Susan Ann Shepler

About AwakenArts

AwakenArts explores human experience through symbolic poems, figures, and literary encounters. Rather than offering fixed interpretations, the work invites readers into a process of recognition through image, language, and reflection.

The figures approach experiences that often resist ordinary explanation—conflict and reconciliation, longing and belonging, strength and vulnerability, concealment and revelation. They are not presented as puzzles to solve, but as invitations to notice what feels deeply familiar before attempting to explain it.

The work draws from poetry, parable, allegory, archetypal patterns, and the rich figurative language found throughout Scripture. While informed by psychology and symbolic tradition, AwakenArts finds its deepest orientation in the Christian story, where recognition ultimately points toward reconciliation in Christ.

How the Work Emerged

The poems of AwakenArts emerged through a creative dialogue between image and language. Sometimes an image came first and called for words. At other times, the poem revealed something more about the image. Neither led for long. Each continually informed the other.

That creative process became a meeting place where symbolic patterns surfaced long before I could fully explain them. Whether understood psychologically, artistically, or spiritually, these images consistently revealed truths that required years of reflection to more fully articulate.

The poems themselves have remained remarkably unchanged. What matured over time was not the symbolic work, but the language surrounding it. The Figure Editions represent that continuing effort: changing symbolic worlds in which image, poem, and reflection can be encountered together while remaining faithful to what the poems expressed from the beginning.

Susan’s Practice

Today, Susan conducts AwakenArts workshops as a literary-symbolic practice. She holds a consistent sequence of encounter, reflection, writing, and conversation while each Figure Edition brings participants into a different symbolic world. The work invites recognition and conscious language; it does not offer therapy, diagnosis, or a fixed interpretation of an image.

About Susan Ann Shepler

Susan Ann Shepler holds a Master of Arts in Counseling Psychology from Webster University. She is a Certified Transformative Language Artist through the Transformative Language Arts Network and a Certified Journal Instructor through the Center for Journal Therapy in Denver, Colorado.