The Lively Center: Expressive Arts Mentoring for Pracitioners, rooted in Relational Ecology

The Arts are a powerful source of sustenance for humans, and have been since the beginning of human life. Earth is a place of call and response; Life is a movement; Life is inherently creative.

Therapy can be fun, playful, joyous, innovative, curious, and deeply satisfying, for clients and therapists. The arts offer currents that hold and inspire us, surprise and remind us, evoke new wisdom and confront us with what we are running from. The arts help us move through what is bound, give form to what is hidden, release what is boxed up, celebrate what is amazing, integrate what is growing and changing. The arts help us find our own soulful magical voice and also help us push back, resist, disobey, agitate, and call for change!

So versatile and so life-affirming. Come dance, make art, sing, play, improvise, conjure, and write about it! Come learn with me about the arts in therapy and group facilitation practices.

FAQs

What is Relational Ecology?

We humans are nestled in relations with all beings of Earth, with Earth, with Air, Fire, and Water. We depend upon these relations for our life. Our body is part of Earth’s body. Our breath is Earth’s breath, we breath with all plants and all animals to create this life-giving atmosphere. The water in our body was once a mountain stream, once raindrops falling, once a drink in another’s cup.

Indigenous Elders and Buddhist Dharma teachers are very clear that reciprocity, interbeing with all beings, is the fundamental reality of life of Earth. Yet, we have an overculture that denigrates relationships, that denigrates Earth, that exploits people and other animals for profit.

Relational Ecology is a way of practicing our woven-in relations, with Earth, Sky, Water, Fire, one another, through embodiment and movement, through breath and rooting and rising, and through listening, through call and response with one another….remembering our place within the Whole.

Relational Ecology is rooted in Liberation praxis - this is an undoing of domination methodologies, a curious way of pondering and wondering and practicing together to find and co-create alternatives to the relational patterns that have led to so much destruction, collective pain and traumatic injury.

Come co-create.

What is the hourly tuition fee for individual/group mentoring and consultation?

$225 US or $315 Canadian, per hour, prorated for session length for individual and group mentoring/consutation sessions.

Folks often decide to gather a group of practitioners together and split the fee. To choose this option, simply decide on a time in the booking calendar that works for your group and create a booking. I will send a zoom link to you on the day of the session.

How do I pay?

You may pay for your session in one of the following ways, on the day of your appointment:

Credit card - a credit card number is recorded at time of booking to reserve your spot; if you would like to be billed to this card, make a note while booking.
etransfer (only available in Canada): info@katrinacurry.com
venmo (only in the USA): @katriona-ilsedottir
paypal: @katrinacurrymft direct link

Can I work with you online, or in-person?

Both!

I am based in Victoria, BC, Canada. I offer mentoring and consultation for practitioners across the world, online through zoom.

I also hold in-person workshops, classes, and retreats. You can find out more about in-person offerings here.

Are there any training cohorts planned for the near future?

Yes! We will begin a new learning cohort in September, 2025. Learn more here.

After 25 years of practicing arts, movement, and somatics as psychotherapy, I am delighted to offer The Lively Center - an emerging training hub to support other therapists in their growth and development in improvisational arts psychotherapy.

Come for a mentoring session, join a training series, access consultation, or come for a workshop. You are welcome to deepen your creative rivers here.

I began training as an art therapist in 1999 at the Vancouver Art Therapy Institute. Since that time, I have studied deeply in various lineages of creativity, such as:

Soul Motion Conscious Improvisational Dance with Vincent Martinez Grieco, Movement Based Expressive Arts at the Tamalpa Institute, Authentic Movement and Experiential Anatomy with Andrea Olsen, Dance Movement Therapy with the Center for Movement Education and Research, Developmental Movement with the Moving On Center, Embodied Touch with Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen, Theraplay with the Theraplay Institute, PlayBack Theater with Jo Salis and Jonathan Fox, Theater of the Oppressed with Headlines Theater Company, Vocal Improvisation with Rhiannon, and Soul Singing with Sorah Nutting of MaMuse.

I am an experienced trainer, and have been holding trainings for therapists for 23 years. I am currently teaching faculty with the Kutenai Art Therapy Institute (KATI) in BC, Canada, and with the Sensorimotor Psychotherapy Institute, teaching in Canada, the USA, Europe, and Japan.

deepening resilience

This work can be intense. The socio-political context we are living through is also intense. When the work is feeling exhausting or draining it can be an indicator that we need support to tend burnout, compassion fatigue, or vicarious trauma. It can be an indicator that we may need some support for our own resilience in the midst. How very wise and kind and important, to center your own embodied heart and spirit for renewal.

Social Justice

Deepen your skills in decolonizing, antiracist, Queer and neurodivergent honoring, social justice practice in healing arts work. Understand your own location within systems of power and learn to move in ways that center dignity and difference with great respect, humility, curiosity, and suppleness. Learn how to practice reflective clearing of domination methods out of your clinical practice. Grow creative capacity in weaving liberatory approaches to psychotherapy that center consent praxis and collaboration. Grow your ability to disarm reactivity and navigate power dynamics with sensitivity.

creativity

Deepen your improvisational capacity as a practitioner, your capacity to navigate in complexity with courage and clarity. Understand the creative maps and life affirming principles that can provide a compass, like navigating by the starlight. Grow your skill and playfulness in working with the creative arts in therapy: art, poetry, movement, play, song, music, writing, photography, and ecological arts.

Embodiment & Earth

Learn how to work with the body in therapy, the profound restorative healing that can unfold from centering ecosomatics in the process of psychological growth. Grow your understanding of the artistry and neuroscience of working ecosomatically. Learn fundamental principles to guide you in creating your own ecosomatic interventions.

Practice your relations with Earth, learn about reweaving kindship through a myriad of loving and tangible sensory methods of resting into relationality. Consider ritual and ceremony and your own ancestral relations with these embodied arts.

Trauma Tending

Learn about the somatic & neuro-relational science of trauma and recovery, so that you can offer your clients skillful accompaniment for transformation.

Deepen your understanding of how to work with multigenerational and collective trauma, including working with the grinding and ongoing trauma of systemic oppression and the emerging danger of climate unravelling.

Learn individual and group methods for this generative work.

vitality, VOICE & VISION

Who are you, as a practitioner? What matters to you? Why do you do this work? What calls you alive about your practice? How would you like your practice to work? Where are you stagnant or longing for something a little different? Let’s dive into your own deepest sense of the work you are here to do, the message you are here to share. Let’s explore the practices that will nourish your own voice and explore the sources of vitality that underly capacity and clarity.

* radical earth-centering antiracist feminist decolonizing creative liberatory pedagogy is life affirming education praxis that evokes and nourishes deep change in the world

rates & payments for individual/group consultation and mentoring:

$225 US, $315 Canadian Dollars per hour, prorated for session length

You are welcome to gather a group of practitioners together and split the fee. To choose this option, simply decide on a time in the booking calendar that works for your group and create a booking. I will send a zoom link to you on the day of the session.

You may pay for your session in one of the following ways, on the day of your appointment:

Credit card - a credit card number is recorded at time of booking to reserve your spot; if you would like to be billed to this card, please let me know.
venmo (only in the USA): @katriona-ilsedottir
paypal: @katrinacurrymft direct link
etransfer (only available in Canada): info@katrinacurry.com

Sessions through zoom.

EAGLE POEM

To pray you open your whole self
To sky, to earth, to sun, to moon
To one whole voice that is you
And know there is more
That you can't see, can't hear
Can't know except in moments
Steadly growing, and in languages
That aren't always sound but other
Circles of motion.
Like eagle that Sunday morning
Over Salt River. Circled in blue sky
In wind, swept our hearts clean
With sacred wings.
We see you, see ourselves and know
That we must take the utmost care
And kindness in all things.
Breathe in, knowing we are made of
All this, and breathe, knowing
We are truly blessed because we
Were born, and die soon within a
True circle of motion,
Like eagle rounding out the morning
Inside us.
We pray that it will be done
In beauty.
In beauty.

— Joy Harjo, Muscogee Nation,