The Body Speaks...

To the left is an image of the participants at the recent "Mapping Our Internal Landscapes: A Felting Workshop" at the Smith Center...for Healing and the Arts in Adams Morgan, DC. Participants rested on mats and visualized sending messages of gratitude and healing to various parts of the body. Then they created a felted landscape, incorporating various elements that had come up during the visualizations. I was moved by the creativity, openness and forthrightness of the resulting images. Vulnerable, yet strong, an overarching theme of courage emerged. Figures flowed with the waves, merged with the trees, and embraced parts of themselves that needed special healing energy. Elements from nature, such as trees, roots and leaves, dragonflies and shells made their way into the work. One participant, whose image, for me speaks to the whole theme of the workshop, created a body with a mouth in her belly, allowing the body to tell it's own message, to speak its own truth.

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More photos from "Mapping Our Internal Landscape..."

Arts therapists and other therapists explore felting at the Spring Institute...

Earlier this month, wet felter and art therapist, Sarah Pitkin and I offered a workshop at the Expressive Therapy Spring Institute in Arlington, VA, an expansion of the workshop we offered for the Expressive Therapy Institute in New York last November. This time we allowed more time for the actual felting, and participants explored the possibilities inherent in needle felting and wet felting. They created needle felted faces and then made either wet felted rocks or rattles. There was even time to create a simple landscape with felt. The most interesting part of the workshop for me was hearing the workshop participants explore the ways in which they could apply felting to their therapeutic practices back home.

One woman who works with children experiencing trauma envisioned using felting to create a box to hold difficult feelings. Another mused about mothers and daughters, wondering how the felted dolls might deepen the conversations between the mothers and daughters she works with. All responded to the tactile qualities of the felt, to the soothing process of felt-making and the built-in learning about frustration tolerance that can occur. I always learn so much from the participants in these workshops and will be thinking about this for a while to come. 

Photos from the Spring Institute workshop of Doll heads, rocks, rattles and explorations with wet felting.