About Val Gilman

Good morning,
As I write this I'm sitting in my living room with my cat at my feet, the wood stove stoked and my daughter off to school. And I am thinking of you and what you might like to know in your quest to find the support that will work for you.

Why or how I got into creativity coaching for artists is a good place to start.

 I can see the seeds of it from way way back. I grew up in a family of artists. My mother is an amazing artist, (still painting in her late 80's!)  and has been an artist since she was knee high to a grasshopper. She has all the regular insecurities, and she had a time of being a single mom and having to work as a nurse, but she never stopped making art.

​It was completely inspiring and also a little mind boggling.  

I learned from watching her, how essential the creative practice is, and also how at it's best, it is a process of discovery and endless fascination.

In a corner of her kitchen, she had a potters wheel, and at 8 years old until I left for college, this was my favorite place to be. Clay became my home base and my teacher.

Honestly, I have struggled to make time for my art, to believe in the value of it in the world  in the face of all the other needs that are out there. I have wondered if it is selfish. I have also been busy making a living as a single mother myself.  I have had long periods where my studio lay dormant. 

And I have seen over and over that when I go too long without touching that part of myself, without honoring my creative needs, I become unhappy. It comes on slowly. I get more and more stressed, and impatient and grumpy. Everything feels hard- things in life that should be simple and straightforward, feel like pushing a boulder uphill. 

When I finally notice what is going on, and I sit down with some clay, and let myself push it around with a simple invitation to play and see what looks interesting to me, it is like I am coming home to myself. I can breath again. As I build it back into my routines, life gets easier again. And I wonder how I could have forgotten again. 

It is not easy to keep the art front and center. Our western culture does not value it as an essential part of daily life. And there are always folks who will let you know that it is not real work, that you are lucky to have the time for it, that it must be nice to have that luxury. I have come to see that it is not a luxury. It is essential in my own life, and it is essential culturally. 

The arts are where we get to touch those parts of ourselves that do not have words. The parts of ourselves that are below the surface. The parts of ourselves that are changing and growing and pushing up against the standard assumptions. It is how we know ourselves on a deep level.

If we do not have the arts, as a culture, we stay stuck in what we think we know, what we have been telling ourselves in order to be ok with the way things are. We need to let go of the knowing and allow ourselves to feel into a deeper place in order to draw up the healing necessary to move into, or create a better world.

When I was in my early 20's, living in western MA, and yearning toward grad school, I lucked into a support group for women artists. I am not sure I would have gotten anywhere with my creative work had I not found that group. It was the first time that I was supported in finding my own truth. That group was not about advice, it was about a kind of open, compassionate witnessing that allowed my own inner wisdom and drive to come forward.

It was profound, and shockingly different from all the support I had known up until then. My mother loved me and wanted what was best for me, but was full of advice and her own story. Her fears and sorrows colored how she could support me.

Years later, while I was an academic, teaching ceramics and sculpture in college settings, I began to study authentic movement, or what my teachers call Contemplative Dance. Again, it was an experience of being witnessed with compassion, openness and non- judgement. It offered a way to make space for the vulnerable act of accessing the deeper truths of the creative unconscious.

It was so different from the stressful, competitive, and often dogmatic academic model that I was living in.

When the academic career ended, I knew I wanted to support people in creating the lives that make most sense for them, and bringing their creative insights to the world. 

I am so pleased that I found the Synthesis Center as my training to be a coach because the values I hold so dear are built into it. Through this training, I gained a lot of tools and maps that you will experience through our work together. But the bedrock is my own experience as an artist finding my way.

I have complete faith that if I can support you with that same kind of openness, compassion and non-judgement, with the faith that you have everything that you need to get to your own best place, and my job is to help you trust yourself, you will discover and bring out into the world exactly what you need and what we need. 

Taproot Arts and Insight is built out of elements that have been weaving through my many previous life chapters and continues to grow as I push into the newest chapters. 

As a life coach, I not only have training from an extraordinary coaching program, Synthesis Center, but also decades as an artist and a college professor, as well as a deep training and ongoing practice in authentic movement and a previous chapter as a massage therapist. 

I have been a professional artist since graduating from Earlham College in 1988 exhibiting in solo and group shows around the country. As an artist I have always jumped back and forth between the worlds of craft- specifically pottery, and high art- including sculpture, installation, drawing and painting. My art work is my grounding and my teacher- it takes me to the places I need to grow and provides the tools for transformation and healing. I welcome the unknown as I delight in the forms that develop in my hands.  In so many ways I experience my creative work as my spiritual practice, a way to connect to the essential truths of my life and the collective life of the culture and the planet. 

I became an art professor in 1999 after earning my MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.With roughly 14 years of full time college experience plus numerous non- academic classes, I have worked with well over a thousand individual students. My greatest joy in teaching is seeing my students discover their own voices through their play with materials and design, and in so doing become more clear in their goals and passions.  For professional details of my academic and art career see the full CV.

Prior to graduate school in art, I completed a year long program at National Holistic Institute in massage therapy in 1995 where I studied shiatsu, Swedish massage, deep tissue and health and nutrition. I became fascinated with alternative healing processes as I experienced the way that emotions and our stories are held in our bodies and can be released through body work. This became the core of my artistic investigations for many years.

In 2005 I began to study authentic movement, with Alton Wasson and Daphne Lowel, a form I continue to practice and find very rich. It is based in Carl Jung's work with the creative unconscious and related to dance therapy, and it brings a sense of the spiritual into the mix as well as a deep understanding of the relationship between the witness and the "mover",  or core self and the one who is playing out the stories of our life.  It teaches how to access our deeper truths through movement and visualization as additional forms of creative process.  

In studying Psychosynthesis life coaching, based in the work of Roberto Assagioli, who was a contemporary of Carl Jung and innovator in psychology who brought an awareness of the spiritual element and transpersonal qualities to the field, I added maps and tools for coaching to the background, and found myself in a very good place to work both individually and with groups to tap into this rich material.
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Art, in all its forms, is a great teacher, spiritual guide, therapist and healer.

The creative process is really all about play.  Whether music, writing, dance, theater, visual art or any other, it provides access to the creative unconscious- which is the key to growth, healing and deep learning. Dreaming and visualizations are in the same realm, and while I have a deep love of the process of making, and I value tremendously the creative work that others have put out for us to enjoy and relate to, I have found that it is possible to use the imagination directly to dig into the deep and emerge with profound healing. 

My current work, both in coaching and in teaching, is to bring the lightness of play to the profound work of the  creative unconscious and the incredibly rich awareness and healing potential it can unlock. I also continue to create my own art work and find it is ever helpful and revealing as I dance the dance of life.

Check out the interview with me that was published in the Daily Hampshire Gazette!