OH-Cards
Basic understanding
The use of the cards of the OH-genre addresses two very particular spheres of experience:
Firstly, the activities made possible with the cards create a positive (i.e. safe) ambience in which the skills of communication, exchange of perspectives and value-free understanding can be deliberately practised. Whatever you see in the cards that you pick, is directly, intuitively about yourself. That's how The OH Cards work, why they were created: to put you in touch with yourself ... and those around you.
Secondly, the cards function as a tool which can facililtate entry into a wide spectrum of interpersonal activities of a social, professional or therapeutic nature ...... to put you in touch with those around you.
This experiencial practice may then be taken back into one ́s private or professional daily life in an enhanced form.
OH ETIQUETTE
- In OH, we honour each other's privacy. I may choose to pass, choose to not play the cards I have drawn. I can do this with or without explanation, revealing my cards or not.
- In OH, we honour each other. I will not interrupt you. In OH, we honour each other's intelligence and imagination. I do not re-interpret (or interpret) your cards - even in the secrecy of my mind.
- In OH, we honour each other's integrity. I do not contradict you or argue about your interpretations. I try to remember that there are no "correct" or "incorrect" interpretations of the pictures, no misreading of words.
- In OH, we honour each other's individuality. When I interpret my OH Cards I do not assume that you see what I see, feel what I feel, read what I read.
The OH Cards are an unbound book of endless pages that lead us into new adventures every time we open the decks: we find silly stories full of laughter, lovely poems of love and joy, sad tales of woe and pain ... as well as private narratives told softly to a silent room.
In combining word and picture, The OH Cards address the whole person. The OH Cards combine familiar pictures and words in continually new ways and thereby stimulate our creativity. A unique game-like tool, The OH Cards can be used in many situations: privately, socially or at work. They have many uses: to play games of story-telling and invention; to stimulate creativity and fantasy; to enhance communication, encourage expression, stimulate imagination and further self-awareness.
The OH Cards stretch our capacity to listen and to respond, to really hear each other without judgment or competitiveness. Using The OH Cards is a way for people to exchange feelings, ideas and intuitions within a context that protects privacy and vulnerability.
Their most common uses are as a focus for self–examination and as prompters in social interactions. They are often used as aides in psychotherapeutic settings, and in a variety of educational situations. Less commonly, OH cards are used as catalysts in artistic fields: in writing, painting, theater, even dance.
Since their first publication in 1981 The OH Cards have become a widely acclaimed tool for personal and interpersonal work. Printed and sold in 20 different languages and in many more counties than that, they flow around the world much like a net of groundwater, supplying a resource to professionals of any teaching or healing denomination as well as countless interested private persons.
OH cards differ in artistic style and in content, so that children, youth, adults and seniors may find suitable images to trigger their own inner stories.
The OH Cards are designed to increase intuition, imagination, insight and inner vision. People around the world are using them to reclaim their sense of self and their place in this universe. One profound quality of this genre of “cards of association“ is that they bend to the user: you can make them a tool for your own specific purpose. It is a mark of a great tool that it lends itself to universal application, and it is a mark of the power of these cards that they do this without imparting of dogma.
With OH you can anticipate to get in touch with your own stream of creativity and your processing skills. This increases awareness and the ability to positively influence private as well as professional situations.
The OH Cards look like a simple game. But in truth they are a magic satchel full of thoughts, discoveries, perceptions, and new ideas. They are many-faceted and cannot be easily categorized. They are unique with a multi-faceted appearance that accurately reflects their content.
The OH Cards are like a new language, arising from common images and words, while giving new meanings. Like all truly new experiences, they stimulate our creativity, push us to draw new connections, new conclusions, and to revise our assumptions. And the more we use this language, the better we use it and the richer we become.
However, The OH Cards are not simply an educational tool. They are also playful, funny, and poetic. They are exactly what we make of them. The OH Cards were not designed for competitive purposes, to give the "strong" or "clever" ascendancy over the "weak" or "slow," but were intended to tickle our perception, our imagination and make the sharing of our responses easier.
The meaning of The OH Cards shifts constantly, much like our life does. The OH Cards are like a book to which we add new pages at each reading. They are a springboard into the well of our self-hood.
These cards are the material from which endless forms of work and play are fashioned. To the infinite possible combinations of pictures and words must be added the variations that our differing interpretations contribute, interpretations that change as we drift along the river of our lives.
The OH Cards have been around for many years and have been used in thousands of situations by thousands of people; all experienced the world differently, and by playing with The OH Cards, have chosen to share and exchange their responses with respect and openness.
The OH Cards are a multiple tool with a solid standing in a variety of professions, especially those that deal with people: psychotherapists, counselors, personnel trainers, teachers etc.
The two decks can be used separately or in combination, they can be drawn blind or selected. Using The OH Cards is about expressing our own interpretations and associations and, equally important, about listening attentively to others without being caught up with our own interpretations.
When we place a picture card on a word card, a motif emerges from the combination. We then deal with the theme that it suggests. We can find ourselves in our cards and can attempt to share some of this insight. No one can tell us what we should see since there are no "right" or "wrong" interpretations. The cards lead us; by stimulating our intuitive and emotional side (right brain) with the painting, and exciting our rational, analytic side (left brain) with the word, we trace these stimuli until we find an integrated conclusion. The process is the same whether we play alone or with others. When we play with others, it serves us best to follow a few simple rules, or etiquette suggestions.
1. Communication
As we begin to put OH-cards into use, we take a moment first to elucidate the "rules", which are, more precisely stated, an agreement among participants as to the etiquette governing an OH-exchange. Following these basic recommendations creates an atmosphere of trust and acceptance:
- each person will speak without interruption, judgment or interpretation from others
- no one will dominate the exchange by monologuing - feedback, given in response to what was actually said or seen (e.g.
body language) will take the form of questions of clarification or supportive, non-judgmental expressions of empathy from fellow participants
- any participant has the right to pass or to select different cards
Based in the spirit of democratic equality, this etiquette allows room for both individuality and the experience of integration in a group - we can experience the benefits of departing from our own single track without sacrificing individual perspective. Of equal importance to the OH-participant is the practicing of an active kind of listening made possible by abstaining from judging and interpreting what is being heard.
These conditions create an oasis for the equality of life-perspectives, as for the expressing of them in all their rich variety. Experiencing such a quality of exchange, a cut above the tenor of usual communications, may incite in OH- participants a learning impulse that they can reach across into daily life.
Used in accordance with the recommended etiquette the cards can lead to a noticeable enhancement of communication skills. Even early in life children may be encouraged to hold strong, individual points of view and to exert these over the points of view of others in order to be considered successful. Others may learn to hold back with their perspectives, either so as not to be judged or not to appear too self-important. Using the OH-genre to stimulate a specialized quality of exchange that occurs a step beyond such unconscious communication habits gives all types of personalities the opportunity to express their perspectives in an atmosphere of trust and validation in which authenticity, rather than self aggrandizement or negation, is required and to learn active listening, which fosters understanding.
All people are conditioned through upbringing to a set of norms. We receive in early life what Ely Raman, the creator of OH, calls our “givens“. On the one hand useful as signposts displaying rules, morals and ethics of the social group in which the individual evolves, such norms, when neither questioned nor complemented by new impulses, can lead to rigidity. How then should the thinking of others, who have most certainly been differently conditioned, be understood and their perspectives accepted? Adhering unbendingly to one ́s own givens is one of the most basic causes of interpersonal misunderstanding. Such misunderstanding, in its turn, can lead to conflict.
2. Conflict Resolution
Whether in daily life or the workplace, wherever people with various needs, ideas and goals come together, discussion (i.e. sharing of knowledge and perspectives) is vital to the resolving of differences and to arriving at solutions that serve the best interests of the most people as often as possible.
The ability to change one ́s perspective is a basic requirement for maintaining peace and preventing conflict. In the listener, this ability fosters understanding for the one who is being heard. For the communicator, it enables an expression to be found that can be received by the listener.
The state of readiness-to-anger or -violence, on the other hand, often emerges out of a helplessness in making oneself otherwise understood, or from the refusal to understand. Both conditions could be seen as outcomes of inability/inflexibility to see other perspectives. Exactly this ability/flexibility is one of the skills that can be taught and practiced with OH-cards, breaking ground for constructive discussion and peaceful resolution of conflict.
Children and young people, as well, can learn through playful applications of the OH-genre that life may be perceived not just in terms of polarity (good-bad, right-wrong, friend-foe, etc) but in terms of variety and complementarity. Differences can be accepted: what is perceived as "other" must not of necessity, or by social obligation, be taken to be a hostile force.
Each OH-participant always has the sovereign right to interpret his or her own cards and, consequently, an equal status within the larger process, Each person has the same chance to contribute to the whole or to influence an outcome (e.g. in storytelling as a group), to transform negative to positive. There is always fresh opportunity for new direction, for discovering a way beyond what at first glance might seem to be the end of a road.
In indirect ways, then, this manner of playful interaction using the medium of the associative cards can contribute to the increase of understanding, equality and peace.
3. Help in dealing with Therapeutic/Social/Personal Questions
The OH-genre was developed to be an effective tool in healing. This can be practiced in professional life, as well as in private or in a social situations with friends.
Cards of this genre are used worldwide in helping professions, they are applicable in a wide spectrum of therapeutic processes, assisting both the process of the client and the work of the therapist. When people find it difficult to speak about themselves, or when emotional blocks are experienced, OH cards can serve as a key to accessing the inner condition. In this way the OH-genre makes an effective contribution to the work of healing even deep trauma caused by war, catastrophe and personal loss.
Similarily, the associative cards can enhance the work of pedagogues, social workers and other such professionals in their work of helping people find expression for their inner images and voices.
People working privately or alone at self-discovery find assistance in their process by making use of the OH-genre. The cards function as a door to the unconscious where previously unrecognized feelings and new perspectives await discovery. Creativity expands under their influence.
4. Creativity
Creativity by its very nature can ́t be induced or forced, but there are ways in which it can be trained. OH-cards can be applied to this objective.
Most people hear within themselves, with varying frequency or intensity, the voice of an inner critic. One function of this voice is to caution us about the leaving of familiar ways and conventions. But although such ways and conventions offer a safe place for the development of the personality they can also restrict spontaneity and the courage to live life in new ways.
The sheltered environment created by applying the OH-etiquette permits us to give free rein to our natural and innate creativity, to dream even an impossible dream. The images and words on the OH-cards provide the impulse that calls the idea forth, like a waking dream.
The OH-method of selecting cards randomly, rather than intentionally, prevents us from adhering only to the familiar. When the selected card is turned face up we are confronted with the unknown. And as associations begin to flow in response to the image (or word, or combination of both), our innate faculty of imagination, wellspring of all new ideas, is activated. Experience has shown that even people who consider themselves uncreative can participate in this process and thereby learn to value their own inner wealth plus their ability to access it.
In addition to the random-access-effect, spontaneity plays a strong role in the OH-method. Trying to come up with an appropriate response through a rational process is not the avenue to self-accessing with OH. First respond, think about it or discuss it later!
OH-cards can also be used in an individual ́s search for creative solutions to specific problems. Through the process of associative play, in which one stands at a little distance to the actual problem, a whim or a flash of spontaneous inspiration might lead to an idea that wouldn ́t have occurred in the process of logical thinking usually applied to problem-solving. Such ideas can then be further examined for applicability.
5. "Hands-On" Approach to Art
One of the engendering ideas behind the OH-cards is the concept of "variable structures" (Marcel Duchamp, John Cage): that is, artworks whose creation process may deliberately include changes induced by other objects or by the viewer. This concept supports a version of art that is malleable instead of sacrosanct.
Paintings in the form of playing cards - not hanging on a museum wall but held in one ́s own hand! - make available the opportunity for an intimate encounter with art. The distance from the card-in-the-hand to the eye approximates the distance from the suckling infant to the face of its mother, the first focal length we experience in life.
Each card deck of the OH-genre can be seen as an art exhibition in small- format whose paintings are there to be combined and selected at the will of the viewer. This personal and interactive approach activates something completely natural yet perhaps new in the person who experiences it: instead of relying on experts who organize exhibitions or interpret art for the public, each person/player, without inhibition, just goes ahead and enjoys his or her responses, including attractions and antipathies, aesthetic preferences and fully original and spontaneous interpretations. Such an approach to art, too, is transposable into other life situations, integrates the concepts underlying art into one ́s own creative projects and perhaps even into one ́s approach to life. In this manner art becomes interactive, becomes itself enlivened in being used as a source for inner development.
- Develop better creativity
- Stimulate your imagination
- Learn about perceptual positions
- Increase communication skills
- Enhance your memory
- Learn story telling
- Solve problems
- Find resources that you have not thought about before
- Solve personal problems
Business:
- Find creative solutions to complex problems
- Plan your business development
- Understand your competition
- Understand your business situation
- Outline your business model
- Negotiations within the company
Therapeutic:
- Develop well formed outcomes
- Create goals
- Find purpose in life
- Work with somatic illnesses
- Solve relationship problems
- Reframe problems
Children:
- Unleash creativity and imagination
- Learn about logic and problem solving
- Develop better communication skills
- Practice story telling and presentation
- Learn about different way to solve problems
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