Premier Healing and Transformative Doll Making Resource
Healing and Transformative Doll Making Artists and Teachers
Online Groups & Self-Study Classes, Coaching, Mentoring, Books and Dolls
Online Groups & Self-Study Classes, Coaching, Mentoring, Books and Dolls
What's New
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or In the Washington Post, Washington, D.C. Museums Review
In the galleries: Erika Cleveland’s ‘Healing Dolls’ are playful in their duality Read entire article on Erika's Maker page. 
"Black Lives Matter flip doll."
Erika Cleveland: There, There: Healing Dolls as Solace in an Off Kilter World Through March 2 at WAS Gallery, 5110 Ridgefield Rd., Bethesda.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment |
Barb Kobe's Book The Healing Doll Way is now available to purchase from Amazon and www.healingdollway.com for signed copies and International orders |
Why Use Doll Making for Healing, Transformation and Personal Growth
When Barb Kobe began designing and making sets of feeling puppets,she noticed that she could transfer a feeling from inside her into a puppet/doll and talk to it and with it. When she used her feeling puppets and dolls in conversations with children the dolls brought about a safe, non-threatening, emotional discussion. When she spoke to parents groups about emotional communication using the puppets, she listened to stories about stuffing feelings and never having learned how to talk about feelings, let alone express them through art making. This was the beginning of her realization that making a doll and could be used as an instrument for change, growth and healing.
You can change how you see yourself making a doll. You can talk to yourself using a doll that you made.You can use the imagery of doll making--thought in concrete visual form--to focus your energy into evolving new ways of being and doing. Doll makers create symbols of an emotion, a feeling, a sensation, a struggle or a celebration. A self made doll, a figurative form, can stand as an honoring of something sacred outside or within you. Dollmaking is different than any other form of art...it allows you the experience of holding a part of yourself in your hands. You become your own witness of your life, feeling it and embodying it.
See how others make healing dolls within the pages of Barb's book The Healing Doll Way.com and http://healingdoll.blogspot.com/index.html
We will be featuring healing doll artists on the MAKERS Page
If you are a healing doll maker and want to share you and your dolls
Contact barbkobe@gmail.com for details.
“Dolls are one of the symbolic treasures of the instinctual nature. For centuries humans have felt that dolls emanate both a holiness and mana – an awesome and compelling prescience which acts upon persons, changing them spiritually. Dolls are believed to be infused with life by their makers. They are used as markers of authority and talismans to remind one of one’s own power."
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
Women Who Run With Wolves
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
Women Who Run With Wolves
Why Learn About and Make Healing Dolls
We tend to see ourselves in the doll. It represents an aspect of the human condition. When one engages with the process of making a doll all kinds of possibilities come to the surface. Dollmaking is a way to free oneself of worries, struggles and emotions. Creating a doll, or any art, directly effects the automatic nervous system which controls body functions and the immune system.
Barb Kobe The Healing Doll Way
A doll can be a tool, works on the artist as the artist works on it. It instructs, contains the sacred, represents the deep desire of the body to recreate itself, expresses every emotion from anger to love, pain to joy., It embellishes space. A doll allows you to see who you are.
elinor peace bailey
Mother Plays With Dolls
"I came to a point of my life when I was going deeper into my emotional healing and was finding that the traditional healing channels were not touching me as an artist. I needed the whole of me healed, and my art is the major form of how I communicate. I believe art is a form of language, and I needed all of my communication skills to heal the whole of me."
Linda Hansen, a participant in a Medicine Doll group
Linda Hansen, a participant in a Medicine Doll group
We need this connection with three-dimensional, more or less human-like creations. I believe that the dollmaking allows us to create our own personal model of the world and surround ourselves with energies and images that we enjoy... adapted from. Tatiana Baeva 
Dolls hold such wonderful and varied opportunities for image-making that can be explored by people of all backgrounds and levels of expertise. Feelings and concepts are easier to access through dollmaking. Pamela Hastings |
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