Mood Elevating Creative Expression Workshop With Yael Saar

 Learn to use art to gently shift nervous system states from stress to creativity while fostering self-trust. These processes naturally soothe the mind and calm the physical body while reducing cortisol and increasing oxytocin production. 
You'll go home with newfound self-calming skills and a framed piece of art to hang or to gift.  

We will play with two (super simple*) skills: 

Bilateral Doodling: a playful practice to warm up the whole brain, reducing anxiety while boosting creativity  
 

Color Boundary Markers: exploring color, line, and rhythm to foster self-trust,  and stronger boundaries. You will be guided in figuring out which colors nourish you, akin to "color vitamins", and which color combinations irritate you (either consciously or below your awareness). You'll learn how to discern your unique subtle reactions to the visual stimulus in ways that will support you in challenging social and emotional situations. In other words: you'll experience how finding the colors that please you can help you stop people pleasing others. This process is deceptively easy yet deeply moving, come experience it for yourself.  
 
* Super simple = "Zero-Barrier Art" 
Both practices are totally accessible to anyone who can use an everyday marker. There is simply no way to do this wrong --your creations will inevitably come out delightful. So if you are one of the people who thinks artists are other, more talented people, come play with these no-talent-needed and no-art-experience-required methods! You're in for a pleasant surprise! 
 

Art supplies and picture frames will be provided, just come as you are. Appropriate for teens, adults and elders. 

Yael Saar is the creator of the Sensory Nourishment Method: Easy Practices to Comfort for your Nervous System. 
She is an artist, a poet, a certified life coach, and a trained suicide prevention counselor. She is the founder of the Mama's Comfort Camp international support network, a nonprofit project of the Center for Transformative Action at Cornell University, offering safe space for mothers of all ages and stages in peer support forums and in the "Motherhood is a Joke" comedy writing and performance program.  
A postpartum depression and breast cancer survivor, Yael developed the Sensory Nourishment Method to support herself, mothers and parents in the community, and anyone with a fried nervous system since the Pandemic and in today's shifting hard times.