Holding & Shaping

Hi there, my name is Heather Frayne and I'm an Expressive Arts Therapist living in amiskwaciy-wâskahikan, also known as Edmonton, Alberta, in Treaty 6 territory. My pronouns are she /her and I like about a 20 % sprinkling of they pronouns as well.

Today we're going to explore the themes of perimenopause and our changing body, the unruly body through sculpting some clay. And I'd invite you to bring in the themes of holding and shaping. So you can grab a chunk of clay, maybe about this big. Sometimes you can get these at the dollar store or art stores. And we're just gonna begin by sensitizing to the material.

So you might notice the temperature, the texture, the weight of it, the resistance of it. You can really put some muscle into it. You can give it a little sniff. Just notice how it like wrinkles and bulges, much like our own bodies are doing. And you can kind of press your thumbs into it.

You can also sort of sensitize to the ways that your hands are holding this clay. Our hands are firm and receptive, kind and compassionate. There's a bit of yielding that happens.And then you can also sense the way that we are using like our arm muscles, our tension, to press into the clay. There's some forgiveness there as well. You can change your mind, you can change the shape, you can push it into a ball, flatten it between your hands. So just begin by noticing and when you're ready I would invite you to close your eyes and begin to sculpt an image of you.

And there's no wrong way to do this. You might also start to notice that there are critical ideas that come up. So maybe we can just hold those in our strong compassionate hands, in our strong compassionate mind, gently. So words like bulging or wrinkling or sagging. Just let those things be. Also taking up space and relaxing.

So you can just hold those with compassion as well. So closing your eyes, I would invite you into a time of just shaping, trusting your intuition, tethering back and forth between holding and shaping, being receptive and allowing and then bringing in some shaping.

Now that your eyes are open, you can survey your creation with some compassion and humor. Notice what surprises you. See if there's any little finishing touches that it needs. And again, our fingers are just moving with such great tenderness and compassion. We are holding space for our changing body. Notice that there was a lot that we couldn't control, but also we made something. We made something of this, of this time.

Sometimes there are so many messages about our bodies and how we should be shaping them in certain ways, how they should be looking. And those aren't always realistic or kind even, so just holding your splendid, lumpy self with great curiosity.

When you're ready, I would invite you to grab a pen and paper and start a little dialogue with this creature that you have made or that has emerged this little being and just ask it what it needs, what it knows, what it feels, also what it doesn't feel, what it doesn't know, what it does not need and then just see what messages it might have to say to you.