Creative Juices Arts Blog

Last week I spent a little time making art with other folks in an online creative community. Before we started our creative process we were asked to set some kind of intention for the art we would be making. And what came to mind immediately was the question of what...

“How ARE you???” That’s the first question I ask a friend or compatriot when I meet them for a zoom or phone call or a lunch date and the answer I invariably get is a groan or a head shake, a nervous laugh or maybe an eye roll, followed by something like “ I have NO...

  Time for a little astrology.   As many of you may have already heard, we are going through a major astrological shift right now. And that shift is the planet Pluto changing signs, going from Capricorn ( where it’s been for the last 15 years), into the sign...

  I recently celebrated my 72nd birthday so the process of aging is very much on my mind. And in honor of that birthday I took the past few weeks off from teaching the online classes ( I’m back to my regular teaching schedule in October) to deal with some nagging...

  Our soul will sometimes let us know that it is time to heal something within us through an experience of suffering. We will find ourselves in a place of distress that sometimes has no discernible source. We just know that we’re miserable, hurting and unhappy....

When I turned 50 ( almost 22 years ago) I had just started holding my week long painting retreats at the Ghost ranch Conference Center in Abiquiu New Mexico a couple of years prior. During that retreat I had a number of my long time students in attendance. These were...

There’s an interesting form of resistance that regularly shows up in my intuitive painting classes that people don’t actually recognize as resistance. And it looks like this. What we encourage our students to practice as they are painting is their full range of...

Before the pandemic turned all of our lives completely upside down, I had a thriving, in-person retreat business. I held weekend and four day non-residential retreats at my Oakland studio and took people on week long residential retreats in fabulously beautiful places...

  As we are coming down to the wire for this next round of our Wild Heart Expressive Arts Teacher Training Program I’ve been thinking a lot about my own expressive arts journey My early days in terms of my own personal healing and also in my professional practice...

One of the conversations I’ve been having a LOT with my students recently has to do with the struggle people feel around how much easier it is for them to be free and creative and fully alive when they are in painting class or on retreat with us, and how difficult it...

The past four years have been a sometimes grueling, often disturbing, seemingly unending process of slip-sliding transition, rocky instability, startling change and revolutionary upheaval. This process has been happening in both in the inner world of the psyche and...

Whenever I launch a new round of my Wild Heart Expressive Arts Teacher Training Program it takes me back through my journey of being an intuitive painting facilitator that began almost 30 years ago. And one thing that stands out for me was the challenge of filling my...

Seventeen years ago in 2007 I was facilitating a week long painting retreat in Hawaii. One of my long time students who was there with me started talking about how much she wanted to learn how to facilitate people around the creative process like I did. And proceeded...

We’re coming down to the wire and The Wild Heart Expressive Arts Teacher Training Program begins in one short week on April 29th. And as Tim and I are preparing and refining the curriculum it’s also making me think about some of the psychological, spiritual and...

The Wild Heart Expressive Arts Teacher Training Program begins in a little more than two weeks on April 29th and as Tim and I are preparing and refining the curriculum it’s also making me think about some of the psychological, spiritual and philosophical roots and...

  The Wild Heart Expressive Arts Teacher Training Program begins in a little less than a month and as Tim and I are preparing and refining the curriculum it’s also making me think about some of the psychological, spiritual and philosophical roots and influences...

One of the first things you will hear me talk about when you come to one of my classes, workshops or retreats is that here in these circles we are focusing on and placing greater value on the process of creation instead of primarily valuing the finished product.      ...

This is Tim and I wanted share some thoughts about our upcoming Wild Heart Expressive Arts Teacher Training Program and one of our core philosophies: love!     “I’m going back in!” She said defiantly as she took a deep breath, pursed her lip, and wiped away the tear...

Whenever Tim and I take another group of students through our Wild Heart Expressive Arts Teacher Training process we inevitably hear from folks how they’ve never experienced anything quite like the sense of healing and love and liberation that happens for them in our...

As Tim and I go through the process of interviewing folks for our upcoming teacher training program, we often get the question of how do I know if this Wild Heart Expressive Arts Teacher Training is right for me? This is a HUGE question on a certain level because it...

When I was 8 years old and in the third grade we were given the assignment to write our autobiography. I don’t remember much about what I wrote. In my memory, I don't see words, only the thin, lined composition notebook with the black and white speckled cover and my...