Using Creative Art Exercises to Guide your Self Care Journey
The creative process opens the door to unknown thoughts, feelings and intuitions that can guide and build your unique self-care. I often interweave creative exercises, mediations and visualisations into the workshops and sessions we do together.
When my clients are given the time, space and support, they can create pieces or images that continue to talk to them for days, weeks and years. I always blown away by what happens when we surrender to a material and allow it to talk to us on a journey into the unknown. We find ourselves with a renewed understanding and appreciation of ourselves that could never be imagined.
Over the last 10 years, I have been studying and experimenting with the creative process.
This journey very much began with my own painting, drawing, textile making and photography. I started at night school and moved into my local Community College. From here I went on to the Applied Art Degree. The mediums and materials changed but never did my search for self-expression change.
Over these years, my curiosity led me to unravel many various aspects of my story through creativity: my inspirations, my desires, my illnesses, family dynamics and relationships. I understood the aspects of my life in a much deeper way.
How does the creative process help with self care?
When using the creative process to explore aspects of your life, you get to see yourself from so many different angles. Yet, there is something about the dialogue with the material, where you often find yourself so far away from where you thought you would be.
Nothing ever turned out as planned. I became comfortable with the unknown, the unexpected and imaginative.
In observing and noticing the deeper conversation I was able to engage with the material, and therefore life, I became interested the psychotherapeutic elements of the making process. A Masters in Art therapy provided me with an incredible array of skills through the coursework, but also spending three years of clinical placement in community health, hospital and hospice settings.
I discovered the power of the creative process in building therapeutic relationships and presence, which allowed me, others and groups to be present in the here and now, dialoguing with images and sculptures of stories and situations.
More than anything, I saw how the imagination and inner world of people can be transformed through making marks on a page, going beyond their current ways of thinking and finding a level of self-awareness that helped them accept and move forward in their lives.
