Painting Away the Unspoken: How Apothecary Moved the Trauma I Didn't Know Was Still There

...from tragedies to remedies....

Energy moves when you do the painting process called Apothecary. But sometimes… it moves so gently, you don’t even realize it’s happening.

Back in 2018, I was introduced to Shiloh Sophia's and Jonathan McCloud's new Apothecary painting process. I sat down with my paints, my canvas, and the quiet whisper of intuition that always seems to guide this work. I dutifully made my way through the steps, observing and encoding the various tragedies of my life and the tiny flashes of insight. There was no emotional breakdown, no cathartic release. I didn’t cry or rage or feel anything particularly remarkable. I was simply creating—caught up in the colors, the textures, the slow unfolding of a good painting.

The McClouds called the process Apothecary because it was soul alchemy. By recording and painting your traumas on the canvas, you learned to shift your relationship to them...as Jonathan would say, moving post-traumatic-stress-disorder to post-traumatic-stress-discomfort. It's a subtle distinction.

I moved on. Life kept going. Other things, other paintings and inquiries, came and went.

This last week, in preparation to teach Apothecary in Tucson, I pulled out that first Apothecary painting again. I turned it over, and there it was—written in my own hand: "The Death Event."

That’s the name I gave to a pre-verbal trauma I experienced as a baby. A heavy, mysterious pain that shaped so many parts of my body and story… and that, somehow, I hadn’t thought about in years.

No fretting. No emotional spirals. No anxious picking at the wound.

It just… disappeared.

In that moment, I realized something profound: That painting, made in quiet presence, had moved the energy. It had held the story for me when I couldn’t. It had done the deep work silently, without asking for acknowledgement.

There was no lightning bolt. No clear moment of release. Just a gentle shifting… and then, one day, the weight was gone.

This is what Apothecary does. It offers a sacred container for the things we can’t always name. It allows energy to move in its own time, its own rhythm.

Maybe you have a trauma—clear or hazy, remembered or buried—that’s still living somewhere in your system. You don’t have to confront it directly. You don’t have to "figure it out."

You can simply paint it.

Let your brush do what words cannot. Let your art carry what your heart is tired of holding.

And then--maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow--One day you’ll realize it’s lighter.The grief is quieter. And the energy… has moved.

Maybe it’s time to paint your way free.

We're saving an easel for you.

Shiloh and Jonathan personally trained a few of us to pass on this magical elixir of a painting process. I am delighted to be teaching Apothecary this weekend with my Color of Woman sister Rosie Mac in Tucson. You can sign up here.