Create, Transform, & Heal by Telling Your Story

I just returned from a three-week physical theater training intensive in the far northern California region of Humboldt County. Walking in rivers, running on the beach, daily tai chi, and schoolyard games were some of the activities we explored. It was my first experience in the possibilities of the whole body as an expressive, interactive instrument, and also so much of it felt familiar. Since 2009 (this is my tenth anniversary of researching the intersection of creativity and wellness!), I've been a student of how we reconnect body, mind, and soul, in service of evolving and growing as human beings.

In these ten years, I've learned that creativity means so much more than art, and that getting involved in making art is a great first step to confronting your issues. The issues that stand between you and greater self-understanding, between you and more freedom in your life, between you and deeper compassion for yourself and others.

Not just any art, though. The kinds of art that sets you free rather than keeping you bound in the same set of rules that have formed patterns of thinking and seeing for generations. There are certain prompts for art-making that encourage us - or even require us - to see and be in a different way. This difference in perspective is what can set us free of bound patterns and send us into a brand new set of possibilities. It's meeting that threshold over and over again that nudges us into growth and innovation. And through practice, we can establish new patterns, keeping them until they no longer serve what is present.

When I look at all the offerings I have listed below, it's a natural evolution of the same set of questions I have had since 2009. What does it mean to be free? What is art? And what do art and creativity have to do with health and wellness, and living a vibrantly expressed life?

By asking those questions relentlessly, and following my discoveries in response to those questions, I am now holding a unique set of threads, which I have begun to weave into a tapestry that only I could have made, an artifact of all the conversations I have had so far.

My current questions, which I bring into my work of storytelling and workshops, are, "Can your story, told in full honesty, be a way to write yourself back into belonging? Can we re-storyour wholeness together?".

In addition to the performances and workshops listed below, I am forming a new group starting this fall to explore healing from inherited trauma in adult children of immigrants related to Chinese and Taiwanese historical events of the 20th century, using embodied storytelling techniques. If you or someone you know would like to learn more about this, please contact me directly by email or phone.