About Expressive Arts Therapy
In 2019 the World Health Organization released an extensive, evidence based report on the benefits of the arts on health and wellbeing. Our traditional cultures have known since time immemorial that the arts offer a profound and powerful container for growth, healing, insight, and spiritual development.
Expressive Arts Therapy lives in this place. We work with the innate impulse to create - the birthright of each of us - in order to serve transformation. In this work, we stand in the shoes of the poet, the visual artist, the writer, the musician, the dancer, the thespian. We learn from these disciplines, perhaps ever so gently and gingerly at first, and reclaim the archetype of Artist within our lives.
What you can expect from sessions:
- We may use a variety of mediums, which will be tailored to meet you exactly where you are at in your skill level. No prior skill in the arts is required in order to participate in these sessions.
- We will compassionately and sensitively work with your unique mythology, passions, interests, aesthetic, struggles, challenges and life material.
- You can expect guidance, presence, shaping of the session, and structuring from me. Sometimes - with your permission - I may join you in creating work or respond to your work with my own.
- You may work on the same body of work or piece over multiple sessions. You may create a new piece each time. Some sessions you may not make a piece at all.
- There will be a mix of talking and artmaking, depending on what the session is calling for on that day. Some days we might only talk. Some days we might only engage in creative process. Some days a coaching approach may be required. I meet each session with the full breadth of my skillset in service to your growth and wellbeing.
What won't happen in sessions:
- I won't interpret your artwork.
- I won't tell you what to do next.
- I won't assess or critique you or your artwork.
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From the European Graduate School's Website:
"Expressive Arts Therapy is an intermodal field combining the study of health, illness, resilience, and the Arts. Through the process of Art-making, an Expressive Arts therapist discovers how their clients can live in a better way, how the Arts facilitate change, personal growth and transformation.
Indigenous cultures have often been cited as combining ritual, community and the use of the Arts for the purpose of healing and such practices have endured throughout the centuries. Through its intermodal approach, Expressive Arts Therapy integrates different Art modalities within a therapeutic context. Its roots are based in philosophy, anthropology, psychology and the Arts."
"Expressive Arts Therapy has, as its foundation, the practice of the Arts and our response to this innate quality. This creative process supports us to respond and to shape our world in a way that is life-giving and healing. The intrinsic human capacity to create is at the centre of the therapeutic work and thus the creative urge becomes stronger than illness, disease or psychic disorder, empowering the client to come in touch with their inner strengths and gain insight on how these resources can impact and transform the larger disharmony."
- Description of Expressive Arts Therapy
The European Graduate School
Switzerland