The Art of Belonging: Psychedelic Journey Through Expressive Arts & Ancestral Wisdom
A 60-90 minute experiential workshop integrating movement, sound, bilateral drawing, and partner work to explore belonging, embodiment, and integration through expressive arts modalities. First presented at the 46th CATA-OEATA Conference September 2025, Winnipeg, this workshop is available for conferences, festivals, retreat centers, and community organizations.
What Attendees Will Experience, Learn & Expect
The Art of Belonging: Psychedelic Journey Through Expressive Arts & Ancestral Wisdom is an experiential workshop that invites all participants to explore the sacred architecture of psychedelic journeys through Expressive Arts practices deeply rooted in indigenous wisdom. This is not a lecture—it is an embodied, participatory journey.
What You'll Experience:
This workshop guides you through the three phases of a traditional psychedelic ceremony—preparation, journey, and integration—using creative expression, sound, and somatic practice. Working in dyads, you'll create sacred intention through crystal mandala-making, explore embodied sound and movement, and integrate through bilateral art-making and reflection. These practices create liminal spaces similar to those accessed through psychedelics, but without substances. Whether new to consciousness work or experienced, you'll move through this archetypal journey in a contained, condensed format.
What You'll Learn:
This workshop honors indigenous knowledge keepers who have refined safe protocols for working with plant medicines across centuries. It demonstrates how liminal states created through creative expression mirror those accessed through psychedelics—dissolving boundaries and inviting transformation.
For psychedelic facilitators, therapists, and integration specialists:
You will gain concrete Expressive Arts Therapy (EXAT) tools for preparation and integration work with clients, learning how creative practices bridge embodied experience with understanding. You will expand your clinical toolkit with trauma-informed, culturally sensitive approaches.
For all participants:
Belonging—to ourselves, each other, and something greater—is the foundation of healing. Plant medicines awaken us to profound interconnection. This workshop reveals we can access that same felt-sense of belonging through somatic creative expression. We heal when we feel truly seen and held in circles. Through embodied art-making, sound, and presence with one another, you will experience how collective belonging creates the sacred container for healing.
The Container We Create:
This workshop is held in a culturally sensitive, reciprocal framework that honors indigenous wisdom keepers and their ancestral knowledge. We create a safe, professional, therapeutic space for all participants—regardless of background or experience. There is no judgment, no artistic skill required, and full autonomy to participate as feels right for you. You are the expert in your own experience.
Leave With:
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Direct experience of how intention, embodied presence, and creative expression can facilitate transformation
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Practical EXAT tools for your own integration work or professional practice
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A deeper understanding of liminal spaces, belonging, and their healing potential
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Connection with a circle of diverse minds and hearts honoring wisdom, wholeness, and interconnection
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Tangible reminders (your created altar and artwork) to carry the medicine of belonging forward
This workshop honors both the sacred traditions that have preserved this knowledge for millennia and the contemporary therapeutic approaches that help us integrate these practices responsibly and ethically in today's world—recognizing that true healing happens when we remember we belong.
