Our soul will sometimes let us know that it is time to heal something within us through an experience of suffering. We will find ourselves in a place of distress that sometimes has no discernible source. We just know that we’re miserable, hurting and unhappy. This is how the invitation reveals itself. So the first step to breakthrough is through the process of inquiry.   It’s being willing to ask the question over and over again… what’s going on? What’s at the root of this suffering? And then continuing to stay open with compassionate relentlessness, petitioning your inner wisdom ..read more

In my role as an intuitive painting facilitator and guide I am deeply dedicated to the principals and practices of the Wild Heart Expressive Arts Intuitive Painting process. And one of those practices is the invitation to complete any painting that you start before you begin another one. It’s actually more of a strong suggestion than it is an invitation but I try to be as nice as possible about that fact. And that practice looks like this. When someone in one of my intuitive painting classes thinks they are done with a painting they have been working on I ask them to have a conversation with m ..read more

When I turned 50 ( almost 22 years ago) I had just started holding my week long painting retreats at the Ghost ranch Conference Center in Abiquiu New Mexico a couple of years prior. During that retreat I had a number of my long time students in attendance. These were people who had been in my world for a long years and we had a deep relationship of love and trust. In celebration of me entering this new decade my beloved students proposed a birthday ritual that included painting my body with the tempera paints we used in the workshop. What they wanted was for me to strip totally naked but I sai ..read more

There’s an interesting form of resistance that regularly shows up in my intuitive painting classes that people don’t actually recognize as resistance. And it looks like this. What we encourage our students to practice as they are painting is their full range of aliveness. But a lot of folks define aliveness as something that is ONLY positive. Or pleasurable. Or upbeat. This common approach to creativity views art making as something that is supposed to make them feel good at all times. And what they call feeling good is often a form of avoidance. They want to feel calm. They want to feel peace ..read more

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