Before the pandemic turned all of our lives completely upside down, I had a thriving, in-person retreat business. I held weekend and four day non-residential retreats at my Oakland studio and took people on week long residential retreats in fabulously beautiful places like the red rock landscape of New Mexico, the mountainous High Sierras, the forested California wine country and the California coast overlooking the ocean.     I loved the healing magic that would happen when I invited people to step out of their normal routines and leave home to devote a number of days in sacred circ ..read more

  As we are coming down to the wire for this next round of our Wild Heart Expressive Arts Teacher Training Program I’ve been thinking a lot about my own expressive arts journey My early days in terms of my own personal healing and also in my professional practice centered around body based approaches to creating conditions for wholeness and what is often referred to as talk therapy… or psychotherapy. I spent many fruitful and satisfying hours in my various cozy offices with individuals, couples and groups guiding people into trusting their own inner healer and inner wise person through so ..read more

One of the conversations I’ve been having a LOT with my students recently has to do with the struggle people feel around how much easier it is for them to be free and creative and fully alive when they are in painting class or on retreat with us, and how difficult it is to maintain that sense of freedom and creative flow once they are painting on their own. What they tell me is that they feel frustrated and disappointed in themselves for not being able to maintain that sense of creative liberation and they think there’s something wrong with THEM when they lose that thread of creative connectio ..read more

The past four years have been a sometimes grueling, often disturbing, seemingly unending process of slip-sliding transition, rocky instability, startling change and revolutionary upheaval. This process has been happening in both in the inner world of the psyche and the outer world of politics, the environment and societal norms. No one has escaped this process of shake down and shake up. If your life is still essentially the same now as it was four years ago I suspect that you have been in a cryogenic deep freeze. Or perhaps you’ve been vacationing on another planet. There is a cosmic demand f ..read more

Whenever I launch a new round of my Wild Heart Expressive Arts Teacher Training Program it takes me back through my journey of being an intuitive painting facilitator that began almost 30 years ago. And one thing that stands out for me was the challenge of filling my classes. I had been working primarily as a psychotherapist when I started my Creative Juices Arts business, and I was supporting myself nicely with that work. But intuitive painting … even though it meant I was still working in the realm of psychological and emotional healing… was something that not a whole lot of folks knew about ..read more

Seventeen years ago in 2007 I was facilitating a week long painting retreat in Hawaii. One of my long time students who was there with me started talking about how much she wanted to learn how to facilitate people around the creative process like I did. And proceeded to spend the rest of the retreat ..read more

My husband,  life and business partner in all things creative, Tim Lajoie,  has been writing more and more these days and this post is written by him.  I’m so enjoying how his wise perspective is contributing to the conversation about this powerful expressive arts process. When I was younger yellow was my favorite color. It ..read more

  The Wild Heart Expressive Arts Teacher Training Program begins in a little less than a month and as Tim and I are preparing and refining the curriculum it’s also making me think about some of the psychological, spiritual and philosophical roots and influences that inform what and how we teach.  Over the next week ..read more

This is Tim and I wanted share some thoughts about our upcoming Wild Heart Expressive Arts Teacher Training Program and one of our core philosophies: love!     “I’m going back in!” She said defiantly as she took a deep breath, pursed her lip, and wiped away the tear that was rolling down here cheek ..read more

It finally arrived! I had been waiting all morning, checking my phone, tracking the number of stops until it got here and then, “cuh-thunk”, the satisfying thud of a heavy box unceremoniously dropped on our front porch. I pulled the box inside and grabbed a knife to slice the cellophane tape along the top seam ..read more