Am I still welcome if I can’t draw?
Our tutor Irene Dudley-Swarbrick answers your questions.
This weekend event is for practitioners in counselling and psychotherapy, education, or mental health fields. We’ll meet in a small group setting either online or at the Tara Centre in Lancaster. I am an experienced Person-Centred Expressive Art Therapist and Process Experiential Therapist. I’m also a senior academic and published researcher in Arts for Health and Well-Being.
What will I get from doing this expressive arts course?
- A non-judgemental space and deeply nourishing environment
- An opportunity to experience what expressive art or creative arts might offer to your clients and yourself
- Enjoy a safe place to experience the healing salve of creativity
- Space to connect with your expressive and intuitive self
Irene’s invitation
I find my joy and passion in expressive art and in helping others to experience its healing salve for themselves and for their clients. When I neglect my creative expressive and intuitive self, I lose the spark that nourishes me and helps me feel connected to myself and others, and the natural world.
I invite you to join me in creating a space for connection, emotional nourishment, learning, and feeling more fully alive.
What will your sessions look like?
Our sessions will begin in a small circle where I and Heather, my co- facilitator, will guide you through a simple exercise using natural materials. The aim is to help you bring your full awareness to the room and each other. We will therefore leave the outside world and its pressures behind for a time.
We will use our co-created safe space during each day to explore using all our senses and a variety of materials. Our responses to one simple question: how am I?
You will experience using Natalie Rogers’ Creative Connection® to develop and deepen your insights and self-healing work. You will use natural materials, mark-making, movement, sound, clay and paint. In fact we will expressively journey together inside our own sacred space.
There will be time for sharing experiences and for learning about the thinking behind the Creative Connection®. You will understand for yourself why, and how, you might make use of what you learn. For example, a better relationship with yourself and your feelings, with others or with clients.
No one is required or expected to do or share anything that does not feel comfortable for them.
My invitation this weekend trusts that you will take care of yourself and your needs in the way that feels right and authentic for you.
There will be refreshments available at breaks and there are many places to eat or sit with sandwiches (should the weather permit!)
What you will learn about Expressive Arts
The aims for the weekend are to introduce you to the powerful emotional and creative impact of the Creative Connection®. You can experience for yourself the potential of this way of being and expressing.
My intent and hope is that this course will offer you:
- Respite from the world, one that centres and grounds you, while supporting your ongoing development
- Learn how to awaken your creativity and that of others
My intent and hope for you is that this will bring you personal and professional joy.
- Ways to centre your awareness, and tune into the moment-by-moment experiencing and expressive creating of yourself and your fellow travellers.
My intent and hope for you is that this will help you to express what comes from the unconscious, and your intuiting sensing self.
- Skills to use the movement from one expressive media to another, allowing one form to influence another. This helps to ‘heighten and intensify our journey inward’.
My intent and hope for you is that this will help you to allow layers of inhibition to shift and move.
- Again – because it is so important – practical ideas to awaken your creativity and that of others
My intent and hope for you is that this will bring you personal and professional joy.
Irene is running face-to-face creative and expressive arts therapy trainings from September 2022 at the Tara Centre in Lancaster, Lancashire, England. There will also be an ONLINE version in 2023 – for more details click here.
There will be a Certificate in Integrative Creative and Expressive Art Therapy in 2023. The Diploma in Integrative Creative and Expressive Art Therapy will follow in 2024. All our courses are a maximum of 8 students. Contact us for more details.