Active Kreative

25/11/2025

I remember sitting on the floor among boxes,
moving my life from the old space into the new,
and feeling nothing.
My body had become a machine - lifting, packing, carrying, but not felt...
For so long I tried to think my way through pain - mentally strong, emotionally disciplined,
numb in the places that needed softness.
But healing demanded something else: to feel with my whole body. To let the chest shake, to let the belly breathe again, to let the hands express what the voice couldn’t name.
This is why, inside our Active Kreative workshops,
we don’t just talk - we touch, we hug, we breathe,
we use the full body as the instrument of healing.
We shake, we ground, we release through movement,
we soften through connection.
We create with the whole self - skin, breath, lungs, heart, hands. Because healing isn’t cognitive.
It’s somatic. It lives in the flesh.
I began to hear my body’s stories , ones words could never reach.
🜂 The body doesn’t need fixing.
It needs witnessing.
It needs feeling.
It needs you.

△ The body is the first canvas of truth.

21/11/2025

Over the past six weeks, our Creative Circle has been immersed in The Mirror Field — a structured yet deeply intuitive process that blends art therapy, somatic psychology, sacred geometry, and reflective witnessing. The work has unfolded in layers, mirroring the alchemical path from shadow toward clarity and coherence. 🌟Week 1 opened with Louise Hay–inspired mirror work.
Week 2 explored shadow and identity through mask-making.
Week 3 softened into clarity with inner-child visualisation and letter writing.
Week 4 invited belonging through nature weaving and grounding with the earth.
Week 5 opened into wholeness using intuitive collage and meditative circle drawing.
Week 6 deepened into self-witnessing with an IFS-inspired two-chair dialogue — held in silence, without fixing — followed by a powerful closing ritual where participants “paint-hugged” one another, leaving marks of presence, connection, and shared humanity.

Across these weeks, we worked with:
• mirror rituals
• breathwork + somatic grounding
• collage, masks, bilateral drawing
• nature-based art
• sacred geometry + circle meditation
• IFS witnessing + embodied mark-making
What’s emerging is profound: self-recognition, nervous system softening, emotional clarity, and the quiet return of one’s true voice.

We are only halfway. The field is still unfolding. ✨

18/11/2025

Today, my brother turns 40.
And I have not seen him since 2016 — the year he baptised my son.
My son turns 10 this year.
My daughter was born during a war.
He has never held her.
I have never watched him age into the hero he has become.
We have lived years apart because of war — because life scattered our family across borders we never asked for...
The older we become, the more valuable it is to age together. When you’re children, siblings are your world — your adventure team, your rival, your safety.
When you’re teenagers, they become your first true relationship — not romantic, but emotional, raw, brutally honest.
And when you grow up, have your own family, build your own life… your sibling becomes a part of you no one else has access to.

Because they are the only ones who know who you were before the world told you who to be.

War took years from us that we will never get back.

So today, братик, I honour you.
I honour your 40 years — your journey, your strength, your life.
I honour the boy you were and the hero you became.

One day, I will hug you again.
Happy Birthday, my brother.
No matter the distance,
no matter the years,
you are my family — my closest mirror in this life.
And that will never change. 💛

17/11/2025

17/11/2025

Latin:

creāre (verb) — “to bring forth, produce, beget, cause to grow, make, create.”

Etymology and Proto-Indo-European origins:
Derived from the Proto-Indo-European root *ker- / *kre-, meaning “to grow, to arise, to increase.” Creativity is not merely an ability — it is a transformative tool that alters reality itself.
Its Latin root, creare (“to bring into being”), points to its original function: to cause something new to exist that did not exist before.
In this sense, creativity is an act of reality-making. Every creative act — a drawing, gesture, sound, word, decision produces a new form in the external world.
In therapy and expressive arts, this means:
something previously unexpressed becomes manifest
a new perspective becomes embodied
a new pattern, behaviour, or way of being becomes available

Creation transforms what is into what could be.Creativity is the human capacity to transform the possible into the actual.
It is the tool by which reality is reshaped, both within and without and can be accessed by anyone 🌟

13/11/2025

Come spend a day wrapped in the rhythm of nature — breathe deeply and weave with what the land offers — leaves, shells, petals, branches and the stories carried by the wind.
✨ Join me for Nature Weaving at The Art Therapy Retreat — Sunshine Coast, January 2026.
Spaces are limited — come create, connect, and be nourished by the beauty around and within.

🌸 Breathe. Create. Belong.
https://www.activekreative.com/store/p/the-art-therapy-retreat-sunshine-coast-january-2026

06/11/2025

There was a night when the house fell silent in a way I had never heard before.No shouting. No crying. Just the hum of the refrigerator and the sound of my own breath trying to remember what peace felt like.
Two children asleep, a decision made, but not yet lived.
Fear sat in my chest like a stone — heavy, immovable.
I had no map, no certainty, just the knowing that the life we were in could no longer hold us.There was a moment I realised — no one was coming.
No rescue. No safety net.
Just me — and two small eyes watching, learning what strength looks like when your knees are shaking and your heart is racing.
So I stood.
Even when I wanted to fall.
I breathed slow, my voice calm, became the mountain they could lean on.
Not because I wasn’t afraid — but because they needed to feel the strength I was still learning to become.

🜂 Sometimes peace is the quiet act
of standing steady in the storm.
🜂 Strength, I learned, is not in holding everything.
It’s in knowing what to release.

Through that fire, I became the Mother Who Is a Mountain —
still, steady, sovereign.
Rooted not in control, but in clarity.
Rooted because I chose to stand.

Working, mothering, creating, leading circles —
I realised I was building a field where broken pieces could root again. Every tear I had shed became water for someone else’s seed. Every painting born from my pain became a map for another woman’s return.

06/11/2025

Cathy Malchiodi’s Expressive Therapies Continuum (ETC) teaches us that healing moves from the body to the heart, to the mind, and into creative integration.

When we draw, move, or meditate within a circle, we travel this continuum.
The motion begins in the kinesthetic body — grounding awareness through rhythm and gesture.
Emotion awakens in the affective field, finding color, texture, and release.
Meaning forms in the symbolic realm, where image becomes insight.
And finally, the creative level — the circle closes — integration happens.

The circle ⭕️ is more than shape.
It is a living map of consciousness — a container that holds the opposites, the beginnings and endings, the cycles of remembering and renewal.

In therapeutic and ritual practice, the circle becomes the embodied geometry of wholeness —
a reminder that transformation is not linear but spiral, that every return is a deeper homecoming to Self.

✨
Read the full article: The Circle: Mandala, Wholeness, and the Art of Healing
→https://www.activekreative.com/blog/circle-mandala-wholeness-the-art-of-healing-therapy

01/11/2025

There’s a moment in the creative process where you stop trying to make something —
and something begins to make you.This week, we step outside the studio and into the living classroom of the earth.
Through gentle somatic movement, sensory awareness, and land-based art therapy, we let the body remember what it has always known: you belong.

🌀 Practice:
Gather leaves, branches, or stones that call to you. Let your hands move without planning — weave, arrange, or mark the earth as if it were your canvas. Allow nature to collaborate with you.

🎨 Process:
Notice how creation changes when the wind, soil, and sunlight join in. The goal is not perfection, but presence.

💫 Reflection:
“What part of me feels mirrored in this landscape?”
“What is the earth teaching me about letting go and becoming?”

As we work with nature, we don’t just make art — we remember ourselves as part of something whole, cyclical, and alive.

🌸 This is the art of ✨ Join us in Melbourne
Step into the field of creation, healing, and remembrance.

🎨 Breathe. Create. Heal.
🌸 Limited spaces available


home.
✨ Join us in Melbourne
Step into the field of creation, healing, and remembrance.

🎨 Breathe. Create. Heal.
🌸 Limited spaces available