Arts for Transformative Experience - Spring course starts on 04-May-2023

Welcome to the Arts for Transformation (Art Therapy) course.

Here you can find information on the course content, course dates, and a summary of the course instructor. 

All courses will be recorded and will be available to the course participants for an unlimited time. 

In this eight-week course (one hour and a half weekly), we are going to use Resource Tapping (Bilateral Stimulation) together with meditation and art therapy techniques to improve your mental well-being and reduce your challenging psychological symptoms. 

I encourage participants to practice kindness, respect, non-judging and trustworthyness in my meditation and art-making session. 

Why using painting/drawing and meditation as therapeautic tool:

Using art as a therpeautic tool gives you a voice to communicate your feelings and thoughts. This is because, when we use painting (or other form of arts), we activate the mid-brain, where our emotions and memories reside. Using the expressive arts almost always unlocks the pre-frontal cortex so that the hidden feelings and emotions can be spoken. Through examining the inner self, and the experiences that have shaped you, you have an opportunity to start recognising your strengths. Art therapy can help people deal with strong emotions, increase self-awareness and self-worth and decrease stress and anxiety.  Meditation is a great complimentary tool as it allows self-exploration and awareness of our minds, bodies, feelings and thoughts.

Why using Resource Tapping?

As a bilateral stimulation technique, tapping connect the left and right brain and calms prefrontal cortex. This will allow the processing of the intense emotions and feelings and help to rebalance the nervous system, activate the parasympathetic restoration cycle, and teach self-regulation.

How each session looks like?

In each session after a short recap on how the week has been, we will go through the following stages:

1. Guided meditation.  This stage has the key role in brining out the feelings and thoughts that we will work on during the session. In my work, I define meditation as silencing the consious mind to let the higher conciousness within us speaks with us. We start by calming our body and mind, followed by reading a short inspiring and powerful quote. Then you will be guided through a method of breathing and visualisation with a specific goal and outcome in mind. Each meditation finishes with a RT. This stage takes about 20-30 minutes.

2. The second section of the course is the art making. In some sessions, there are specific themes, but some sessions are open themes depending on the topic. This stage takes about 20-30 minutes.

3. Group discussion and post art making process. When the art making is compeleted, I faciliate the group to have a discussion and if they like share about their work. Also the participants will be guided to be able to summarize their feelings and thoughts. In some sessions we will use a RT technique to calm the mind and make the positive impacts lasting. This stage takes about 30-40 minutes.

Please note: To benefit from this course, you do not need to have any artistic knowledge or background.

What can this course helps you to:

1. Improve the symptoms of PTSD and depressive symptoms. 

2. Acquire a deeper understanding of the pattern of your thoughts and emotions. This will improve your behavioral and emotional patterns & thus you will have healthier emotions and manage your behavioral and emotional issues.

3. Increase mindfulness and present-moment-awareness: removing you from being on autopilot constantly and enabling you to take more logical and informed decisions about your life.

4. Increases resilience and coping abilities during stressful times.

5. Increase life satisfaction and general happiness.

6. Increase your creativity and your performance in your work. 

Summary of the topic for each session:

• Session one: The session's topic: "Understanding the basics". In the first session, we learn some fundamentals on the meaning and the impact of art, meditation and bilateral stimulation as therapeutic tools. We learn about the science of what we are going to undertake during the following weeks. You will learn a bilateral tapping technqiues to use during the sessions but also during the week when you are working on your own. 
• Session two: The session's topic: "Creating a Safe/happy place". This session is to create and tap into internal resources for healing when difficult emotions and experiences arise. The theme for art-making will be 'Safe-Place Drawing'.
• Session three: The session's topic: "Light in the brain". The goal of this session is to balance the brain by stimulating the right and left side brains. The balancing of the brain is like tuning the piano. This allows to process difficult experiences. It is also for removing the resistence mechanism in our head. The theme for art-making will be 'Bilateral Drawing'.
• Session four: The session's topic: "I love my strenghts and weaknesses".   
• Session five: The session's topic: "Inner Child Art and Meditation - session two". You are getting some meditative practice to be able to find out what is your character strengths and also connect to them. Then we work individually on our art to further deepen our understanding and then we share at the end of the session our thoughts to create a collective learning atmosphere. The theme for art-making will be 'Inner Child Drawing'.
• Session six: The session's topic: "Inner Child Art and Meditation - session one": In this week, we work on seeing the relationship between our emotions and feelings and how over the years they have influenced the way we are and the ways we react to situations and how our actions reaffirm our thoughts and feelings creating cycles of negative patterns and how we can break them.  The theme for art-making will be 'Inner Child Drawing'.
• Session seven: 
• Session eight: 

Time & Dates:

Every Thursday from 19:30 to 20:30 (CET time) - Eight weeks.

About the instructor:

Art and creative work have become part of me since childhood. I started to attend sketching and drawing classes when I was 11 years old and then continued for several years with various professional painters. Creating art not only has been a therapeutic tool for myself during difficult childhood times, but also gave me this ability to see the details, to be observant, and to see the beauty in shapes, forms, things & in people. Through art, I learned to observe and understand people and the ways they are. I could see their emotions and their feelings and I learned to make them comfortable to be who they want to be in front of me. Parallel to art, meditation has been a key element of well-being or simply 'being' in my life. Meditation has been part of my morning routine for many years now. In 2018, I got a severe brain injury that lead to a 1 and a half of solitude. During this period, I had the time to stay with myself and explore myself and give meaning to things that I worked with as Ph.D. candidate and researcher in the Pedagogy Institute of University of Oslo. Norway. When I was healed, I decided that I want to bring my academic knowledge and my passion for art and meditation into the practice of helping others to unravel their innate capacities and heal from their past traumas. So, I got my sertificate in  CBT and in "coaching through trauma" and did courses in various psychological therapy method. Then I started VARRAK. In my counselling and in my group work, I use art and meditation combined with the concepts from the psychology of human beings and eastern philosophy to help them connect to their emotions and feelings and also better connect with those around them and with life.