HEALING ARTS PSYCHOTHERAPY

Sometimes words are not enough.

Art psychotherapy offers another way to explore what is happening within us — through image, colour, metaphor, sensation, imagination and the simple physical act of making.

At Maranatha Healing Arts & Pleasure Garden, artist and art therapist Melani du Jardin offers individual, trauma-informed creative therapy in a private natural setting in the Northern Rivers of NSW.

You do not need to be an artist. You do not need to know how to draw. And the artwork does not need to be beautiful.

The value is in what happens while you make it.

A different kind of therapeutic space

Maranatha was created as a place in which creativity, nature and therapeutic practice can meet.

Sessions may take place in the studio, garden or surrounding natural environment and can incorporate painting, drawing, clay, collage, journalling and other forms of creative expression.

The process is responsive rather than prescriptive. Sometimes we make. Sometimes we talk. Sometimes an image says something before we have words for it.

Art can offer a safe distance from difficult experiences while also creating a pathway towards understanding them.

What might bring you here?

People come to art psychotherapy for many different reasons.

You may be navigating grief or loss, relationship change, separation, life transition, overwhelm or a period in which you simply no longer recognise where you are in your own story.

You might be seeking greater self-understanding, wanting to reconnect with creativity, or looking for a therapeutic approach that feels different from sitting opposite someone and talking for an hour.

You don't need to arrive knowing exactly what you want to work on.

We can begin where you are.

Trauma-informed practice

My approach is trauma-informed, relational and creative.

Rather than treating art as something to interpret from the outside, we become curious about what emerges through the process of making.

What do you notice?

What has appeared?

What does the image seem to be asking?

Where do you feel yourself drawn — or resistant?

The artwork becomes another participant in the therapeutic conversation.

The aim is not artistic achievement. It is awareness, expression, integration and the possibility of change.

The Pleasure Garden

Therapy does not always have to happen between four walls.

Maranatha's Pleasure Garden provides opportunities to work with the rhythms and sensory experience of the natural environment — light, weather, water, plants, earth and seasonal change.

There are places to make art, talk, sit quietly, walk and simply notice.

For some people, being able to move between conversation, creative work and the garden creates a very different therapeutic experience.

Individual sessions

One-to-one Art Psychotherapy

By appointment at Maranatha Healing Arts & Pleasure Garden, Northern Rivers, NSW.

Art materials are provided.

NDIS participants

Creative therapeutic services may also be available to self-managed and plan-managed NDIS participants, where the service is appropriate to the participant's goals and funding arrangements.

Please enquire to discuss individual needs, session length, support requirements and private group options.

About Melani

Melani du Jardin is an Australian artist, art therapist, life coach and educator whose professional practice brings together fine art, creative process and therapeutic work.

Her approach has developed through years of working with art both as a professional practice and as a means through which people can explore experiences that are difficult to contain in language alone.

At Maranatha, these strands come together in a therapeutic practice grounded in creativity, relationship, curiosity and connection with the natural world.