Healing Trauma

An iceberg can be a symbol of our different memory system. There is the cognitive part visible above the water line, capable to rationalize and symbolize, and there is the huge hidden part floating underneath the surface. Implicit memory systems are not visible and have little words, if at all. They describe our emotions and all other body memories including learnt action patterns such as walking, eating with a spoon, or riding a bike. Our survival responses from the autonomic nervous system are implicit, just as our heart rate is not something we need to think about in order to make it pump our blood.

The Transformation Journey

The concept of a topside world and an underworld is as old as human consciousness. We have the universal experience of day and night, of light and darkness. The day-light, sunny side is associated with what we know, what we can see and what is familiar, also with rational, logic, linear thinking and planning. The nightly dark side is unknown, mysterious and equally fascinating as it is terrifying. Here we perceive with our intuitive mind, processing the surroundings in associative image-based patterns. The night-side is the world of our dreams and the source of creative ideas. This underworld has different layers of darkness, which we can associate with the moon cycles. At full moon we can perceive, often with heightened awareness, what wonders this unknown world entails, whereas the dark moon can be filled with terrors and existential danger.

Rhythmic Movement as a Vital Trauma Response

In recent weeks I find myself watching dance and movement video clips wherever they appear on social media. My soul craves them. On the days when I cannot go out and walk, I turn off all the lights at night, search for streaming Gabrielle Roth and dance to the 5 Rhythms in the dark. The many posts on Facebook inviting me to visit famous art galleries all over the world, to take virtual tours through the pyramids, and glide along the walls of the Sistine Chapel soon feel strenuous, like yet another thing to focus on. My eyes are hurting from too much screen time and the incessant online bombardment with visual stimuli.

Trauma Healing at the Clay Field: A Conversation with Cornelia Elbrecht

A Conversation

I want to ask about your history with Work at the Clay Field. Where did it all begin?

Well it started when I was in my early twenties and I was studying at the Institute for Initiatic Therapy in the Black Forest. It was a multimodal training and we studied art, music, drama and movement therapy, body work, martial arts, yoga, meditation and Jungian Analytical Psychology….

A Visual Meditation: The Higher Consciousness

One of the core tools in my practice is a visualisation exercise I learnt in the nineteen seventies from Jungian analyst Phyllis Krystal (Krystal 1995). It is a visual prayer that can communicate a profound sense of safety flowing from a spiritual core that remains undefined or as you like to imagine it. I apply the exercise consistently as a visual aide to picture the client-therapist relationship and how both relate to what she called the ‘Higher Consciousness’. I introduce it to almost all groups I facilitate, and frequently meditate like this on my own.

ANZACATA Guidelines for Art Therapists during COVID-19

e good hygiene practices, washing your hands often with soap and water for at least 20 seconds especially before and after each client.
Ask clients to do likewise and use the sign provided by Australian Physiotherapists on entry to your practice. Some members are emailing clients before visits to remind them of hygiene practices (and to make a new appointment if unwell).
Practice ‘social distancing’, but perhaps explain the need for it and/or call it ‘physical distance’ (1.5 metres)….

Sensorimotor Art Therapies

This professional development Art Therapy training is designed for mental health professional who wish to integrate a trauma-informed, healing-centred, bottom-up approach into their practice. Including Guided Drawing, Clay Field Therapy, Collage and Totem Making. Facilitated by Cornelia Elbrecht and The Institute for Sensorimotor Art Therapy and School for Initiatic Art.

The Primary Shapes in Guided Drawing: The Lemniscate

Lemniscate is the term for a horizontal figure eight. Of all the primary shapes this is the least threatening. It is without exception experienced as positive rhythmic flow without any threat of overwhelm.

The Primary Shapes in Guided Drawing: The Spiral

The spiral pattern of growth is found throughout nature as rolled-in fern, in shells on the beach, in the shape of an ear, in a fingerprint, the umbilical cord and how an embryo is curled up in the womb.

“Both the winding forms of the intestines and the brain have been depicted in religious and symbolic art as the labyrinth of spiral path, which creates, protects, and lays the foundation of the new town or centre”. (Purce 1992)

Bilateral Body Movements

At the last weekend workshop we made “gymnast's sticks” from driftwood and branches we found in nature. Cut them to size to make handles, then decorated them with pieces of dyed cheese cloth, other fabric, and ribbons. We painted the materials, some embroidered it and carved “magic” into their sticks. Dancing with music, alone, in pairs and as a group with our sticks was not only fun, it also activated our mirror neutrons, created group synchronicity and connections.

The Primary Shapes in Guided Drawing Series: The Arch

Over the next few months, I will share insights about a couple of the main shapes that characterize this approach but for now we shall take a more in-depth insights of the Arch. The structure of Guided Drawing is based on a number of primary shapes, which all have a universal, archetypal quality.

The Significance of Colour

There are many different ways to approach the subject of the meaning and significance of colour. In art therapy sessions I encourage clients to honour colour in so far as to choose it according to the felt sense.

Blog & Essays

A Conversation