The Healing Power of Poetry

 I actually do believe poetry can have a sort of healing power for people. Similar to art, it is a form of self-expression where the poet creates based on his thoughts and feelings. One thing I noticed is that with any type of art form there can be a profound decrease in stress. Some people even create poetry as a hobby or as a form of escape from the real world. When we were asked to create haikus recently for this class, I did feel a sense of stress due to time constraints, but besides that I actually enjoyed the activity because it allowed me to talk about how I feel about a topic specifically one that was making me fatigued at the time. Expressing my thoughts towards the IT exam through poetry made me add a sense of comic relief to a very serious subject which I think is invaluable. Based on this experience, I do believe that poetry can also be used as a way to vent out feelings of anger, fatigue, or frustration. Poetry is like a different language where we speak with a different level of our minds allowing us to express thoughts and feelings towards various subjects in a more dramatized or exaggerated manner.

By helping people with their mental health, I do believe that poetry can also benefit a person's physical health because by lowering stress levels it can feel easier to make challenging health decisions on a regular basis such as exercising or choosing to eat fruits and vegetables in our meals. When we have ways to remove stress from our lives such as poetry, it can feel easier to make better decisions for our mental and physical health.

Here is the haiku I wrote recently for my Storytelling In Healing class: