The Expressive Arts are an innovative and inclusive field of education and therapy that combines various creative mediums for the purposes of personal growth and community development. By interweaving multiple mediums into one process, we engage with the questions in our lives from a diversity of ways of knowing. Each medium brings its unique strengths and challenges, touches different parts of us, and joins in relationship with each other medium in the process to catalyze a whole “story” or “picture” greater than the sum of its parts. In this work, we venture beyond what we already think we know, encounter and cultivate new resources, perspectives, and possibilities.
Art is For Everyone: The expressive arts approach values equally the creative spark in everyone, regardless of relative skill level or experience. It is not technical prowess or even planned outcomes that make the work “succeed;” rather, it is the creator’s sensitivity to their own authentic experience while making which catalyzes healing and change. Whether or not one has previously identified as an “artist” in any particular medium, expressive arts practice naturally deepens each person’s connection to their creative source and expands the art-making process itself into a medium for growing self-awareness, present-centered mindfulness, and communication.
Personal Growth & Community Development: Whenever we engage in creative explorations, we encounter our inner lives – the feelings, histories, imaginings, desires, fears, habits, impulses and inhibitions that live in our body-minds, and even the attitudes we carry about the creative process and life. We encounter, clarify, and explore this inner terrain made workable through the art mediums. Thus, entering into the “serious play” of expressive arts work, we are able to more deeply understand our histories, heal our wounds, and cultivate our gifts.
Through creative expression, we bring our stories into the world and allow ourselves to be seen in meaningful ways – even if only witnessed by ourselves. As rewarding as personal practice in the expressive arts can be, it is also a delight in community and interpersonal spaces. Through creative improvisation, collaborative ritual, sharing one’s material and witnessing others in ways that deeply honor one another, any many other means, the expressive arts bring extraordinary authenticity, solidarity, and enlivenment to relationships.
The Tamalpa Life/Art Process is a movement-based expressive arts approach that integrates movement/dance, embodied anatomy, visual arts, creative writing, vocal work, performance techniques, and therapeutic practices. Ash is a Certified Tamalpa Practictioner by the internationally renowned Tamalpa Institute. Ash provides artful structures through which clients encounter themselves and the world in new ways; a supportive environment in which personal truths can be expressed and the authentic self can be witnessed; and resources for clients to cultivate lasting change in individual and community life.