This free art therapy session will provide tools and education to adolescence going through the first years of their menstrual cycle.
Similar to the four seasons, your menstrual cycle has four phases. We can imagine it as: Winter, spring, summer and autumn. Each phase affects and offers a unique set of physical, emotional, hormonal, and psychological gifts. When we understand these changes, we can eat, work, love and play according to our natural flow and we get better at working with our cyclical rhythm power rather than against it.
Through art therapy and mindfulness soft movement, we will explore and together start familiarizing yourself with the 4 phases. By the end of the session, youth will leave with their own tracking calendar they’ve create. Tracking and understanding your period provides health clues and an internal snap shot of what is happening inside the body. This 2 hour workshop will explore what happens inside and out during each phases to understand where you are at currently. This is not about perfecting anything, but learning about the ebbs and flows of your cycle. How you feel as it changes, and getting more attuned with your body.
My goal is to provide adolescence going through the first years of their menstrual cycle with the tools, education through art therapy to develop their own relationship with their monthly cycles. This would encourage positive connection with their bodies, eliminate shame, potential stigma, creating healthier and stronger relationship with their future partnership, advocating for their needs, stronger work ethic.
Meet your Guide
Hannah Marie: Social worker and registered counselor and therapeutic arts practitioner
Hello! I’m Hannah.
I am a Registered Counselor, Social worker, Somatic Therapeutic Arts practitioner and Art therapist. I have over 10 years of experience working with diverse populations. My two passions are people and art, the goal has always been to blend healing and art together. Through my time working with trauma patients, I realized there was something missing, that using verbal expression and talk therapy was not always the first step. That is when I discovered how revolutionary art therapy was. It provides a way to externalize feelings in a safe way, regulating the nervous system and supporting embodied integration.
Using imagery, as part of this creative therapeutic process, feelings and emotions can be expressed that would otherwise be difficult to articulate.
Learn more at https://www.cominghometoself.ca/