn together.

We hope that these stories are not just celebratory and can be a way to reach out to feel on common ground and inspire change through art.

Runforever offers educational opportunities through marathon running and Feldenkrais® for humanising health care within prison environment and in the community. Our projects are particularly important now after covid which has exacerbated the time that prisoners spend in their cells and magnified their sense of isolation and loss of freedom. Both running and Feldenkrais are recognised as invaluable practices of care of the self by combining the individual with the collective: people have the opportunity of being outdoor with others, improve posture, balance, coordination and the capacity of listening to the body in a group environment.

These practices enable the formation of a community of support between all participants – prisoners and non-prisoners – and provide the context where good and healthy social relationships can grow. This contributes towards breaking the barriers and walls between them as running clubs do, “and we will all be Runners…”

Our work is contributing to shape a new understanding of health within prison environment in dialogue with HMPG Recovery, Health & Well-Being Strategy Group which takes in consideration the role and impact of social inequalities and adverse childhood experiences upon mental health.

Runforever is participating in the collective dream of a different way of being in the world.

The Healing Arts Scotland opening celebration will take place outside the Scottish Parliament at 4pm on Monday 19 August as part of Edinburgh International Festival (@edintfest) and the Festival of Politics, and features over 250 performers and participants from across Scotland.

Find out more on the Healing Arts Scotland website:

https://www.healingartsscotland.org/

#HealingArtsWeek #HealingArtsScotland

https://www.healingartsscotland.org/events/healing-arts-scotland-aberdeen