Inner Dialogues: Exploring Self Through Art, Community, and Connection

led by Dr. Doreen Maller, LMFT, PhD

Friday, January 15, 2021, 1 pm – 4 pm ET
(registration closes one hour prior, at 12 noon ET)

Self-selected fee: $75 (community rate) – $100 (supporter) – $125 (sustainer rate);
$50 access grants are available to help cover the community rate; request one here.
ACMHE members receive a $25 discount.

Perhaps the greatest loss of 2020 is our connection to one another. This retreat will focus on the complexity of connection in these challenging moments using various forms of arts-based visualization and meditation. Through guided visualization, art practice, mindful sharing, and listening, we will be able to turn within to each other to restore the beauty of life that can be found through interconnection.

Using art made with household objects–pens, paper, fastening tape, and scissors–we will explore together various states of feeling and being, internal and external: how we present to the world and how we feel inside our own hearts. Holding the space of truth and dignity, we will support each other by listening to the emergence of feelings and honoring the strength and resilience we demonstrate every day in small and large gestures.  We will explore the beauty of perseverance we have each discovered as we harness our resilience and stamina.

Making art in community provides an opportunity to share and learn together. Sharing art with others invites a new geography to life on-line: a deepening and broadening of experience. Together we will create a place to see as well as say. A place to share and listen and support. A place to learn and to connect.  A place to tell and create. Together we will create a community where art is a language of connection.

This workshop is intended for all levels of artists, new and timid, eager and enthusiastic, well versed and experienced. Instruction will be in English but I welcome translation. While I will offer instruction and prompts along the way, the day will unfold as your art emerges. You will be invited to share in small groups and with the whole group. The day will flow between individual work and art creation, group sharing, and reflection, all within a co-created supportive community.

Dr. Doreen Maller, LMFT, PhD, is a lifetime “maker” and educator.  She began her career in clothing manufacturing and pivoted in mid-life towards Mental Health and Education. She earned her MA in Expressive Arts Therapy and her PhD in Transformative Learning both at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco, California. For a decade, Dr. Maller served as Professor and Chair of Holistic Counseling Psychology at John F. Kennedy University in Northern California, retiring in 2019 to take care of her family elders and work differently in her local community. She is a licensed Marriage and Family Therapist, practicing mostly on-line during these challenging times, as well as an adjunct professor and Zoom classroom art teacher.

During COVID she juggled many new opportunities: producing webinars on parenting, short films on art-making, and in the early days, produced over 100 masks from fabrics she had collected over the years. Dr. Maller has authored and produced multiple educational volumes and papers on Mental Health and has presented domestically and internationally on topics related to art, trauma, counseling, and families. Recently, Dr. Maller has returned to her artist roots with a renewed practice of multimedia art, focused mainly on the natural world that exists just outside her window.