When you’re stepping into using art and creativity to heal or to grow or to manifest what you want in your life, how do you know where to start? “Make something” could mean literally ANYTHING (that’s part of its magic), so how do you choose where to focus?

One of the best ways to start exploring the healing and growing and manifesting potential of making and creativity is to hire an art therapist! We’re basically your guide on the path - it’s our job to create a way in for you.

Spontaneous gestural drawing is one of my favourite things to fill my art journal pages with.

That’s a lot of big words - what do they mean?

It's a way of making an image that encourages stepping away from our thinking mind and letting a different part of us choose colours and marks.

Instead of thinking about what colours, and what shapes, I like to let my eyes go a bit soft, a bit blurred, and instead FEEL the colours and shapes. What colour jumps out at me? Start with that. What shape feels nice to draw? Draw that.

I don’t have a 10 step process to anywhere.

My lack of answers sometimes dismays me.

I want to be able to tell you - here’s the path. Do these ten things, one after the other, and then you will arrive, and live happily ever after.

Alas…

Life, relationships, healing and growth don’t really work like that.

Know what they DO work with, though? Curiosity.

Trees (and the rest of nature) have no concept of progress. They grow because the conditions are right.

What if we did the same? Instead of trying to force progress, instead of frantically reading more self help books and beating ourselves up for not healing fast enough, what if we recognised that perhaps right now the conditions aren’t right for us to be where we’d like to be?

And instead of forcing ourselves, we started creating the right conditions for us to heal, grow and thrive?

Know what’s missing lately?

Silliness. Absurdity. The whimsical and strange.

Not as a way to bypass the weight of the world, not as a way to stick your head in the sand or your fingers in your ears singing ‘la la la I’m not listening’ (although - good strategies, sometimes necessary).

But as a way to help us stay human, and to resource us for the hard times.

If you're someone who is saving a nice journal (or two, or three) for ‘someday’ when you have a nice enough thing to use it for, this is your gentle encouragement to get out the nice journal, and use it. Not someday, (someday is not a real day) but today.

Use the nice journal.

When your feelings feel bigger than you, what do you do? There’s not enough room in you for all of your anger, there’s too many tears for you to ever cry them all, the heaviness pins you to the floor, life is overwhelming and confusing, the bigness of what you’re experiencing is too much and it’d be so nice to have somewhere else to put it.

That’s one of the things that art therapy can help with - it gives you somewhere else to put some of those things.

One of the first things many people say when they find out I’m an Art Therapist is:

“Oh, I couldn’t do that, I’m not creative. I can’t even draw a stick figure.”

If this is you, I have good news for you!

You don’t have to be talented, know how to draw or see yourself as creative to benefit from art therapy. Here’s why.

When we’re small, we base our understanding of who we are and how we should behave by noticing the world around us. If we don’t learn to question this understanding as adults, we can end up feeling out of place in one or more areas of our lives, of not feeling authentically ourselves, in a way that’s hard to define.