What is Expressive Arts?

What is “Expressive Arts”?

Land Art

Expressive Arts creates a threshold for the authentic exploration of our lives. It allows us to explore ourselves and our place in the world through the wisdom of our senses. An expressive arts session begins with sharing, but soon moves into the arts, accessing alternative doorways. Through artistic expression, we can turn inward, tapping sensations of memories and glimmerings that are expressed best through imagery.

The raw material of expressive arts therapy is sensory awareness – bodily tension, color, texture, rhythm and weight, shapes energy level and sound.  Expressive Arts empowers human beings to utilize movement, poetry, visual art and sound as resources for insight and change.

Art is the bridge between inner and outer realities. Spontaneous art lives at the threshold, while the expressive arts experience (EXA) enlivens what lives at the margins of our experience.

EXA stimulates the prime language of the imagination. Images may be fearless, awe-inspiring or mundane.  

We can invite these images in, pay attention and tend to them while asking what else they need from us and what they bring that we need to know. 

We help you do this by approaching each image with respect, asking what it needs, allowing the artist to take the lead.

When we feel that the image has been explored, we spend time reflecting on what happened during the art making and how it might inform our lives in the present. What resources and insights arose that would be helpful to take into our daily lives?

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