This bi monthly group makes art making available to every participant as a resource for living a full, resilient life!
Over 12 months, this group course helps participants develop a working relationship with the sensing body as the primary creative partner. We practice living with our shape shifting journal as a daily companion, identifying and honoring our personal imagery as helpers and guides along the way.
With the support of your group, your images emerge through guided intuitive collage, meditative drawing, blind painting, journaling, movement, clay, drumming, sound, sand tray and dramatic enactment. You will be encouraged to take personal risks by inviting images – both delightful and disturbing – into your daily image quest journal. Through this process, they can be safely engaged and given space for you to explore how you relate to them, as well as how they shift or change.
Some childhood images may emerge as shy, fragile, frightening or uncomfortable, and some will be familiar and firmly rooted in your ancestry. You may recognize old images that still activate your body. However, when worked with objectively, you can begin to realize that these images only cloud the vision of who you are now. Through expressive arts we will explore how these and other images inform decisions in your life – for better or for worse.
Throughout group sessions, we build an intimate community. Together, we learn the expressive arts skill of ‘feedback methods’ to safely respond to the images that arise. Watch as this form of communication begins to extend into your daily life and you start to engage your world through new eyes.
Read Pamela's Story...
and learn the history behind Image Quest Sojourn!
Why would a person join and "Image Quest™ Sojourn" ?
No art background necessary!
This group is for you if you desire to:
~Make art but can’t find the time, the courage or the inspiration.
~Learn to access art making as a guide, a helper and a life companion
~Discover imagery (color, texture, scent, taste, images, sound and melody) that elicit body sensations or gut reactions and explore how these feelings affect your decisions every day.
~ Excavate imagery that you may not realize you carry from childhood and ancestral stories. This work helps you acknowledge them and then decide how to reintegrate old experiences, memories and images in a new way or let them go.
~Feel encouraged to experiment with new, fun visual art techniques in an enthusiastic spirit of play!
~ Identify your personal Image Council and learn to work with these images consciously, as helpers and guides.
~Build a creative support network with other women who have come to explore art in community, speak their truth, get messy and reassess who they are NOW .
~Feel supported and encouraged to develop a 15- 20 minute daily practice of visual journaling.
~Be expertly guided by a professional artist and expressive arts therapist through the chaos of the creative process culminating in a big, fat, juicy, pulsing journal!
~ Learn to set ego and judgement aside, allowing your journal pages to self organize into their own story.
~Realign with who you are NOW by creating a new way to perceive your story through the arts
This Rumi poem is a beautiful example of how images are at work in our lives.
Guest House
This being human is a guest house
Every morning a new arrival.
A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.
Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they are a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out for some new delight.
The dark thought, the sham, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.
Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond. – Rumi