Ecopsychology — *notes on Art & Narrative Therapy — THE ALCHEMY PROJECT

During my graduate studies at Pacifica Graduate Institute, I had the pleasure of meeting not only a fine artist as one of my fellow students, but, a show he had up at the school during the years we were studying to become psychotherapists really influenced how I worked from then on.

He’s a friend of mine in Facebook!  And, he shared one of the photos from that exhibit with me.  Here it is.

The treatment paradigm I am designing for therapists is an Ecopsychological ART/NARRATIVE adjunct to classical psychotherapy.  Or?  It’s a place to make a FRIENDSHIP CIRCLE.  If you begin to think of your clients as books of their own lives — which they are — because all of our lives are a collection of lived experiences — what I learned from Dr. Robert while at school is a very large part of my new Ecopsychological treatment paradigm.

In my second placement I worked in a Rehab with clients just like these in the picture below.

One of the biggest things I learned was how to foster dialogue and their stories by looking into the stories of their tattoos.

Each tattoo was a story.

Sometimes the tattoos interlocked as stories, and sometimes it was as if the story of their lives was in those tattoos.

It was.  What they had done was to ink their lives onto their own skin.

Therapists who want to use THE ALCHEMY PROJECT I have designed as part of their practice are welcome to join in at this link.  Below is a link to begin your part in THE BOOK OF HEARTS.  You can have your clients make a blog to use ART and Narrative Therapy.

Instructions for how to do this can be found at THE ALCHEMY PROJECT — THE BOOK OF HEARTS link.

You can make a blog that is like a blank sheet of paper.

You could take a picture of a tattoo, and use that in the blog?

What I did with those was just ask the people I was seeing to write a little story about each tattoo.  One at a time.  We had these little books available to us to use at that site?

Blogs that get made by people for THE ALCHEMY PROJECT are totally private because they are being made by choosing a name as a “gravatar.”

What the Alchemy Project is about is WORLD HEART and WORLD SOUL.

Because everything in the world has a heart.

I have given a lot of thought about why I chose WordPress for this project?

It’s because they are so great, and so safe, and WordPress allowed me to design THE ALCHEMY PROJECT!

Without WordPress and their blogs?  This project would not even exist!

xxoo!

❤