Expressive Arts Therapy
Expressive Arts Therapy (EXA) interweaves the creative arts therapies: dance movement, sound/music, visual art, performance, and writing. EXA works with the senses, imagination, art materials, musical instruments, nature, the body, and our voices to respond to life with poeisis - the creative act.
The purpose of EXA is not only to heal from what has hurt us, but to unify with the richness, depth and joy of life, through expanding our creative, capable nature.
I facilitate Expressive Arts Therapy “play sessions” that help people move into safer, more enjoyable experiences of aliveness in the here and now.
Internal Family Systems Therapy meets EXA: Expressive pArts Work
Internal Family Systems Therapy (IFS), also called Parts Work, is a non-pathologizing, systems-oriented healing model that works with Parts, or subpersonalities, to heal inner relationships and restore unity.
Parts Work and EXA work beautifully together. Using EXA practices to make friends with our Parts and to embody Self energy is life-changing!
Please note that LionSong is IFS-informed, which means that I have some training, understanding, and experience with the model, but that I have not undergone the official IFS certification process. Rather than being IFS-first, I integrate what makes sense to me of IFS into my primary healing model, which is Expressive Arts Therapy.
Other Models Informing LionSong
In addition to Internal Family Systems, I use a Person Centered, Trauma Informed, and Process Work -minded approach. I have a Masters in Counseling Psychology and EXA from CIIS.
Please note that I am not a state-licensed psychotherapist at this time. My work currently falls under the scope of practice of coaching and facilitation, and is not meant to replace work with a clinician. Read more about my scope of practice here.
EXA experientials in Sessions
Experientials stimulate somatic awareness, connect us with inner imagery, facilitate healing moments among the Parts in our psyche, and lead to new, exciting, and emotially reparative “aha” moments.
Experientials help embody positive change and growth, fortifying them to be felt as real here and now, located inside the body’s present moment sense perception.
You are in charge of how extensively to bring EXA experientials in.
Booking A Session
My fee for coaching and Expressive Arts Therapy facilitation is $144 per hour. Sessions may be booked for couples, families, children and creative collaborators.
Sessions are held remotely over video conferencing software most of the time. To initiate a booking process, send me an inquiry using the button below. I will respond to your email with information about the next steps.
Please inform yourself about my scope of practice before you pursue working with me. Thank you for your interest!
Try LionSong-style EXA at home
In facilitated EXA sessions, experientials are unscripted, arising organically out of the work we’re doing together. Self-facilitated EXA isn’t quite the same, because the aspect of relationship is central for healing. But solo EXA spelunking is healing too! I have placed many records of my own creative healing encounters with the Inner Wild in the Ideas section of this site, for anyone to use on their own authority. Here are some explorations you may want to try to get your feet wet:
Places, Grandmothers, or True Size for honoring yourself and where you come from
Body Map, Grounding or Containment for somatic skills explorations
Disasterpieces, Awkward Collaboration, Dictionary Song and Group Musical Play for playfulness
Parts Work Comics and Parts Work Dialogues for working with Inner Parts
Sandplay and Make Your Own Deck for vivifying intuition
For many more prompts, explore the LionSong IDEAS page.
My Background and Training
I grew up in a big family on a working organic produce farm in Lompoc, California. I went to college at UC Berkeley, where I studied painting.
Art Practices
Over the years I’ve experimented with many creative channels, sometimes with serious intentions and sometimes just for play and connection with others, as creative collaboration is my favorite way to relate. I’ve played in the realms of theater, improv, directing, playwriting, filmmaking, songwriting, musical collaborations, dance, drawing, painting, and poetry. I also continuously explore EXA practices for personal discovery and healing.
Counseling Psychology and Expressive Arts Therapy
I earned my Masters in Counseling Psychology and Expressive Arts Therapy from California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco, in 2007.
I worked for several years as a supervised marriage and family therapist (what is now called an AMFT) in clinical settings. I worked with homeless children, incarcerated youth and their families, dual diagnosis adults, and in addictions treatment, in the Bay Area and in Detroit.
When I moved to Berlin in 2010, I shifted to a coaching and facilitation frame. Since returning to the US in 2015, I have stayed primarily in the coach, teacher and facilitator role.
I continue to be passionately connected to all the ways that arts, healing, trauma, personal creative work, and collective consciousness evolution intersect.
What about you? What’s your story?
Say hi using the button below! Thanks for visting LionSong!