This is a beautiful video about my supervisor Peta Schur’s work in Expressive Arts Therapy
Drawing by R. age 8. Seymour Elementary
with refugee children in the Surrey school district. It highlights the potential for art in working with and healing trauma.
I got a beautiful press release for my book!
Expressive Arts Therapy: Compelling New Book of Essays Inspires Readers to Express Uniqueness & Find Healing through Art.
Last week, as part of the East Vancouver Culture Crawl, I was invited to give a talk about Outsider Art.
The place that invited me to do this talk is The Kettle Society, an organization that has the mandate to serve people with a mental health diagnosis. When I was an Expressive Arts therapy student, did one of my practicums at The Kettle, and I loved it.
I have always been an artist. When I was 4 years old my father bought me a “finger painting” set, and, for about a year, me and my brother painted every night.
This experience of painting so freely became my inspiration for going to art school, and for about 20 years I was an abstract painter.
I have been away for most of the summer, and while being in Mexico for an extended period is nothing new, getting married while in Mexico was definitely new.
Nobody thought I would get married one day. Not even me! I actively and vocally disagreed with the concept of marriage, and everyone knew how I felt.
So, when I decided to “marry” my boyfriend, I knew that something had to be different.
I have read many interesting books by the author and psychotherapist Irvin Yalom, and one of my favorites is a book I got as a graduation present from a friend who is also an art therapist: “The Gift of Therapy, an open letter to a new generation of therapists and their patients”.
This is a follow up from last week’s post, “talking to the image”.
After the image of the lotus had spoken, the blue circles in the image talked. The circles revealed themselves as pain.
In Expressive Arts therapy, it’s a common practice to talk to the images we create and it’s also a practice to listen to the images talk through us. The images, having been created in the intuitive right-brain, seem to express a point of view that often surprises the intellectual left brain.
Following on from my last post on the “princess” archetype…
The Gestalt idea that all dream characters are parts of the dreamer and could be analyzed as such correlates well with the Jungian idea of the ancient archetypes and deeper personality integration.
My family has very strong women. My mother never laughed at my dream of Africa, even though everyone else did because we didn’t have any money, because Africa was the ‘dark continent’, and because I was a girl.
My family has very strong women too. I’ve talked in a previous post about my mother being a feminist; being unstoppable. Growing up I witnessed her doing everything and anything she was capable of, including plumbing, electrical wiring for the house, changing a car tire, fixing the washing machine, building a closet and fixing the car’s engine whilst on the road. My father wasn’t much of a handy-man, so my mom was the default fixer upper.