One of the most profound and far-reaching ways we can evolve and transform our future is by bringing consciousness to our physical bodies.
Movement-based Expressive Arts Therapy is a somatic, arts-based approach to therapy that uses movement, imagery, drawing, writing and reflection to explore lived experience. It offers a low-skill, accessible way of engaging with emotional life through creative process and the body.
My work in this field has been shaped by over 20 years in professional dance. I trained in Expressive Arts Therapy at the Tamalpa Institute in California with Anna and Daria Halprin, and at the European Graduate School in Switzerland. This training informed a practice that bridges conscious living and art-making—exploring the relationship between what is experienced in the studio and how we live beyond it.
I am especially interested in supporting both dancers and non-dancers. When talk alone is not enough, I offer creative and embodied ways for people to encounter their lives and discover what matters most to them.
At the heart of this work is the understanding that life and movement are deeply interconnected. This connection not only informs dance, but also how we understand and move through our lives. In this sense, expressive arts can support reconnection, change and a greater sense of integration.
The body holds the full repertoire of our lived experience. When we begin to work with the body as a source of awareness, we can express through movement, visual art, poetic writing and sound—deepening our relationship to ourselves, others and the environments we inhabit.
This work is dance-informed, but not limited to any single form. It draws on movement, imagination and sensory awareness as they interact and inform one another. Simple movement explorations are often combined with drawing and reflective dialogue, supporting a process of creative inquiry that is accessible to all bodies. No previous experience is required.
Within this practice, expressive arts becomes a space of inquiry:
What am I experiencing?
What is emerging?
What wants to be expressed?
This way of working is influenced by thinkers such as David Whyte, who speaks of the “arrogance of belonging”—the necessity of allowing ourselves to take up creative space in our own lives.
As Elizabeth Gilbert writes:
“I am a child of the Universe… engaging with the experiment of my life.”
At its core, this work is grounded in the belief that human beings are meant to participate in creation—not as performance, but as a lived, embodied process of expression, meaning-making and becoming.
We are living in times that ask for imagination, flexibility and new ways of being with ourselves and each other. Expressive Arts offers one pathway for this: supporting people to reconnect with themselves, expand their capacity for expression and move toward greater wholeness.
Ultimately, this work is about returning to the body as a place of knowing—and from there, re-entering life with greater presence, creativity and connection.
Dancer: Ryan Genoe, “Blind As Night That Finds Us All”
Choreographer: Maggie Forgeron
Photographer: unknown
Not Just Any Body Part 