When people praise me for something, I vow with all my being to return to my vegetable garden and give credit where credit is due.     ~ Robert Baker Aitken

In my work I hold a strong foundational understanding in the healing capacities of nature and creativity. When appropriate for the client, I like to facilitate interactions with the natural world and with expressive arts, helping people to access non-verbal or unconscious expressions in which personal themes, images, and metaphors can arise. Image and metaphor can provide valuable reflections and are often alive and rich with personal meaning.

Reflective interactions with art and nature can facilitate deeper understanding and insight and can also be a way for a person to access and embody a sense of resiliency, find authentic self-expression, and form a more integrated and holistic sense of them selves.

In working with individuals, youth and families, the expressive arts are an incredibly useful tool to externalize and create distance from “the problem”. Creating a certain amount of distance from a life problem can provide a new vantage point from which to explore possible solutions and opportunities to understand behavior.

In addition, play therapy and the expressive arts are especially useful for young people, helping them to express and discuss topics that they’re unable to approach using talk therapy techniques alone.

Whenever possible, I love to take young people into the outdoors, providing them with opportunities to truly encounter themselves. Encounters in nature can assist young people in building self-confidence and developing a sense of responsibility by overcoming different challenges that activities in the outdoors can provide.

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The Earth Would Die if the Sun Stopped Kissing Her     ~ Hafiz

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