Mindful Journeys:
A women’s support, exploration, transformation group
– What gets in the way of your true goals in your life?
– What keeps you stuck?
– How to get things flowing with more ease?
These are great questions!
This playful, fun group can show you ways to find the answers for yourself.
Ways that you can continue to use in your life.
Let the languages of art, movement and play speak to you from your deep wisdom
Let your mindful awareness observe, without judging your life path, itsroadblocks and also the experience of open spaciousness.
Using
*Mindful awareness
*Many different art mediums,
*Authentic movement (a movement therapy form that uses witnessing and moving to bridge the conscious and unconscious)
*Body tales (a movement form using voice and story)
*And other inspirations for deep play and fun,
Learn to tap into your own guiding
wisdom to touch a deeper sense of yourself and
your own knowing, while making connections
with others in a caring supportive community.
No art experience necessary!
Call now to add your name to list.
Group starts when there’s enough participants.
To Pre-register or for more information: brigidry@yahoo.com
or call Brigid Ryan at 831 515-4104
www.ryantherapy.com
Brigid Ryan is a licensed Marriage and Family Therapist in private practice. She has a BA in theatre arts/ dance and a MA in psychology. She has led expressive arts groups for 5 years. She is an advanced student of Hakomi Therapy and is trained as a Body Tales teacher. She studied Authentic Movement with an Authentic Movement Institute founding member. She is a contributing author of the Spiral: Exploriing the between.
In this support (exploration, transformation) group for women we will explore creativity, which I’ve seen, is also a way to explore
youour own power. I think that the creative impulse comes from a deep connected place in each of us. As we get more in touch with this impulse, we get to know ourselves in a deeper way; getting in touch with what we deeply want in our lives. In the group there’s support created to practice using your creative power to make the changes in your life in ways that you consciously choose to.
Mindfulness, the ability to observe what’s going on internally without judging it, adds a huge transformative power to this exploration process. New brain science research is now finding that mindfulness, which has been used in meditation, yoga and tai chi for centuries, has huge impacts on the brain. It boosts working memory, reduces stress, increases the ability to focus, decreases emotional reactivity, strengthens the immune system, increases cognitive flexibility, helps with fear modulation and increased sense of well being among other things. As we increase our self-observing ability, we increase our ability to have a new, wider perspective. Mindfulness actually creates new neuro-pathways (physical nerve connections) in our higher brain that creates new possibilities and options for change in our lives.
Another big part of the focus of the group is about giving yourself time and also enough safety to really be able to play and be yourself. I see play as very intertwined with creativity and it really is our original way of learning. But you can’t truly play if you don’t feel safe. So safety is my priority in the group, both in creating a safe environment and a sense of group connectedness together. There is no pressure to produce anything, do anything or be any way that doesn’t feel right to you, so you get to choose your own level of risk-taking. I’ve seen that when there is a non-judging support and also a spirit of play and exploration that much can grow, in art and in life. I invite you to join us to play and explore together.
Here is a basic, but flexible, format for the group, to give you more of a sense of what we do:
Arriving – 5-10 minutes of either stretching and moving on our own or a mindfulness meditation.
A check-in – where each person has 3-5 minutes to say what’s been going on for you lately, what’s up for you, anything you would like the others to know about you. Sometimes I’ll suggest a theme question that you can answer in the check-in if you choose.
An art exploration – Often this includes a visualization or experience as inspiration and then exploring using different art mediums, such as collage, drawing, painting, clay, movement.
Some things we’ve done in the past have been:
* A visualization about what nurtures you in your life and expressing this in a collage
* Experiencing, the sense of wonder about expressing art as a child and from this place finger-painting
* Create an image out of clay of your internal critic. What does it have to say? Letting it talk
* Moving with your eyes closed following an internal impulse to move and then drawing or writing about your experience and sharing this with a partner.
Closing – Then we come back together to share about the experience.
I look forward to meeting you and playing together… Brigid