Creative Disruptions: An Art-Based Supervision Series
Wednesdays, May 6, 13, 20, 2026
3:30-5:30 PM EST
This 3-part experiential supervision series explores how creative disruption can interrupt the exhausting continuity of professional, personal, and world stress. When the nervous system is overwhelmed by ongoing “too muchness,” introducing intentional shifts can support regulation, restore agency, and open new pathways for response.
Through creative process and curious play we will bring the possibility of relief from the stagnancy of a monotonous heavy rhythm of these times. Through pausing, shifting, agitating, breaking, we will play with creative process that allows for healthier balance and sustainability.
Drawing on principles aligned with trauma-informed practice, DBT (Opposite Action), and the Expressive Therapies Continuum (ETC), participants will explore how creative processes can offer respite, co-regulation, and sustainable change in both personal and clinical contexts.
The series unfolds in three parts:
Part 1: Interruptive Rhythms
This first session explores how experimenting with creative rhythms and movements can shift the felt experience of sustained urgency, uncertainty, and exhausting continuity. The session will focus on how rhythm, pace, and shifts in energy can support experiences of safety, holding, and relief within both personal and professional practice.
Through experiential reflection and shared inquiry, we will pay attention to how slowing down can help us meet inner rhythms more honestly and compassionately. We will explore the relationship between stress, time and self-agency perception, and creative process, considering how gentle disruptions may offer respite from urgency without overwhelming the system further. The emphasis in this supervision space is not on intervention, but on deepening our capacity to hold ourselves and others through the use of creative presence, attunement, and own rhythm.
Part 2: Restoring Balance
Session 2 explores how sensory awareness and engagement with materials in the here and now can support a renewed sense of grounding, balance, and embodied presence in the midst of chronic stress. We will reflect on the relationship between internal and external experience, attending to subtle bodily shifts, states of homeostasis, and the ways texture, touch, and materiality can offer containment, expansion, and co-regulation. At the same time, this session does not approach sensory work as an attempt to simply calm, manage, or override the nervous system at any cost. Rather, it invites us to listen more truthfully to what the body is living in a time when the collective unconscious may be sensing crisis, threat, and destruction. Drawing gently on the kinesthetic and sensory dimensions of the Expressive Therapies Continuum, we will consider how creative sensory experience can help us stay present to that reality, deepen understanding, restore a sense of self-agency, and soften the felt experience of helplessness without bypassing the depth of what is being lived.
Session 3 — Reframing Through Symbolic Imagery
This session invites participants to explore how imagery can open space for reflection, multiple perspectives, and gentle meaning-making in the context of chronic stress. Rather than moving toward urgency or resolution, this supervision session emphasizes staying with the symbols and internal images, listening to what emerges, and engaging in a dialogical process through response art. We how symbolic expression can support internal safety while allowing complexity, ambiguity, and new narratives to unfold. Through shared reflection, the focus will be on cultivating a thoughtful, grounded presence that can hold both personal and professional experiences, supporting sustainable ways of responding rather than reacting.
The emphasis in this supervision space is on deepening our capacity to hold ourselves and others through the use of creative presence, attunement, and rhythm.
Learning Objectives:
Deepen understanding of multilayered stress as an embodied, rhythmic experience and its impact on perception, time, and presence
Cultivate the capacity to use creative process as a space for safety, holding, and co-regulation
Develop sensitivity to subtle shifts in pace, sensation, and imagery as indicators of nervous system change
Explore play, interruption, and creative response as ways of opening space rather than imposing change
Enhance the ability to stay with experience without urgency, supporting reflection, multiplicity, and meaning-making
Reflect on personal and professional positioning in relation to sustainability, presence, and ethical holding
Expand confidence in facilitating safe, attuned, and creative supervisory spaces
Through creative process and curious play we will bring the possibility of relief from the stagnancy of a monotonous heavy rhythm of these times. Through pausing, shifting, agitating, breaking, we will play with creative process that allows for healthier balance and sustainability.
Drawing on principles aligned with trauma-informed practice, DBT (Opposite Action), and the Expressive Therapies Continuum (ETC), participants will explore how creative processes can offer respite, co-regulation, and sustainable change in both personal and clinical contexts.
The series unfolds in three parts:
Part 1: Interruptive Rhythms
This first session explores how experimenting with creative rhythms and movements can shift the felt experience of sustained urgency, uncertainty, and exhausting continuity. The session will focus on how rhythm, pace, and shifts in energy can support experiences of safety, holding, and relief within both personal and professional practice.
Through experiential reflection and shared inquiry, we will pay attention to how slowing down can help us meet inner rhythms more honestly and compassionately. We will explore the relationship between stress, time and self-agency perception, and creative process, considering how gentle disruptions may offer respite from urgency without overwhelming the system further. The emphasis in this supervision space is not on intervention, but on deepening our capacity to hold ourselves and others through the use of creative presence, attunement, and own rhythm.
Part 2: Restoring Balance
Session 2 explores how sensory awareness and engagement with materials in the here and now can support a renewed sense of grounding, balance, and embodied presence in the midst of chronic stress. We will reflect on the relationship between internal and external experience, attending to subtle bodily shifts, states of homeostasis, and the ways texture, touch, and materiality can offer containment, expansion, and co-regulation. At the same time, this session does not approach sensory work as an attempt to simply calm, manage, or override the nervous system at any cost. Rather, it invites us to listen more truthfully to what the body is living in a time when the collective unconscious may be sensing crisis, threat, and destruction. Drawing gently on the kinesthetic and sensory dimensions of the Expressive Therapies Continuum, we will consider how creative sensory experience can help us stay present to that reality, deepen understanding, restore a sense of self-agency, and soften the felt experience of helplessness without bypassing the depth of what is being lived.
Session 3 — Reframing Through Symbolic Imagery
This session invites participants to explore how imagery can open space for reflection, multiple perspectives, and gentle meaning-making in the context of chronic stress. Rather than moving toward urgency or resolution, this supervision session emphasizes staying with the symbols and internal images, listening to what emerges, and engaging in a dialogical process through response art. We how symbolic expression can support internal safety while allowing complexity, ambiguity, and new narratives to unfold. Through shared reflection, the focus will be on cultivating a thoughtful, grounded presence that can hold both personal and professional experiences, supporting sustainable ways of responding rather than reacting.
The emphasis in this supervision space is on deepening our capacity to hold ourselves and others through the use of creative presence, attunement, and rhythm.
Learning Objectives:
Deepen understanding of multilayered stress as an embodied, rhythmic experience and its impact on perception, time, and presence
Cultivate the capacity to use creative process as a space for safety, holding, and co-regulation
Develop sensitivity to subtle shifts in pace, sensation, and imagery as indicators of nervous system change
Explore play, interruption, and creative response as ways of opening space rather than imposing change
Enhance the ability to stay with experience without urgency, supporting reflection, multiplicity, and meaning-making
Reflect on personal and professional positioning in relation to sustainability, presence, and ethical holding
Expand confidence in facilitating safe, attuned, and creative supervisory spaces
About the Workshop Facilitators
Write your awesome label here.
Lindsay Clarke, MA, RCAT, ATR, CCC
Art Therapist
Lindsay believes in the importance of nurturing community and creativity. For the past 10 years she has provided art therapy at a women’s shelter, schools, and art hives. She has enjoyed developing and facilitating community art exhibitions to support the voices of those who have survived violence, the impacts of suicide, and living through homelessness and mental illness.
She now offers art therapy to people of all ages at her Montreal studio, atelier lanterne. Her practice is with a focus on art making and creative process as a catalyst towards change, health, and empowerment. Her work is guided by principles of trauma-informed, attachment-based, and strength-based art therapy practices.
Lindsay provides supervision to individual art therapists and also within a community context, in order to facilitate ongoing growth, curiosity, and support.
She now offers art therapy to people of all ages at her Montreal studio, atelier lanterne. Her practice is with a focus on art making and creative process as a catalyst towards change, health, and empowerment. Her work is guided by principles of trauma-informed, attachment-based, and strength-based art therapy practices.
Lindsay provides supervision to individual art therapists and also within a community context, in order to facilitate ongoing growth, curiosity, and support.
Write your awesome label here.
Carmen Oprea, MA, MFA, RCAT, ATR-BC, ATPQ
Art Therapist
Carmen is a registered art therapist with post-graduate training in sandplay therapy and cognitive-behavioural therapy. Holding master's degrees in art therapy and fine arts, she is currently a doctoral candidate in psychology.
Her professional career includes art therapy services for individuals and groups of all ages with various life challenges, at her clinic, Accès Art. She deeply resonates with Indigenous wisdom and strives to provide culturally sensitive art therapy to Inuit and First Nations adolescents.
Carmen is fortunate to be part of a dedicated team at Concordia University, engAGE Living Lab project and she is co-investigator in a research projects related to art therapy and depression at the same university.
She provides supervision to creative art therapists in person and online.
Her professional career includes art therapy services for individuals and groups of all ages with various life challenges, at her clinic, Accès Art. She deeply resonates with Indigenous wisdom and strives to provide culturally sensitive art therapy to Inuit and First Nations adolescents.
Carmen is fortunate to be part of a dedicated team at Concordia University, engAGE Living Lab project and she is co-investigator in a research projects related to art therapy and depression at the same university.
She provides supervision to creative art therapists in person and online.
Created with
