WEB SIGHTS
EXPRESSIVE ARTS THERAPY WEB RESOURCES ONLINE
— Bruce Wochholz

The expressive arts—the integrated process of using movement, visual art,
music, journal writing, and psychodrama—are powerful, creative ways to
become aware of our feelings about world events, and to transform those
feelings into self-responsible action.
— Natalie Rogers, AHP Perspective Feb./ Mar. 2004, ahpweb.

April/May 2004

WEB RESOURCES

Expressive Arts Therapy is the focus of the last two issues of the AHP Perspective. The site of one of the seminar figures in the field, Natalie Rogers, is one of the best points of departure for the following exploration of resources on the Web. Her Creative Connection® process allows the expression of experience through the medium of the arts, within the “sacred space of creativity.” Person-Centered Expressive Arts Therapy main site, that is part of psychotherapistresources.com, further describes the process and “A Path to Wholeness,” from Natalie’s book The Creative Connection—Expressive Arts as Healing, available through the AHP Humanistic Bookstore ahpweb.org/booksense/bookstore2.html.

Training for Expressive Arts Therapy can be found in a wide variety of web sites and locations. PCETI Person-Centered Expressive Therapy Institute, offers an international certificate training program in person-centered expressive arts therapy (art, writing, movement, drama, and sound) in a supportive and playful environment, releasing the creative spirit and promoting personal transformation through creative expression. Faculty Shellee Davis and Anin Utigaard have articles in this issue.

A certificate program at Saybrook Graduate School, Expressive Art for Healing and Social Change: A Person-Centered Approach, incorporates the expressive arts with the person-centered philosophy as a basis for awakening creativity and self-empowerment.

Additional training sites include: Jane Goldberg’s Expressive Arts Training Institute; Glass Lake Studio Expressive Arts Training, and PSNCC The Center for Nonviolent Communication (The Puget Sound Network for Compassionate Communication) offers Person Centered Expressive Arts and NVC (nonviolent communication) blending training for empathic listening skills with expressive arts therapy.

The combination of expressive arts and person-centered listening . . . use art as a language to uncover deeper issues. . . . . The expressive arts allow us to transcend our analytic, rational mind and bring us into balance by engaging our imagination, intuition, and spiritual capacities. As we gain an internal sense of peace, our way of being in the world shifts, bringing inspiration and wisdom to others. — Natalie Rogers, “Expressive Arts for Peace,” AHP Perspective, February/March 2004

The National Expressive Therapy Association® is an effort to bring together the arts and healing, the official, not-for-profit, professional membership organization serving the profession of expressive therapy and expressive arts therapy .

A companion site is the National Institute of Expressive Therapy, , providing in-depth professional education and training in expressive therapy and expressive arts therapy. The home page shows a detail (at left) of Jackson Pollock’s Number 8.

IEATA International Expressive Arts Therapy Association is committed to providing a professional guild and network for its members, a global population from North America, and the International community, emphasizing an interdisci-plinary or inter-modal approach to creative endeavor. The field is grounded not in specific tech-niques or media but in how the arts can respond to the multitude of human experience from lifechallenging situations to self-realization. Natalie Rogers is the first recipient of its lifetime achievement award.

Arts and Healing Network site serves as an international resource for those interested in the healing potential of art, especially environmentalists, social activists, artists, art professionals, healthcare practitioners, and those challenged by illness. The impressive set of links from this site includes Art As A Healing Force which will immerse you in the field of art and healing, “art” that includes storytelling, poetry, music, dance, visual arts, painting, sculpture, “everything that is usually thought of as creativity.”

Metaphysical Paintings, has abstract painting, drawing, and printmaking galleries with more than 200 large-scale oil paintings based on Sacred Geometry’s connections to nature and art and art’s spiritual relationship to cosmic creation.

MEMBERLINKS IN EXPRESSIVE ARTS THERAPY
(These Memberlinks and sites are mentioned in Expressive
Arts Therapy articles in this Perspective issue and the last.)

Lisa Berg’s site Awethentic Life, describes the 8 Cs to living an awethentic life. Anne Black’s comfortbaskets .com contains articles, a newsletter, steps to help oneself and others with grieving, and offers sympathy cards and comfort baskets for sale.

Stewart Cubley is cofounder of The Painting Experience, an exciting adventure of free expression painting, exploring the power of spontaneous creation to touch your core and awaken your passion.

Christine Evans is cofounder of The Living Arts Center, which cultivates the rediscovery of creativity and the arts as vital, curative, and necessary aspects of healthy living, within an atmosphere of encouragement, inclusiveness, and mutual exchange.

The Center for Touch Drawing site provides resources to support “the process of creative awakening,” whether it is through doing Touch Drawing or interacting with the Touch Drawing images created by the founder Deborah Koff-Chapin.

The second site referenced by Mukti Khanna was the Gaza Community Mental Health Programme, a Palestinian, nongovernmental, nonprofit organization established in 1990 to provide comprehensive community mental health services to the population of the Gaza Strip.

Tino Plank who is on the Emovere site, the Latin root for the word emotion, which means “to move outward or onward,” has found that art, ritual, and close attention to dreams can reawaken the innate healing abilities.

Expressive arts therapy . . . is a process of discovering ourselves through any art form that comes from an emotional depth. It is not creating a “pretty” picture. It is not a dance ready for the stage. It is not a poem written and rewritten to perfection.
— Natalie Rogers “What is Expressive Arts Therapy?”

All the sites listed above can be reached at ahpweb.org under WEB RESOURCES. AHP Members are encouraged to submit their web addresses to WebSights columnist Bruce Wochholz at bwochholz@mac.com for review. Sites should be primarily educational or informational, and relate to AHP’s interests, but member sites may emphasize services, books, workshops, tapes, or other commercial offerings.