Sand & Clay Therapy

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Helping children & adults heal through 🌱 Sand & Clay Therapy | Symbols, play & creativity as the language of the soul.

19/02/2026

🕊️ Safety Is a Nervous System State

In Jungian Sandplay Therapy, healing does not begin with talking.
It begins with safety.

For a child carrying trauma, safety is not a concept.
It is something the body must feel.

Only when the nervous system softens can trauma move toward symbol.

In the sand tray, you may see:
• Chaos
• Battles
• Prisons
• Destruction

These are not “bad themes.”
They are the psyche’s attempt to bring implicit memory into conscious form.

But this movement only happens when the space is truly free and protected.

As therapist, my role is not to direct the tray.
My role is to regulate myself — and protect the container.

Without protection, trauma retreats.
With protection, the psyche dares to reveal.

I explore this more deeply in my latest blog on the Free and Protected Space in Jungian Sandplay Therapy.

📖 Read more here: [https://rinalouwclinical.co.za/free-and-protected-space/]
📍 Secunda
🌿 Jungian Sandplay Therapy
📩 Appointments available

If you would like, I can also:

• Refine a slightly shorter version
• Make a more personal-reflective tone version
• Or create a pinned post vers

17/02/2026

Some days the psyche works hard at night.

Dreams come, memories move, and the inner world wrestles with questions we cannot solve by thinking.

And then the morning comes…
and a child simply runs toward you, says your name, shows you a drawing, or gives a quick, unplanned hug.

No analysis.
No expectations.
No proving.

Just presence.

In Jungian psychology the child does not only represent a stage of development. The child is an archetype — the part of the psyche that is still close to life, spontaneity, and genuine feeling. When we are with children in these simple moments, something inside us remembers how to exist without performance.

Today I realised: sometimes healing does not arrive through insight, but through contact — being seen without effort, and receiving without needing to earn.

A small voice.
A brief hug.
And the inner world softens.

**“Contact with the child within is contact with life itself.”**
*(paraphrased from C.G. Jung’s writings on the Child archetype)*

🌿 Jungian Sandplay Therapy
Rina Louw Clinical Social Worker

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16/02/2026

🕊️ Why Safety Is the Foundation of Jungian Sandplay Therapy

In Jungian Sandplay Therapy, the term free and protected space comes from Dora Kalff, rooted in the psychology of Carl Gustav Jung.

But from a trauma perspective, safety is not just a concept.
It is a nervous system state.

A child cannot allow trauma to surface into consciousness unless they feel protected.

In the sand tray, a child may build:
• Chaos
• Destruction
• Prisons
• Battles

These are not “bad” themes.
They are trauma moving toward symbol.

When the therapist maintains a steady, regulated presence, the nervous system softens — and implicit memory begins to express itself safely.

Without protection, trauma stays buried.
With protection, the psyche dares to reveal.

If you would like to read the full blog on how safety allows trauma to surface, visit my website.

🌿 Rina Louw

read more..✔️.https://rinalouwclinical.co.za/free-and-protected-space/

12/02/2026

🌿 The 10 Core Principles of Jungian Sandplay Therapy

What makes Jungian Sandplay Therapy different from ordinary play therapy?

It is grounded in the work of Dora Kalff and Carl Gustav Jung, and supported by modern neuroscience, including Dan Siegel.

At its heart is one essential idea:

🕊️ Healing begins in a free and protected space.

In Sandplay:
• The psyche speaks in symbols before words
• The body participates in healing
• Opposites are held safely
• The Self moves toward integration

For children, this strengthens emotional regulation and reduces anxiety.
For adults, it bypasses defenses and reaches trauma stored in the body.

Modern neuroscience now confirms what depth psychology has long known:

Symbolic play integrates the brain.

If you would like to read the full article on the 10 principles, visit my website.

📍 Secunda Laerskool
🌿 Jungian Sandplay & Clay Therapy
📩 Contact me to book a consultation

Read my blog: https://rinalouwclinical.co.za/rinalouwclinical-co-za-jungian-sandplay-therapy-principles/

09/02/2026

Jung in my everyday life🌿

This pot was built with Baba Yaga’s tears of rejection.

Rejection shapes.
What is not held by others is pressed inward —
until it finds its own form.

Not everything that hurts is meant to break us.
Some experiences arrive to give weight, boundary, and strength.

This vessel learned how to hold.

04/02/2026

Jung in my everyday life🌿

This morning, while wondering what I need to learn from Jung today, I looked out of my office window and saw children playing.

They were busy with sand, water, and mud — forming their own little worlds, fully absorbed, negotiating, creating, destroying, rebuilding.

From a Jungian perspective, this is not “just play.”

For Carl Jung, play is where the psyche expresses itself freely — before logic, before explanation, before words.
In sand and mud, children work with the most basic elements of life: earth and water. Here they regulate emotion, explore control and chaos, and give shape to inner experiences they cannot yet explain.

Jung might not ask, “What are they learning?”
He would ask, “What is trying to come into form?”

“The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect,
but by the play instinct.”
— C. G. Jung

Perhaps today’s reminder is simple:
When children are allowed to play deeply, the psyche already knows what it needs.

03/02/2026

After the call comes resistance.

Fear. Doubt. Practical excuses.
“I don’t have time.”
“It’s not that bad.”
“I should be grateful.”

From a Jungian view, resistance is not weakness.
It is the ego protecting what it knows.

But the longer the call is ignored, the louder it returns — often as anxiety, fatigue, or loss of meaning.

Resistance is not failure.
It is part of the journey.

03/02/2026

Jung in My Everyday Life 🌿

Today, a Medusa figurine appeared in my sandtray. I did not place her with intention—she arrived.

In analytical psychology, the Medusa (Virgin Mary) embodies the Great Mother archetype in her nurturing, protective, and containing aspect. She represents care without intrusion, love without demand, and presence without control. When this image enters the sandtray, the psyche may be asking for safety, gentleness, or a return to inner compassion.

In Jungian work, symbols surface when something essential needs acknowledgment. The Medusa often appears when the inner world seeks:

✔️Containment after emotional strain
✔️Repair of early attachment wounds
✔️Permission to soften, to be held rather than to hold everything alone

She may also signal the activation of the inner mother—the part of the psyche that can care for pain without fixing it, and witness suffering without turning away.

So the real question is not what is she doing in my sandtray?💕

""Where does the soul need gentleness right now?""

In sandplay therapy, such images are never random. They are precise, meaningful responses from the unconscious—arriving exactly when words are no longer enough.

02/02/2026

The Hero’s Journey always begins with a call.🌿👑
Not a loud decision — but a quiet disturbance.

From a Jungian perspective, this call comes from the unconscious.
It may arrive as restlessness, longing, sadness, or a sense that something no longer fits.

We often try to silence it.
But the psyche does not call without reason.

In everyday life, the call is not heroic.
It is human.

Jung reminds us: what we do not listen to consciously will insist on being lived unconsciously.

02/02/2026

Digital devices in the sandtray – reflection or symbol?💻📱

Today, a 7-year-old drew a picture in the sand of “home,” and what struck me were the laptops.

Children often include digital devices in their sandplay, which got me thinking: Is this a simple reflection of the digital world we live in."?

In sandplay, nothing appears by accident; the psyche doesn’t literally reproduce reality, but symbolises inner experience through the familiar.

A digital device in the sandtray can mirror the outer world, but symbolically it may represent much more :
- a mediator of connection,
-a barrier to direct relationship,
-a place where attention, identity, or safety resides,
- a container for thoughts, images, or unexpressed emotions.

For some, it’s about control and mastery; for others, withdrawal, protection, or emotional insulation. For children, screens may serve as a regulating object — something to soothe, distract, or hold overwhelming feelings.

Jung noted that symbols emerge when conscious adaptation is strained; when direct contact feels too intense, the psyche seeks an intermediary.

So, in sandplay, the question isn’t “Is this good or bad?” but “What role does this object play in the inner world?”

We don’t remove the symbol; we let it speak and watch how the relationship with it evolves over time — because it’s that change, not the object itself, that tells the story.

01/02/2026

Clay Therapy for Women
A Hero’s Journey through Image, Symbol, and Form

In Jungian psychology, the Hero’s Journey does not begin with bravery or action.
It begins with a call — often quiet, often uncomfortable, often without words.

This clay therapy process offers a contained space for women to work with that call through image, symbol, and form.

Using clay as a symbolic medium, participants are guided over four sessions toward creating a vessel — a form that expresses their own inner journey and capacity to hold what is emerging.

This is not a pottery class.
There is no focus on skill, technique, or “getting it right.”
The work unfolds through presence, slowness, and symbolic meaning.

Practical details:
🗓 Saturdays, 9:00–11:00
📅 20 February – 14 March 2026
👥 Only 5 women
💰 R400 per session
🔥 Firing included | Clay excluded

If something in you recognises this, that is enough to begin.

📞 Rina Louw – 076 227 1578

Address

Secunda

Telephone

+27762271578

Website

http://rinalouwclinical.co.za/

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