ABOUT OUR EXPRESSIVE ARTS TRAININGS

OVERVIEW OF PROGRAM

Sky Mountain Insitute's Expressive Arts Therapy Training is a 100-hour certificate program providing an intensive experiential foundation in the expressive arts. The program in designed to realign our relationship to our bodies, our place-worlds, and to the planet through a vision of a sustainable person-earth presence, a practice of relational depth, and an experience of imaginal competency in the expressive arts. We create an open, free space in which our expressiveness can thrive and find ways back into community.

WHAT IS EXPRESSIVE THERAPY

Expressive therapies provide a means for moving below the surface of the verbal, the known, and the routinized into the multi-layered levels of the Self-world unity. By accessing the forms, symbols, and wisdom that emerge from the core of our individual and collective experiences, the expressive arts engage the imagination and create dialogue between inner and outer realities. These forms and symbols access our capacity to make meaning, to heal, and to grow in a direction consistent with our authentic self and our interdependence within the earth-communities. Expressive therapy touches the creative core and speeds up internal processing, thus making it applicable to brief therapy, depth psychology, and the individuation process.

View Expressive Art Modalities and Artwork

TRAINING APPROACH

Participants will actively engage in the expressive process, thereby gaining a firm understanding of this approach from the inside out. The training involves the awakening of body-knowing and sensory attentiveness, the deepening of assessment and observational skills, individual and group work, and learning to be both a witness and a direct participant in the art-making and therapy process. Theory and practice are interwoven in each of the training sessions. Videos, PowerPoint presentations, and demonstrations will allow each person to integrate new materials with their own experience. A training manual and all art materials are provided.

THE TRAINING MODULES

The training is divided into four modules scheduled one weekend a month over a four month period. Each module begins on a Friday evening from 6:30 PM to 9:30 PM, Saturday from 9:30 AM to 4:30 PM, and Sunday from 9:00 AM to 4:00 PM. Each of the four modules begins Friday night with an interactive lecture introducing core orientations and themes, along with exercises to deepen and internalize our understanding of art-making and emergent images. Over the course of the program, these themes lay down a practical and theoretical understanding of the Expressive Arts. Extensive hands-on experience throughout the course builds familiarity and confidence, so that you can use expressive arts in your work, practices, community, or own personal growth.

View Expressive Art Modalities and Artwork

The modules move in and out of various expressive arts modalities: body-breath-sound, the sense of place and the ecological-self, visual arts, movement arts, collage, clay-work, language arts, performance arts, myth and story-making, and ritual and ceremony. This type of intermodal work deepens the expressive content of our living images as they interweave within the individual, the group, and the world soul anima mundi.

WHO SHOULD ATTEND

The training will assist those working in the helping professions - psychologists, interns, educators, social workers, and nurses, as well as artists, parents, and individuals wishing to deepen their competency in the expressive arts. Expressive tools and processes are central to unfolding the individuation process and deepening creative exploration. They are also invaluable in working with trauma, grief, developmental challenges, and to emotional and spiritual deepening.

GROUP EXPERIENCES

We facilitate a participatory co-creative group process and value an atmosphere of trust, acceptance and community. Each person is honored for who they are. There is no set map or expectations of what one should experience. We provide a nonjudgmental, dialogical setting conducive to allowing the natural flow of images to unfold.