Sessions at the clay field are centered around touching and moving the clay. Touch is the most fundamental human experience. The focus is on haptic perception, or, how we sense and perceive with our hands. The clay will mirror each move the child makes. Every time children reach out with a motor impulse, they will receive sensory feedback and strengthen their implicit sensorimotor base. This is profoundly regulating for children and helps them repair developmental milestones that may have been missed earlier.

Sessions for children age 4-12. Parents are welcome to come to the clay room, or wait in the lobby.

My office is at the Old Mill Center for Children and Families, located at 1650 SW 45th Street in Corvallis, OR.

Sessions range from $0 (if family qualifies for grant funding) to $100/session.

What if, when you were little, and painting with bold colors, no one had made any comments? Just a half smile, a small nod, and gave you more paint and paper?

And by the time you got to high school, you knew how to drop into a river line of creativity? You’d have found the material that felt the best in your hands by then, clay or wood, paint or markers, fabric, glass …. something else entirely. The thing is you’d know your own creative voice, know how to listen for it, that moment just before a thought comes in.

People who have had those experiences –few in our culture—don’t all become artists. In fact, many don’t. Because focusing on a product to sell makes it hard to listen to our intuition. But they do know how to bring their innate, inherent creativity to bear on any aspect of their lives, from relationships to starting a business to walking in the woods.

Process art invites us to that space of creativity with no comments. We learn to listen to the soul’s voice, and let color, shape, image emerge from there. We won’t analyze or interpret. We enter the river of the muse, which is always there, after we cross over the torrent of our mind chatter.

Process Art taps into intuition and creativity, inviting the right side of the brain to give us perspective on our lives. Process art mediums we might work with include clay, paint, drawing or weaving. We create to explore areas of difficulty in our lives, and no importance is placed on the finished product. We often don't keep what we make. We engage the creative and intuitive functions of our right brain, and make something with our hands. Focusing on the experience gives us a chance to take a break from the thinking/analyzing/often critical part of our minds.

A specific modality that I am trained in is Guided Drawing, which uses bilateral rhythmic repetition to explore emotions and felt sensations, and release or change old patterns.

Sessions for individuals and groups.

Rhythm + Creativity: Dave Chiller of Common Pulse and I offer customized expressive art and music sessions that are deeply nourishing, building resilience and sparking creativity. These sessions combine rhythm and music with process art, where the focus is on the experience, not on a product.

These 2 hour workshops are offered individually, or in bundles of three, which gives participants a deeper, more integrative opportunity to open into the potential of creative expression.

Some of our topics include:

1- Clay -- tending the inner critic and inviting playfulness

2- Writing --- balancing joy and sorrow

3- Process painting --- cultivating bridges to wonder

4- Grieving bowls —- feeling the support of the natural world