Gratitude, Opportunities, and Compose for Change: Healing Arts course content

Dear Healing Bells Friends,

Thank you for following our website and blogs in 2025! We're grateful for your interest and pledge to continue to provide supportive and informative healing arts resources in 2026 and beyond. Likewise, we ask for your year-end support for us in the ways that work best for you. Here are several opportunities.

1. Subscribe to our social media posts, like them, and add comments. Instagram & Facebook.

2. Donate: Give a year-end tax-deductible donation or set up a monthly donation to Healing Bells for future programming such as

·  Ni une más and Mother of Exiles

·  our documentary films,

·  our Colectiva por Andrea: sanarte,

·  our Compose for Change: Healing Arts class.

Healing Bells is a 501(c)(3) IRS-certified non-profit organization. Donations to Healing Bells (EIN 33-3186407) qualify to be tax-deductible.

3. Host and sponsor a documentary film screening, or a music, theatre, and dance production.

4. Register for our Compose for Change: Healing Arts class, which drops in January.

And..., drumroll, please! 🥁

Click the course title to see our impactful Compose for Change: Healing Arts course series content!

View from Terra Noble Art & Healing Center, Puerto Vallarta, México. Photo: Pamela Ruiter-Feenstra

Benefits of taking the Compose for Change: Healing Arts course series:

• Learn from myriad individualized healing arts methods we developed at Healing Bells.

• Investigate wisdom by global majority arts activists and scholars.

• Celebrate cultural roots.

• Learn how to recognize the 4 Embodied Trauma Responses.

• Discuss the 8 Levels of Listening and how they make people feel.

• Apply the 5 Stages of Healing from Trauma.

• Practice Trauma-Sensitive Interviewing techniques.

• Become an Architect, designing your project; a Weaver, writing for change; and a 

Wordsmith, speaking for change.

• Foster self-care routines.

• Embrace vulnerability & courage, humility & empowerment.

• And much more...!

One of the advantages of our Compose for Change: Healing Arts course series is that you get to choose:

1. Which social issue you wish to address.

2. Which art form you choose to express your social issue and solutions.

3. Which course series best suits you:

• Arts Activist (with 20 impactful and memorable classes with one arts project),

• Arts & Scholar Activist (with 31 powerful and empowering classes with 1 arts project and 1 research paper),

• the Healing Arts Certificate Program (a deep dive into 36 segments with 3 major arts projects and 3 major scholarly research projects).

4. Your own pace. The course videos and other resources are asynchronous, which means you may choose to engage in the material at times that work best for you. Synchronous face time is also available: I hold monthly office hours, and each course participant receives a certain number of free individual consultations, with extra consultations available for purchase.

We look forward to hearing from you and continuing our healing arts journey together!

With gratitude,

Dr. Pamela Ruiter-Feenstra

Artistic Director, Healing Bells

Compose for Change: Healing Arts Developer and Designer

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In our upcoming December blogs, Dr. Pamela Ruiter-Feenstra and Yurani Cubillos will explore "Celebrating the Holidays Amidst Grief and Loss."

What helps you heal? Ocean and beach view, Puerto Vallarta, México. Photo: Pamela Ruiter-Feenstra

FAQs

1. How do I know if the Compose for Change: Healing Arts content is a good fit for me and that I'm a good fit for the class?

Compose for Change: Healing Arts is designed to support people who care deeply about social issues of our time and who are looking for mentoring to find their voice and become arts activists. The course series centers cultural wisdom and lived experience from people of the global majority, women- and LGBTQIA2S+-identifying people, survivors of various types of trauma, and people whose voices and cultures have been ignored, censored, or marginalized.

2. Do I have to be a professional artist to sign up?

No. We believe that everyone has art inside of them waiting to be activated. You are required to either have a minimum of an intermediate level of competence in an art form that takes years to develop (such as music, dance, theatre, certain visual arts, film, creative writing, poetry, and design forms), or to be able to demonstrate that you are committed to learning how to create art forms that you can readily learn from YouTube videos (i.e. jewelry making, haiku poetry, slide shows on Canva or Google Slides), including some videos that we will post as separate add-ons (i.e. collage, bookmarks, cards).

3. Do I have to finish the course within a certain time period?

No, you may take the course at your own pace, according to your other commitments. I recommend that you try to work on it at least once a week so that you benefit from continuity of the course and also can remember what we've already covered so that you can apply these techniques thoughtfully to your project(s).

4. What are the benefits of taking this class?

Previous participants have described the class as

• "cathartic, healing, validating,"

• "the first time I felt like I had a voice," and

• "the most important class I've ever taken."

The course helps participants

• build resources about issues you care about,

• scaffold skills to tell those stories compelling through art and writing,

• gain empowerment to present effectively,

• better understand how trauma impacts us and ways in which the arts have helped others to begin to release that trauma and find a healing pathway, and

• feel support from a community that cares deeply about social justice.

For more information, see Compose for Change: Healing Arts on our Healing Bells website.

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