Caring for Self While Caring for Others
The Reality of Caring Work
People who spend their lives caring for others can become very good at putting themselves last.
health professionals, mental health workers, veterans, first responders and those who work alongside them carry responsibility, uncertainty, distress and sometimes trauma as part of their everyday work.
There is often little space to stop and ask: How am I?
What These Offerings Provide
These offerings provide that space. Not another meeting. Not another presentation. Not another task to complete.
A genuine space to pause, breathe, create and reconnect.
Why Creativity?
Art offers another language.
Making brings us into the present. Music and imagery create spaciousness. Symbolism allows complex experiences to take form. Creative writing offers another perspective.
What You Might Experience
A chance to:
Step outside the professional role for a while
Pause and reflect
Reconnect with creativity and curiosity
Explore without performance pressure
Experience mindfulness through making
Connect with colleagues in a different way
Reflect on inner resources and resilience
Rediscover a sense of possibility
Built on Deep Experience
My approach has grown from more than three decades within mental health services. I have developed and facilitated Art Therapy programs with veterans, trauma survivors, health professionals and people experiencing a wide range of psychological difficulties.
I have seen first-hand how easily those who care for others carry the experiences of their work home with them.
The people who care for others need spaces where they too can be cared for. These offerings provide one such space.
How It Works
Offerings can be offered individually, as a tailored series or developed for particular organisations and teams.
We work with your schedule, your group size and your specific needs. Small groups (6–8 participants) work best.
Our Five Offerings for Health Professionals
02 — Reconnect with Joy & Vitality
03 — Give Form to What You Carry
01 — ARRIVE IN THE PRESENT
Introduction to Meditation & Mindfulness-Based Art Therapy
Meditation and art-making both operate in the language of silence. For those working in high-stress, high-stakes environments, this session creates a pathway out of hypervigilance and back toward baseline presence.
We begin with gentle meditation and breathing, creating a transition away from the constant alertness of caring work towards a quieter awareness of the present moment.
Using graphite and soft pastels, you'll explore movement, pressure, line and spontaneous image-making — letting each mark lead to the next, watching colours shift and change, discovering what emerges without deciding in advance where it should go.
Making becomes a form of meditation, stilling the mind and cleansing away the emotional residue of bearing witness to others' suffering.
“Art is the set of wings to carry you out of your own entanglement.” — Joseph Campbell
Materials: Graphite • Soft pastels
02 — RECONNECT WITH JOY & VITALITY
Art & the Creative Spirit — Rediscovering Your Inner Joy
Burnout often brings emotional numbing — a protective shutdown that keeps you functional but disconnected from the parts of yourself that know joy, spontaneity, and aliveness.
This session invites you to rediscover your sacred inner space through guided imagery, ritual, colour and spontaneous creation. You'll focus not on external demands, but on an internal sanctuary where you can experience your own will, your own intention, and your own possibility.
Through image-making, music and storytelling, you'll reconnect with curiosity and the parts of yourself that have become quieter beneath the weight of caring for others.
“Your sacred space is where you find yourself again and again.” — Joseph Campbell
Materials: Oil pastels
03 — GIVE FORM TO WHAT YOU CARRY
Art for Healing — To Grieve, To Create, To New Recognitions
Grief, loss, vicarious trauma and low self-esteem often live in places words cannot reach — buried beneath the professional requirement to be strong, capable, and unbothered.
This session provides a safe, multi-modal journey through secondary grief toward new meaning.
Using watercolour, inks, image-making, poetry and creative writing, you'll move between different forms of expression — letting an image lead to words, words lead back to an image. The creative process becomes a kind of excavation, moving inward to find and honour what you carry.
From there, something begins to take form that could not previously be expressed, opening pathways to new dimensions of meaning, hope, self-esteem and resilience.
Materials: Watercolour • Inks • Brushes • Paper
04 — DISCOVER MOVEMENT & INNER RESOURCES
The Creative Journey — The Hero/Heroine's Inner Path
Life is a journey, yet those in helping professions often become stuck in repetitive patterns — carrying others' burdens, feeling as though nothing is changing, losing sight of their own forward movement.
This session adapts Joseph Campbell's Hero's Journey as a structure for understanding where you are and how to move toward growth: Hearing the Call, Setting Out, Facing Obstacles, Reaching the Goal, and Bringing Back the Gift.
Using clay, tissue paper, leather, fabric and string, you'll give form to the different stages of your own journey. Obstacles become objects. Challenges become shapes. Inner resources become symbols.
Through this creative process, you discover what forward motion actually looks like for you — and reconnect with your own agency and resilience.
“The privilege of a lifetime is being who you are.” — Joseph Campbell
Materials: Clay • Tissue paper • Leather • Fabric • String
05 — COME HOME TO YOUR CENTRE
Journey to the Heart — Meditation & Mandala Making
The mandala — a circle in Sanskrit — has been used for thousands of years as a path to wholeness, integration and connection to inner wisdom. For those depleted by the demands of caring work, the mandala offers a profound anchor: a visual representation of wholeness and balance.
In this contemplative session, you'll move through meditation, visualisation and image-making to discover your personal symbol and visual meditation. The very act of drawing a symmetrical, circular form can lead to an experience of integration and calm.
You'll explore the five elements — Earth, Water, Fire, Air, and Ether — and integrate them into your mandala, creating a visual anchor for daily resilience, grounding and inner peace.
The mandala becomes a mirror of the center within you — the source from which everything unfolds, the place you can return to whenever you need to feel whole.
“To regard the universe as a living creature.” — The Life of Apollonius of Tyana
Materials: Colored pencils • Paints • Circular paper • Journaling materials
