Adults
Travel through life with greater ease and a deeper sense of direction
Art therapy with adults
Working creatively in art therapy is like being a creative cartographer. While traditional cartographers map the outer world, creative cartographers map inner worlds. To do this, they listen inwardly to create something that comes from inside. What they create can be thought of as a map: a representation of an inner place.
We all have rich and diverse inner terrain that deserves our awareness and presence. This makes creative cartography important and exciting work. However, the work can also feel daunting. Reassuringly, all we need to do is take one step at a time—learning to listen to ourselves and finding our own sense of direction along the way.
So, how do we start? In an art therapy session, we begin where you are. Our lives are full of sensations, feelings, metaphors, and imagery. With an open invitation to create using the materials in my art studio, all these aspects of your experience can find their way into your creative work and become doorways to the places you want to explore.
You might choose to create with clay, collage materials, natural materials, found objects, fibres, fabrics, or painting and drawing materials. I will support you in choosing the materials you're drawn to and creating something meaningful. Art therapy is different from art-making in other settings. In art therapy, we orient inward—toward our own unique creativity—rather than focusing on external expectations (such as someone else’s idea of artistic skill, for example). As you work creatively to explore your world, I will travel alongside you, moved by my belief in you. Along the way, I hope to help you reach previously uncharted places.
As a participant in creative therapies myself, I have experienced safe therapeutic relationships that allowed me to be more open and curious about who I am. I have mapped this more open and curious place for myself, and I offer the feeling of this place back to you as you begin your own exploration.
As we travel, we will look for new places that hold the potential for you to make more deliberate and meaningful decisions. These spaces are vital for all of us—places where we can stand in our own balance and decide how and where to step next. Over time, as you creatively chart more and more of your inner world, you will begin to build the makings of your own atlas. With your maps in hand—your atlas in the making—you may begin to travel through life with greater ease and a deeper sense of direction.
Sandplay offers a uniquely gentle yet powerful pathway for inner discovery and healing. In Sandplay, participants are invited to create scenes in a small tray of sand using miniature figurines. Because the process is non-verbal and symbolic, it allows deep emotional material to surface within a safe, contained space. As these inner worlds emerge in the sand, we can process difficult experiences, gain new perspectives and understanding, and begin to shape new directions.
Sandplay therapy with adults
It’s a form of creative cartography: orienting by what lies beneath and finding one’s own way with greater awareness and choice.
Participants typically move fluidly between Sandplay and artmaking, choosing the approach they are drawn to on any given day. Both modalities are available and equally valued, offering different yet complementary pathways for exploration and expression.