Lavinia Mariposa, by Patricia Iglesias Peco, Santa Barbara Art Museum
Facilitated Expressive Arts Sessions
I facilitate Expressive Arts sessions that help people move into safer, more enjoyable experiences of aliveness in the here and now.
Expressive Arts Therapy (EXA) is a form of psychotherapy that interweaves all creative arts therapies: dance movement, music, visual art, performance, and writing. EXA works with the senses, imagination, art materials, musical instruments, nature, the body, and our voices to respond to life with poeisis - the creative act.
The purpose of EXA is not only to heal from what has hurt us, but to unify with the richness, depth and joy of life, through expanding our creative, capable nature.
Expressive pArts Work
Internal Family Systems Therapy, or Parts Work, is a systems-oriented psychotherapy model that works with Parts, or subpersonalities, to reorganize and heal inner and outer world topics.
Parts Work and EXA work beautifully together. Using EXA practices to become aware of, unblend from, flesh out, befriend, and unburden our Parts, as well as Embody Self, is life-changing!
Psychotherapy Models Informing LionSong Expressive Arts Sessions
In addition to Internal Family Systems (Parts Work), I use a Person Centered, Solution Focused, Trauma Informed, and Process Work approach. I have a Masters in Counseling Psychology and EXA from CIIS.
If we decide to work together, sessions will be tailored to you and whatever inquiry is front and center for you. We will supportively focus in on the specifics of your needs, be they related to trauma recovery, embodiment, creativity, work, relationships, spirituality, or another topic.
The above models, among others, have informed my way of working. That said, it is my view that techniques and scripts are far, far less powerful than kind, lively, attuned presence!
Experientials and Creative Play in Sessions
I bring safe, exploratory, non-threatening creative arts experientials into sessions.
Experientials stimulate somatic awareness, connect us with inner imagery, facilitate healing moments among the Parts in our psyche, and lead to new, exciting, and emotially reparative “aha” moments.
Experientials help embody positive change and growth, fortifying them to be felt as real here and now, located inside the body’s present moment sense perception.
You will always be in charge of how extensively to bring the arts and somatic explorations in. We will take it slow to build safety and good feelings.
How Sessions are Structured
At the top of each individual session, we’ll refresh and revisit your intentions, aligning them to any new information and experiences you want to bring in.
We’ll use the rest of the therapy hour to creatively play and explore, to help you embody a specific strand of your healing work, through guided experiential process and prompts for connected reflection. Sessions are unique and unscripted, but a common session path is:
Verbal check in —> Body-based check in, orientation & grounding —> EXA experiential addressing your chosen goal for the session —> Discovering, creating and grounding a resource or solution into your body —> Verbal reflection, insight capturing, & closure
Booking Details
My fee for Expressive Arts facilitation is $144 per hour. Sessions may also be booked for couples, families, children and creative collaborators.
Sessions are usually held remotely over video conferencing software. This works surprisingly well with the arts, even for movement and sound work, with minor adaptations that most clients have no problem working with.
Keep in mind that it will be important that you are in a safe and contained physical space, where you won’t be distracted or disturbed during the therapy hour, even though we are working remotely.
To initiate a booking process, send me an inquiry using the button below. I will respond to your email with information about the next steps.
Thank you for your interest!
Benefits of Expressive Arts
Like talk therapy, the Expressive Arts can be used for any therapeutic goal. Because EXA is experiential, it supports changes being embodied live during the session. We try on, practice and anchor our shifts in the now, supported by our bodies, inner imagery, and senses.
Further the Expressive Arts (EXA) can help a person create the following outcomes for themselves:
Embody deep feelings of security
EXA practices stimulate our senses, harmonize and balance the nervous system, and teach us how to attune and connect in relationship.
EXA allows us to anchor embodiment skills like grounding, centering, regulating, co-regulating, noticing, being curious, playing, expressing, boundaries, and integrating what we’ve learned bioneurologically.
Reside in a neuroception of safety
Using the arts, we rewire our polyvagal habits. EXA provides many enlivening, enjoyable and fun ways to master shifting between restriction/shutdown/activation, and more open-feeling, connective, regulated states (neuroception of safety).
Over time, we enter and stay longer in states of lively, playful, calm, connectedness (Self energy).
Experience mindfulness safely and creatively
Those of us with a history of trauma and/or attachment wounds often struggle to know at bioneurological levels that it is safe to let go of our habits of hypervigilance, numbing, or fleeing our body sensations.
These survival resources helped us get through what we needed to get through in the past, but they can make meditation and other practices requiring relaxation, focus, and consistency feel impossible.
The good news is, EXA restores the ability to be mindfully aware of emotions and senses, without getting flooded and overidentified with what we find inside. Safely experiencing our sensations, in turn, allows us to enjoy the nourishing flow state for longer and longer periods of time.
Anchor Secure Attachment
We need relatively secure attachment to be able to live life in the now moment. Otherwise our safety-finding strategies and burdened protector Parts use most of our energy. We can use EXA to heal attachment wounds, including traumatic attachment.
Through EXA, we flow kind, playful, delighted and relationally attuned attention to ourselves, at first in the supportive context of a therapeutic relationship, then on our own. We become the Mother-Father-Self to our inner child.
Befriend and Becalm the Triggered State
When triggered, we are flooded with memories, body sensations, emotions, and thoughts that are kept alive in us by survival-oriented Parts. These Parts of us believe it’s necessary to re-activate and remember these bad experiences lest we forget the harm that can happen to us.
If we gradually increase our capacity to witness our triggeredness without getting carried away, we can disarm these triggers. We adjust to living in the now moment, where safety resides, more of the time.
EXA practices help us master the kind of gentle attention and engagement needed to befriend and unburden Parts of us that keep us trapped in the sensations and survival strategies of our past.
Bloom Socially and Creatively
Through EXA, we return to a natural growing process, which connects us socially and expands us creatively. Back in our bodies, feeling our bouncy resilience and our tendency towards joyful play, we are ready to connect, bond, co-create, and collaborate.
Try LionSong-style EXA at home
In facilitated EXA sessions, experientials are unscripted, arising organically out of the work we’re doing together. Self-facilitated EXA isn’t quite the same, because the aspect of relationship is central for healing. But solo EXA spelunking is healing too! Here are some explorations you may want to try on your own.
Places, Grandmothers, or True Size for honoring yourself and where you come from
Body Map, Grounding or Containment for somatic skills explorations
Disasterpieces, Awkward Collaboration, Dictionary Song and Group Musical Play for playfulness
Parts Work Comics and Parts Work Dialogues for working with Inner Parts
Sandplay and Make Your Own Deck for vivifying intuition
For many more prompts, explore the LionSong IDEAS page.
More About Expressive Arts for Embodiment
Trauma and attachment wounding stop our embodiment process in its tracks. We stay stuck, bound up, or caught in cycles of symptoms and addictions that manage those symptoms, until such time as we discover that it is genuinely safe in the here and now, to begin growing naturally again.
Trauma-informed Expressive Arts Therapy pioneer Dr. Cathy Malchiodi, PhD writes about Expressive Arts as a way to embody using movement, sound, story, and images. EXA restores capacity for enlivenment, joy, and resilience.
You can learn a lot more about why Expressive Arts is perfect for resolving trauma and healing attachment wounds from the horse’s mouth by delving into her work, and I recommend that you do!
For more on how I approach healing in expressive arts therapy sessions, please browse the links below:
Healing Play Sessions for Adults
My Background and Training
I grew up in a big family on a working organic produce farm in Lompoc, California. I lived deeply connected to my siblings, nature, and creative play. I was lucky enough to go to hippie schools and had many loving teachers. I went to college at UC Berkeley, where I studied painting.
Art Practices
Over the years I’ve experimented with many creative channels, sometimes with serious intentions and sometimes just for play and connection with others, as creative collaboration is my favorite way to relate. I’ve played in the realms of theater, improv, directing, playwriting, filmmaking, songwriting, musical collaborations, dance, drawing, painting, and poetry. I also continuously explore EXA practices for personal discovery and healing.
Counseling Psychology and Expressive Arts Therapy
I earned my Masters in Counseling Psychology and Expressive Arts Therapy from California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco, in 2007.
I worked for several years as a supervised marriage and family therapist in clinical settings. I worked with homeless children, incarcerated youth and their families, dual diagnosis adults, and in addictions treatment, in the Bay Area and in Detroit.
Coaching Creative Ecosystems
Due to the twists and turns of life, I moved to Berlin, Germany and ended up staying for several years. That was creatively enlivening, but took me out of the reach of psychologist licensure possibilities at that stage, due to international non-alignment of education and psychology boards.
I began therefore to work in a non-clinical coaching frame, applying what I learned about creativity and psychology in companies and organizations. I also saw expat clients in a private practice coaching setting, working with artists and creatives.
Clinical <<< — >>> Collective
Since returning to the United States, I still train and coach teams and leaders in the topic of Psychological Safety and creative work, in the workplace psychology frame, through my organizational coaching work. I incorporate somatics and creative play practices to help the collective psyche to heal, play, and learn to collaborate fully.
I have also picked up the thread of working in clinical contexts again, through work in trauma informed addictions treatment for women (initially as an Expressive Arts Therapist, and to this day as staff writer).
I have the privilege of training Expressive Arts Therapy students through the Expressive Arts Therapy Institute of Oregon, with the lovely and inspirational Lanie Bergin and her team.
I continue to be passionately connected to all the ways that arts, healing, trauma, personal creative work, and collective consciousness evolution intersect.
Current Explorations
I am presently deepening my embodied understanding of the connections between nature-based psychotherapy and Trauma Informed EXA through continuing education courses.
I ongoingly do my own creative and exploratory process work. I do it for trauma recovery, embodiment, for play, connection with others, and to grow my ability to co-create harmoniously in collaborations of all kinds.
I also do it to welcome and ground the ongoing arrival of my bigger spiritual nature (my Inner Wild, or what the Internal Family Systems model might call Self Energy). I believe that each individual’s inner work serves the whole.
All of this I acknowledge, in thanks to the beautiful, loving Inner Wild, to whom we all belong!
What about you? What’s your story?
Say hi using the button below! Thanks for visting LionSong!