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Marie O. Davis, MA, LPC, CSP | Wholistic Counseling

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Excelling at the Game of Life: Living to the fullest

July 1, 2014 by mariedavis

Life is a Contact Sportfeet in grass

By Marie O. Davis LPC and Tayria Ward Ph.D.

 

One of the joys of sports, whether individual or team sports, is the consistent challenge to perform at our best.   We measure that best by looking at other’s performances or by exceeding our own previous attainments and striving to improve skills with every try.

When it comes to playing the game of life, there are numerous ways people endeavor to enhance performance and develop new proficiencies. How do evaluate ourselves and make the changes that we long for?  Spirituality, therapy, self-help, journaling, reading, yoga, and multitudes of programs offer assistance. When we want to change our soul life performance – in our feelings, thoughts, and behaviors – there is a need for an objective way of testing and challenging experience.

In sports athletes learn their skills, train and get feedback from coaches and trusted sources. How do we get such feedback while learning life skills?  We are suggesting a couple of means to do this. Your dreams of the night are ever offering consistent, reliable, insightful feedback to you from a higher source of wisdom and knowing. Additionally, an alchemical mandala-making process can show you visually and with felt sense how well you are doing, and what needs tweaking next. We have become fascinated with the efficacy of bringing these two methods together in classes and workshops we are now offering.

Try this. Try writing down your dreams of the night, no matter how ordinary, mundane, bizarre or random they may seem. You’ll most likely find that as soon as pen comes to paper and the intent to listen to the language of the dream is activated, another dimension of your psyche starts speaking, offering insight and assistance in its own mysterious language. Your dreams will function like a good coach, the best coach, the one who knows you way better than your conscious mind knows you.

dream catchersWhen life keeps coming at us with challenges and we keep missing the same hurdles, falling into the same emotional and psychological patterns, attracting the same opponents, miss opportunities for advancement – dreams of the night, and the dreaming dimension of the waking psyche are consistently offering to us the most pertinent, relevant, timely, healing advice about how to understand our obstacles to improvement and how to master them. Because they speak in a language that modernity has tragically forgotten, dreams are most often, sadly, ignored. Every person and situation in your dream is a symbol, every person and situation in your life is a symbol. Learning the symbolic language of dreaming will help any person to improve performance and satisfaction in the game of life.

I (Tayria) work with clients to help them recover the language of dreams – both in person in my lovely office in the Flatiron Building in downtown Asheville and also by telephone for people who live a distance away. And I am enjoying teaching workshops and classes now with Marie Davis combining her work with the “dreaming awake” work of making alchemical mandalas.

I (Marie) learned a method for making these mandalas from Dennis Klocek, an avid student of Rudolf Steiner’s philosophy. The technique uses collage images to express the issues, challenges and movement in our inner life. By ensouling these images with meaning, placing them on paper where we can see them and move them around, something alchemically occurs to us that moves and improves our spiritual, emotional and psychological situation. We work through fixities, see our patterns and figure out ways to develop new skills in relationship to the issues.

When we use alchemical mandala’s, different than Eastern mandala’s, the structure of placing images that represent different activities we do creates an objective way at looking at the self and areas of life where we feel stuck.  The soul activities that we look at are how we form beliefs, engage in a process, get our beliefs challenged, and gain insight.  By choosing images to represent soul gestures, we take our ‘problems’ and place them outside of ourselves to gain a different perspective on the life events that are challenging us, giving us an opportunity to develop ourselves, change beliefs and find new responses and behaviors.

In sports, top athletes visualize themselves doing certain actions over and over again as a way of preparing their body to perform the action in the best possible way.  Similarly, when we make an alchemical mandala, we are imaging/imagining how we are performing certain life actions –thinking, feeling, or doing – and evaluating how we think it is going and what we think we might do differently.  Achieving excellence in life is just like what athletes do in sports. We practice in our imagination how we would like to perform.

hands reachingI (Marie) also work with clients in body-centered therapy. In this work, one is supported and guided to explore automatic or habitual movements that are made when talking about specific issues or challenges in life.  By paying attention to the story that our bodies are telling, the client is able to begin to access the internal “map maker” who formed certain beliefs that may no longer serve us.  This level of working with movements and ‘communications’ that our bodies are making that are beyond our awareness is also a deeper form of seeing that parallels dream work and mandala making.  By making conscious the limiting beliefs that we are still holding onto, we gain access to more of our human facilities and skills at our disposal.

For example, if we believe “my needs don’t matter”, we may go through life avoiding acknowledging our basic human needs and feel deprived of love, connection or support.  By revealing this level of belief to the conscious mind, we are finally able to gain awareness our specific needs and then can take productive action to get them met.

Similar to learning to improve our game in sports, we look to utilize improved skills that will make us more effective.  Having helpful and empowering belief systems allow us to excel in life.  But if there are unproductive or unhelpful belief systems that hinder us from getting the most out of life, how do we become aware of these and change them?  Dreamwork, mandala making and body-centered therapy radically help a person in processes of self-discovery.

Like any sport, the game of life is both exhilarating and exhausting, dangerously challenging and ecstatically rewarding. Any way to learn new techniques, increase skills and challenge ourselves to develop strength and awareness is a blessing. We think these techniques are effective, exciting, fascinating. They will offer your psyche and your heart all new ways to engage in life.

For information about upcoming fall series, please contact Tayria or Marie by phone or through their website. 

Tayria Ward, Ph.D. is a depth psychologist and dream analyst in private practice who does telephone sessions as well as face-to-face work with clients in her office in the Flatiron Building in downtown Asheville. Her telephone number is 828-329-0853, website is www.tayriaward.com

 

Marie O. Davis, MA, LPC, is an expressive arts and body-centered therapist in private practice in downtown Asheville and is a part of the Asheville Healing House collective.  More information about her and her work can be found at: www.bodysoulspiritasheville.com or by calling 828-273-5647

Filed Under: Events, Mind - Body Health Tagged With: healing, meaning making, ancient wisdom, holistic counseling, stress management, experiential therapy, body-centered therapy, asheville psychotherapist, dream work, art therapy, personal growth, depression, mind body, dream analysis

Discovering the Body as a Resource Class

April 22, 2014 by mariedavis

Discovering the Body as a Resource Class is a 6 week series designed to help you manage stress and give you tools to feel confident and comfortable in your body.

Marie O. Davis, MA, LPC and Stacey Stone

Filed Under: Mind - Body Health, Videos Tagged With: asheville psychotherapy, healing, holistic counseling, experiential therapy, anxiety, body-centered therapy, depression

Grounding Practice Video

April 22, 2014 by mariedavis

Marie O. Davis, MA, LPC instructs us how to do this simple and very effective grounding practice to bring more peace and stability to your body, soul, and spirit.  Watch the grounding practice video now.

Filed Under: Mind - Body Health, Videos Tagged With: asheville psychotherapy, healing, holistic counseling, experiential therapy, trauma, anxiety, body-centered therapy, asheville psychotherapist, mind body

Art as a Healing Force

November 25, 2013 by mariedavis

In Need of Healing Forces
In Need of Healing Forces

“Art transforms the sense-perceptual world in a ‘speaking’ manner, creating new meaning. In this sense, it is an epilogue to ancient sacred life, where everything is meaningful. And thus art is perhaps a prelude to a new epoch of mankind, where the human being is giving meaning to existence.” Georg Kuhlewind

In the art making process, for me, I have to enter into a different space than the everyday, get it done space. Sometimes i have to force myself to sit down and give myself permission to make art. Every time I do, I am aware that I am activating healing forces within me. I walk away feeling different, even if I only spent 5 minutes painting a single color, or cutting out one image from a magazine.

As alluded to in the opening caption, art was embedded int he culture of ancient societies. Ritual dancing, image making, re-enactments of individual or collective pathology and their healing involved the entire tribe/community. The inner soul struggle that was the affliction was danced, painted, sung, burned, or isolated until the healing affect came about. Often the intention was to get help from spiritual forces. The rituals were a way of connecting with these higher beings.

Today, neuroscience helps us to understand one dimension of why these rituals were so powerful. Through these rituals, there was an alteration in brain states and neural chemicals. In other words, when engaging in art making, our physiology shifts into a healing state and new possibilities become possible. Through trance, intensification of feeling, and enactments, the unconscious element was made conscious for ancient cultures. Through the ritual and healing, new stories were created, new narratives, and finally changes in the way the culture lived. When we focus our energies on the artistic process, we are taping into powerful healing forces in our brains.

Additionally, when we engage in art making, we are engaging in meaning making. By choosing colors, images, subjects, landscapes, we are communicating something about ourselves and our relationship to the world. Consciously or unconsciously we project our inner struggles and feelings into our art work. By beginning to dialogue with our art in a way that we questions what it is trying to tell us, teach us, we can bring significant questions into that healing space. If we stay open and mindful we can find that answers will come from the world around us in unexpected moments.

Today, so many of us are desiring healing, more meaning and substance in our lives. When we can dramatize our inner and outer struggles through art, we find new forces and new ways of meeting the life tasks that face us. We can find new support, as we open to guidance and answers from a source greater than ourselves.

Marie O. Davis, MA, LPC, NCC is a licensed professional counselor in private practice in Asheville, NC.  She had been working with adolescents (11-17) and adults for 10 years facilitating expressive arts therapy in hospitals, schools and groups.  She uses expressive arts therapy and Sensorimotor Psychotherapy to support new insights and meaning to be revealed about clients and their lives.  For more information: www.bodysoulspiritasheville.com

Filed Under: Mind - Body Health Tagged With: healing, art, meaning making, ritual, ancient wisdom

Expressive Arts in Asheville

Expressive Art Therapy

“Life is a great big canvas, and you should throw all the paint on it you can.” – Danny Kaye

expressive arts in asheville

Expressive Arts Therapy is the practice of using imagery, storytelling, dance, music, drama, poetry, movement, dream work, and visual arts together, in an integrated way, to foster human growth, development, and healing. It is about reclaiming our innate capacity as human beings for creative expression of our individual and collective human experience in artistic form. Expressive arts therapy is also about experiencing the natural capacity of creative expression and creative community for healing.

 

 It’s about the process

Expressive arts asheville
Expansive Horizons

Alongside talk or body centered therapy, clients are encouraged to explore their responses, reactions, and insights via pictures, sounds, explorations, and encounters with art processes. Unlike traditional art expression, the process of creation is emphasized rather than the final product, because how we do anything is how we do everything. Free, spontaneous expression can be healing.

Call 828.273.5647 or email to learn more about expressive arts in Asheville, NC.

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