Rekindling Aliveness
🌻
Rekindling Aliveness 🌻
A holistic Creative Arts Therapy group for people living with chronic conditions and sensitive nervous systems.
Living with a chronic condition, such as chronic pain, anxiety, fibromyalgia, fatigue, burnout, depression, endometriosis, or a sensitive nervous system, can change so much about how we experience ourselves and the world around us.
You may have had to adapt your life around pain, fatigue, uncertainty, or symptoms that others don't always understand or even believe. You may have found yourself becoming disconnected from your body, your creativity, your relationships, or the things that once brought you joy and meaning.
Life can become more about managing and coping than truly living, affecting your emotional and mental wellbeing.
And yet, beneath the challenges, there may still be a part of you that longs:
To be met and understood.
To be nourished by moments of wonder, joy, and possibility.
To rediscover creativity, hope, and self-compassion.
To feel more alive
Rekindling Aliveness was created as a space for this exploration.
A space to become curious about your body, your emotions, your thoughts, your creativity, and your relationship with the world around you.
A space to explore what supports your wellbeing and what helps you feel more connected, resourced, and alive.
Together, we will explore the possibility of developing a new relationship with your body and the challenges you are living with—not by denying or minimising your experience, but by meeting it with curiosity, compassion, kindness, and creativity.
Rekindling Aliveness is a compassionate, creative, playful, and holistic therapeutic journey that brings together:
🌻 Somatic Practices and Nervous System Support
Developing greater awareness of your body and exploring ways to support regulation, grounding, and connection. We will explore the landscape of the autonomic nervous system and consider ways of supporting your nervous system while living with a chronic condition or ongoing symptoms.
🌻 Mindfulness and Presence Practices
Cultivating present-moment awareness, curiosity, and a compassionate relationship with our inner experience. These practices may support greater calm, awareness, and our capacity to relate differently to stress, discomfort, and difficult emotions.
🌻 Creative Arts Therapy
Creative Arts Therapy uses expressive processes such as art, creative writing, movement, storytelling, sculpting, sound, nature, symbol work, and imaginative play to facilitate the exploration and expression of inner experiences, feelings, emotions, perceptions, and thoughts, while supporting holistic wellbeing.
Creative Arts Therapy can reintroduce experiences of play, curiosity, creativity, and aliveness.
You don't need to have artistic abilities or experience. The focus is on expression, exploration, and self-discovery rather than on creating "art" in a traditional sense.
🌻 Nature-Based Approaches
Connecting with the natural world as a source of reflection, perspective, nourishment, connection, and wonder.
🌻 Imaginal Exploration
Entering the rich world of images, symbols, metaphors, archetypes, and imagination as potential sources of insight, guidance, meaning, and wellbeing.
🌻 Indigenous and relational wisdom
Drawing respectfully on Indigenous perspectives that understand wellbeing through relationship and interconnectedness with ourselves, each other, nature, community, ancestors, and the living world.
What we will explore
What a session look like?
The group is intentionally small, with a maximum of five participants, creating space for connection, safety, and individual attention.
Each session will be unique and include:
🌻Gratitude and Arrival: Connecting with what is present and acknowledging the resources and moments of goodness in our lives.
🌻Felt-Sense Exploration: Tuning into the body and noticing sensations, emotions, images, and inner experiences with curiosity.
🌻Practices for Presence and Regulation: Exploring mindful movement, breathing, sensory awareness, somatic practices, and other experiences that support connection and self- and co-regulation.
🌻A Theme for Exploration: Each session will focus on a theme connected to the journey of reconnection.
🌻Creative Expression: Using art, image, metaphor, writing, or other creative forms to explore what words alone may not always express. We may also open to the symbolic and imaginal dimensions of experience, where new perspectives, meanings, and possibilities may emerge.
🌻Integration and Optional Sharing: An opportunity to share, listen, reflect, and discover what you are taking from the experience. We will explore these experiences together with curiosity rather than judgement, allowing each person to participate in ways that feel right for them.
What might you take from the experience?
Everyone's journey is different. You may, however, discover:
🌻A greater sense of connection with yourself and your body
🌻New ways of relating to difficult sensations, emotions, and thoughts
🌻A renewed sense of safety, peace, awe, and aliveness
🌻A deeper awareness of your own needs and resources
🌻Opportunities for self-compassion and self-acceptance
🌻New perspectives on your experience
🌻A renewed relationship with creativity and imagination
🌻A sense of belonging and connection with others
🌻Moments of joy, wonder, hope, peace, or aliveness
🌻A deeper connection with nature and the living world
🌻A growing sense of your own uniqueness, worth, and inner wisdom
Together, we become curious about the challenges you are facing, not simply as problems to solve, but as experiences that may hold insight, invite transformation, and deepen your relationship with yourself, others, nature, and life itself.
From this place of reconnection, new possibilities may begin to emerge.
The gift of gathering together
A note about this group
Rekindling Aliveness is not a medical treatment program and does not diagnose, treat, or cure chronic conditions.
It is not centred around a particular diet, technique, or healing method, and it does not promote one single way of understanding your condition.
I deeply respect that people find support through many different pathways, including medical, evidence-based, complementary, and alternative approaches. I encourage you to continue with whatever professional care and support is right for you.
This group offers something different:
A space for emotional, embodied, creative, and relational exploration.
A space to explore your relationship with yourself, your body, your experience, and the world around you.
A space to nurture your wellbeing, reconnect with your own wisdom, and discover new perspectives and possibilities.
Living with chronic conditions can sometimes feel lonely.
A small group can offer a different kind of connection: the experience of being witnessed, listened to, and accompanied by others who understand something of the complexity of living with ongoing challenges.
This is not about comparing experiences or finding one answer that works for everyone.
It is about creating a space where different experiences can coexist, where you can share or simply be present, and where you can discover that you are not alone.
Details
CAYA art space, 153 Melville Rd, Brunswick West VIC 3055
Small group · Maximum 5 participants
5 weekly sessions on Thursdays
from August 20th to September 17th, 2026
11:00 am - 12:30 pm
Investment: $350 (can be paid in two instalments)
For more information and registration: