Many people request guidance to navigate through all of my free resources...as it is...rather mind-boggling to know where to start!
I now offer you an eloquently organized "Expressive Arts Learning Library" delivered via once a week. Just click here to receive your weekly emails. Or, reference the links below.
1. Spontaneous Creativity - It is helpful to cultivate a spontaneous creativity practice every day for your self-expression to come alive and find its own living, eloquent language.
2. Expressive Arts Facilitation - An expressive arts facilitator designs and initiates spontaneous, expressive, creative processes for people and may or may not be trained as a therapist.
3. Non-Resistance to Emotions - To get to the "root" of negative emotions you can honour them as old energies that need to be released.
4. Inner Child Drawings - Inner child drawings are typically done with your non-dominant hand. Buy yourself a box of kid's crayons to get started.
5. Inhabiting Your Body - You might reside in your thinking mind. It is easy to dissociate from your body because that is where all of your unprocessed life experiences are repressed.
6. Expressive Arts Modalities - This free PDF download explains the benefits of spontaneous collage, intuitive painting, expressive journal writing, spontaneous drawing, poetry therapy, storytelling, authentic movement, and photo therapy.
7. Expressive Arts Books - I have a large library of inspiring expressive art books and I share 25 of my all-time favourites with you.
8.Free Support for Art Facilitators- This free peer support group is for expressive arts facilitators of all backgrounds.
9. Free Expressive Art Challenges - Because your original style is already within, you are already good enough to begin expressing yourself.
10. Benefits of Collage Therapy - Intuitive collage provides a "symbolic release" of emotions, even if you are not yet conscious of what they are.
11. Emotion-Focused Therapy and the Expressive Arts - We are drawn to different creative practices at various stages of our emotional journey.
12. Gathering Your Collage Supplies - Many people ask where I find my collage materials. Here is a list of ideas for image sourcing.
13. Healing Painful Memories - An interview about the mysticism of life and death, and how I healed a very painful memory in an intuitive way.
14. Intuitive Creativity - Intuitive creativity kindly and colourfully offers up the next emotional layer to be healed in a way that can be safely and gently held.
15. How to Understand Your Intuitive Collage - The creative unconscious expresses itself in symbolic language, and you can learn how to read it.
16. Spontaneous Pastels - If your life feels uncertain or tumultuous, I share my expressive pastel drawing process with you.
17. Self-Discovery Cards - This collage exercise invites you to create visual representations of different parts of yourself so that you can better understand your inner landscape.
18. Emotional Awareness Journaling - I share a journaling method to support you to recognize and name your emotions.
19. Letter to a Young Expressive Artist - In the spirit of Rilke's famous "Letter to a Young Poet" I offer some guidance to artists who are just discovering the joy of honest, expressive art.
20. Healing Shame with Spontaneous Painting - Layers of shame can arise in your spontaneous art to be seen and loved back into the light.
21. Creative Multiplicity - We all have an indeterminate number of sub-personalities, each having their own age, desires, temperaments, desires, goals, and talents.
22. Depth Journaling - As you start to take note of what feels meaningful to you each day, you bring the edges of your unconscious mind into conscious awareness.
23. Accessing the Creative Unconscious - With practice, you can learn how to sense into the "border zone" between the conscious and the unconscious.
24. How to Feel Safe - Anticipatory or objectless fear can turn into chronic anxiety related to nothing specific to your current life, and this can become debilitating.
25. Art Therapy for Groups - I often reflect upon how deeply we can emotionally heal within groups.
26. 50 Faces Project - Inspired by "Drawing Lab for Mixed Media Artists" artist Carla Sonheim, this is a project that I facilitated in my art group for older adults a few years ago.
27. How to Set up an Art Cart - I include a wide variety of preprepared projects on my art cart, as well as art materials for spontaneous art-making.
28. Art Programs Around the World - Welcome to an online portal for artists and therapists to share their art programs, classes, and creative initiatives with others around the world.
29. Developing an Intuitive Art Style - I share some of my discoveries with podcaster Addie about how, as artists, we can find and develop our intuitive artistic "style."
30. Creative Healing Stories - Read amazing stories about emotional healing through the expressive arts.
31. Authentic Art Journaling - The aim of honest art journaling is to strengthen and reclaim authentic self-expression.
32. Creative Process Portal - Engaging in a creative practice is a powerful way to grow
33. Morning Pages for Clearing Negativity - 3 pages of longhand, spontaneous writing first thing in the morning as a way to clear out negativity.
34. Stream of Consciousness Writing - Regular writing practice is a form of self-therapy that supports to explore your thoughts and feelings.
35. Guided Morning Pages - When I first started writing morning page in my 30's there were periods of time when I could not write.
36. True Generosity - There are many ways to transcend limited psychology. All forms of transcendence involve losing yourself in some form of all-absorbing activity
37. Learning to Love - Once in a while, I would meet a very luminous elderly client in the art studio that I used to work in who glowed from the inside with love.
38. The Heroic Journey to Authentic Self-Expression - Reflections on how I have used expressive art as a form "self-mirroring" to support myself on my journey to authentic self-expression.
39. Self-Attunement - When my daughter was little, I set up a shared art studio for the two of us. We spent lots of time painting and drawing together in our little attic studio.
40. Expressive Arts Interviews - I love discussing how expressive practices can help us to heal emotionally. Please join me in these creative conversations!
41. Emotional Healing - A New Birth - It is helpful to understand the healing of emotional pain through the metaphor of childbirth.
42. Unconscious Death Urge - In my art studio work with adults at the end of life, I was astounded to observe that frail elderly people did not always steadily decline.
43. Expressive Arts Activities for Teens - Interesting a skeptical group of teens to create expressive art became a grand experiment
44. The Golden Shadow - Why do so few of us live an empowered creative life? The answer is hidden in our "Golden Shadow."
45. Living in Purpose - Creative people often see things years in advance. It can take a long time to grow into a big vision.
46. The Feminine Creative Principle - Over-masculinized busyness can stop you from deepening into your creative visions.
47. Finding Self-Love - Self-love takes a great amount of persistent practice.
48. Loving Your Inner Child - When you fear that your emotional needs for safety, support and love will not be met, it is hard to focus and function in adult life.
49. Emotional Pain as Creative Energy - Repressed emotions are resisted emotions. Resisted emotions take a great deal of life-force energy to push down.
50. Healing Suffering with Self-Acceptance - Learning to love what is painful inside is a fierce transformational journey.
51. Overcoming Creative Blocks - If you are feeling blocked creatively, what stands between you and your joyful creativity is your unacknowledged emotional pain.
52. Creativity and Emotional Repression - Healing through visual self-expression, and being present without words is often helpful for clearing the emotions that cannot be named.
53. Daily Creative Practice - I have found that it is possible to transform habitual emotional pain just by introducing something new into my life each day.
54. Releasing Emotional Pain with Expressive Drawing - When we build the strength of our presence to emotional pain - we can heal ourselves on deep cellular levels.
55. Creative Vision - Our creative vision will guide us to be different than who we have been in the past
56. Understanding Your Core Pain and False Self - It is rare to meet a completely authentic person. We live in a world that seems separate from love.
57. The Manic Side of Creativity - Many "creatives" are not willing to admit that their creativity can become manic in its intensity.
58. The Creativity of Life and Death - Many of us prefer to independently guide our own lives, separate from the larger patterns of Creation, especially when it disturbs our comfort zone and requires that we grow in unfamiliar ways.
59. Six Stages of Creative Self-Expression - Spontaneous self-expression can bring surprising information into stagnant thinking and feeling patterns.
60. Women, Creativity and Depression - Depression is a refusal to live with authenticity. Depression is a resistance to the truth of how your life needs to unfold.
61. From Victimization to Self-Empowerment - A while ago I made a series of drawings that made me feel very uncomfortable.
62. Cultivating Intuition with Creativity - I like to offer the activity of spontaneous collage to anyone who tends to over-think their lives.
63. Self-Acceptance with Intuitive Collage - Intuitive collage involves is sitting down with a pile of old magazines and choosing images, textures, and colours without thinking or judging.
64. Facilitating Art for Teens in Jail - The teens in my art group were skeptical of me at first. They asked, "Why do you want to be with us jail kids?
65. Understanding Anger - Prior to owning my anger, I felt depressed, repressed, socially timid, and overly careful about speaking my truth with others.
66. 100 Art Therapy Exercises - I have researched current links that reflect the most inspiring art therapy directives on the internet today
67. 50 Art Process Videos - 50 Art Process videos curated to support you to Dream, Paint and Create in your studio!
68. Top 50 Art Therapy Blogs - Featuring the freshest writings about art therapy, the expressive arts, and the healing arts on the internet today.
69. Intuitive Mandalas and Focusing - Pairing inner meditation with the outer visual form of spontaneous mandala making is how I deepen my body's experience of emerging change.
70. Creating Mandalas for Anxiety Regulation - In my art studio work with others, I have witnessed the calming effects of intense creative focus.
71. The 12 Stages of Emotional Healing - I share a short description of the 12 stages of emotional healing in this article. I encourage you to sense into the stage of emotional healing that you are in right now.
72. 100 Expressive Art Inspirations - Twenty years ago, I worked as a junior art curator in a "bricks and mortar" art gallery. In 2011, I started curating expressive art on my virtual Facebook Gallery Expressive Art Inspirations.
73. Art Process on Facebook - A few years ago I started a Facebook friend page to share my creative process with artsy friends.
74. Emotional Healing Through Forgiveness - Forgiveness isn't something you do for the person who wronged you; it's something you do for your own emotional healing.
75. Expressive Writing Exercise - If you easily abandon yourself when you are with other people, you will find this exercise very helpful.
76. Resistance to Negative Emotions - Happiness arises when we turn towards our challenging emotions and say, "I love you. I see you. You are worthy of my kindest attention."
77. How to Heal Your Emotional Pain Body - Whenever you cannot fully process a difficult life experience it leaves a painful energy imprint in your body.
78. Integrating Conflicting Parts of Self - In my work as a therapist, I often see different personality aspects of self showing up in people's artwork. I have seen this same phenomenon in my own expressive art.
79. Giving up TV to Increase Creativity - I decided that television was uncreative. I felt like I was filling my head with other people's ideas and not making space for my own intuitive creativity.
80. Inner Body Focusing - This way of journaling does not involve much writing. It mostly involves sitting patiently at my "growth edge
81. Creative Abundance - The more that you can relax as you contemplate your visions, the faster they will come into reality, and the more completely you will be able to receive them.
82. 40 Abundance Principles for Artists - Sometimes the best way to emotionally heal is to "live into" the highest possibilities for your life.
83. How to Start a Daily Sketchbook Practice - Showing up daily to authentically express yourself is an act of self-love, yet it can feel surprisingly challenging to maintain a daily creative practice.
84. Healing Anxiety with Expressive Art - Finding the emotions hidden within your anxiety can be done through spontaneous art making and story writing. These two modalities balance both sides of the brain.
85. Four Expressive Arts Exercises - Four expressive arts exercises that I use in my creative therapy sessions.
86. Expressive Arts as Self-Therapy - In my own wellness journey, I have developed many creative processes that encourage emotional healing through self-loving honest self-expression.
87. Gratitude for Healing Depression - Gratitude is like a radio channel that you can choose to tune into any time, no matter what is happening.
88. Healing Trauma with the Expressive Arts - Exponential growth is possible after a traumatic event. Healing through trauma can forge you into an amazing human being.
89. Intuitive Art Exercise - This is an emotional Focusing "check-in" art exercise that I did last year that inspired a deep and permanent change in myself.
90. Healing Emotions Intuitively - Unresolved emotions can be worked through spontaneously by giving your body permission to do what it needs to do to release old emotional imprints.
91. Intuitive Collage Step-by-Step - Intuitive collage will communicate the "growth edge" that is emerging from your unconscious mind.
92. Emotionally Expressive Collage - Spontaneous collage can be so revealing of what is going on within our inner world.
93. Transforming Emotional Pain with Expressive Art - This art exercise is for those of us who repress emotional pain and need to learn how to listen to its messages
94. Ten Ways to Heal the Not Good Enough Wound - "How do I heal my "not good enough" wound? How do I love myself? How do I heal shame?" Here is a list of ways to heal.
95. The Challenge of an Authentic Life - Early societal training communicates the exact recipe of who we have to be in order to "good enough."
96. The Art of Focusing in the Body - You can heal emotionally by listening deeply to your body. Symbols and solutions for positive change will arise from your body when you get quiet.
97. 7 Ways to Interrupt the Negativity Bias - It is easy to become trapped in negativity. Because our brains are wired for survival, our default feeling is fear.
98. Emotional Pain Processing for Highly Sensitive People - Because emotions need to be energy in motion, creating a story about why you are in pain can limit your fullest healing potential.
99. Multimodal Expressive Arts Exercises - After a period of expressive arts practice, you can re-enter the regular world with all your adult concerns and responsibilities, changed and opened, with a newly enlivened perspective.
100. Creating and Marketing E-Courses - Before I started teaching online, I dreamt of a quiet, contemplative way to earn a living, and I have been surprised to learn that it is possible.