Creative Wellness Workshops
Bring Creative Wellness to your team or class.
Stress and anxiety are disorders that affect more people than ever before. When people create art, they enter a flow state, suspend busy thoughts and time stands still. This is Mindfulness, as people become absorbed in present moment experience, pay full attention to the art making and so it feels as if time stands still…..
The following workshops provide a range of Mindful coping strategies for professionals, teachers and students alike, by providing a non-verbal route to regulate the system. This helps people to self soothe and put some distance between ruminating thoughts, complex anxieties, family and workplace worries.
People also gain a sense of achievement and vitality through the creation of an artwork. These workshops are all accessible opportunities and are designed to help people discover a fail safe way to create, as they relax into the rhythm of a creative pause.
How does it work ?
All workshops are designed for groups, schools and workplace settings ; they can be tailored to suit the population, time schedule and the goals of the group. Workshops can be offered as part of a Wellness Initiative, a visual arts program or alongside a life skills program.
These workshops can be conducted Face to Face in your workplace, The Wild at Art Studio or Online.
Workshops can be offered as:
A short 1 hour / 1.5 hour or 2 hour session
A half day or whole day workshop
A series of weekly sessions
I will tailor the workshops to suit your group and their needs. The workshops can also be offered for Online Sessions using basic art materials that can be found in the home.
We offer workshops and sessions that respond to a variety of Workplace Wellness Issues.
Stress Reduction
Using Art to calm down and destress is about learning to bring the body back to centre when people feel agitated or unable to focus. These workshops provide mindful, calming opportunities that are accessible to everyone.
Destress Doodling
Intensively focusing on any activity can help to relieve stress by distracting and refocusing the mind. Guided doodling consists of making spontaneous marks in a repetitive and rhythmic fashion. These marks can take many forms, from abstract patterns or designs to images. This process offers opportunities for people to experience a time out from ruminating thoughts and can assist with better sleep.
Collage for Self Care
Creating an intuitive collage involves the free-associative choosing of imagery and words from old books and magazines. This is a projective technique, when people create without any preconceived intentions, the imagery, colours and words reflect people’s unconscious thoughts and emotions, which can help people to understand, organize and witness their “inner landscape”.
Mindful Mandalas
Making Mandalas can be a simple path to relaxation and inner focus and may help calm an anxious mind. In many traditions, artmaking is used for meditation, introspection, and healing. Using the circle as a container on the page, people find that making marks in a repetitive and rhythmic way helps with focus, and helps people to access a flow state. Themes can be planned with your group.
Managing Overwhelm
We do not always choose what happens to us in life, but we can choose how we respond. Creativity is an invaluable component of our lives, and its powerful healing properties are transformational in helping people to revisualize challenges and gain perspective.
Create Your Safe Place
The creation of a Safe Place that can be visited in times of worry and uncertainty allows both adults and children a way to access calm and safety in times of stress. Through a guided visualisation process, people are then able to imagine such a place and then to create that image using their own art materials. They can then visit that place anytime which helps people to feel a sense of agency in times of overwhelm.
Creating Balance for Self Care
Meeting the demands of daily life can leave people feeling overwhelmed and out of balance. Life calls for creativity in how we rearrange our lives around family, work and health. Experiencing balance IS attainable, it means listening to the needs of the whole self and responding with kindness. This project helps people create a visual self-care plan and create artwork that enables them to adjust balance.
Finding Hope
This project is designed to help people realize that there is always a way out and a pathway to hope even when they might be feeling overwhelmed and under pressure. Creating their own beacon of light in the dark by using the image of a lighthouse as a source of guidance. This is a step by step guided art workshop that incorporates personal art journaling alongside painting and collage techniques.
Creating a Self Care Strategy
“Balance is not something you find, it's something you create”. Creating Self-Care Strategies for a Sustainable Work-Life Balance can help employees gain a sense of empowerment and help them to grow and develop their own stress management strategies.
Tending Ourselves Self Care Review
Self-care is more than just taking a bath or getting a massage. It's a habit, a mindset, and a part of one's life that establishes and reinforces an ongoing sense of balance. This process helps people to identify specific areas where they are spending time and focus. This Self Care Review is a visual tool which helps people to see where they may need to make adjustments in order to regain a sense of balance. This can be combined with the creation of a Vision Board or Self Care Plan.
Self Care Vision Board
Meeting the demands of daily life can leave people feeling overwhelmed and out of balance. Life calls for creativity in how we rearrange our lives around family, work and health. This Vision Board helps people create a powerful visual which articulates goals and desires for work life balance for the year ahead. Manifestation happens when we put our thoughts into the world, we can do that verbally but we can also reinforce them when we create a visual.
Collage for Self Care
Ongoing Self-care means maintaining a reflective practice which encourages people to have a regular check in with themselves to review work life balance or just check in with their present moment emotion health. This workshop offers an accessible collage process which combining words and image making which enables people to take a “Time In” to access their own inner voice and to offer themselves some positive self talk or express their personal stories in a small collage.
Emotional Awareness
Helping people learn to recognise and to navigate overwhelming emotions is an ongoing process. These workshops are appropriate for adults and teens as they try to navigate complex and nuanced feelings and work well for very small children who love to develop a secret code to try and understand things.
Listening to the Body
Mental health is a state of well-being in which people realise their own abilities, can cope with the normal stresses of life and learn to thrive. People need tools in order to develop an understanding of how their emotions impacts their physical world. This workshop helps people to learn Self Awareness techniques through focusing and artmaking, so that they can tune in to their own felt sense and respond to what is found inside.
Emotion Wheel
Emotions can change rapidly and dramatically at times and can be very hard to identify and communicate. An Emotion Wheel is a simple communication tool that can be made in a variety of ways and it helps people build vocabulary and express feelings in order to try and better understand those. As people identify colours and patterns which correspond with feelings then an Emotion Wheel can be created using art materials.
Feeling Landscapes
An emotional landscape image can be a metaphor for how people are feeling at any time. It provides a way to explore complex feelings in a symbolic way and can build on the work of the previous exercise, the emotional colour wheel. This helps people to identify feelings, to externalize those and to gain some mastery over how they feature in daily life. The landscape can be literal or abstract and created using a range of materials.