Students all over the world learn theory in large, anonymous lecture halls, but then need to practice in small group tutorials. No junior doctor would be allowed to treat patients without the hands-on experience gained in practice sessions. The extensive use of PowerPoint presentations tends to dominate all conferences as a way of managing large groups, and it is the preferred teaching medium online. Zoom has made it possible to facilitate international tutorials over the past 18 months in ways unimaginable not long ago.

Much theory can be communicated in this way; however, our emotional brain craves the connection with others, and our brainstem needs the action patterns of practical application in order to integrate insights. Emotional connection, sensory awareness and the practice of new action patterns all benefit from small group learning.

Embodied Learning - Clay Field Therapy, Guided Drawing and Sensorimotor Integration

Students all over the world learn theory in large, anonymous lecture halls, but then need to practice in small group tutorials. No junior doctor would be allowed to treat patients without the hands-on experience gained in practice sessions. The extensive use of PowerPoint presentations tends to dominate all conferences as a way of managing large groups, and it is the preferred teaching medium online. Zoom has made it possible to facilitate international tutorials over the past 18 months in ways unimaginable not long ago.

Much theory can be communicated in this way; however, our emotional brain craves the connection with others, and our brainstem needs the action patterns of practical application in order to integrate insights. Emotional connection, sensory awareness and the practice of new action patterns all benefit from small group learning.

The Psychophysiology of Touch: Haptic Perception

Haptic perception is the perception through touch. Our hands are superbly fine-tuned perceptual instruments. They play a far more important role for art therapy than has been acknowledged so far…

We Need Touch to Regulate Our Anxiety

Another COVID lockdown, quarantine requirements, back to working remotely and the ensuing social isolation have again highlighted the profoundly human need for embodied contact and touch to regulate our nervous system.
In a London hotel room a few years ago I came across an essay by filmmaker Sebastian Junger where he discusses his experiences as a journalist in an outpost in Korengal Valley in Afghanistan in 2007. He describes war from a neurological perspective stating that while no one wants war, the majority of veterans long to go back because combat gives soldiers an intense experience of connection…

Being in Touch

Touch is the most fundamental of human experiences. It is also likely the most under-researched of our five senses. Most art therapists have little awareness of its importance being overly focussed on the optical experience. You can live a successful life being blind, deaf, lack smell and taste, but without touch, we most likely die…

The Sensorimotor Hands-Brain Connection

Haptic Perception describes touch-perception. While all artists and art therapy clients work with their hands, little attention has been given to the touch experience, when we work with crayons, paint, collage and clay, or play a musical instrument. However, in a society, where individuals spend increasing amounts of time online, children no longer play much outdoors, but instead press keyboards to engage with virtual realities, the need for psychological answers to this lack of touch connection becomes apparent. Not by accident body-focused approaches have been growing in importance in recent decade, and I am sure, so will haptic perception become an increasingly valuable therapeutic tool.

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.

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)

The Primary Shapes in Guided Drawing Series: The Bowl

The largest bowl we experience in our body is the pelvis, and while there are other places in the body that can be drawn as a bowl such as the diaphragm or the back of the head, the most common association with this shape is the pelvic floor. The pelvic bowl is the space in which we settle down to relax or which we dissociate, when we are ‘upset’. It is where our spine is anchored

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.

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