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CREATIVE COMPASSION

Creative Compassion is a practice enhancing self-empathy and empathy for others through the arts

Creative Compassion for Peace

Creative Compassion Practice (CCP for short) contributes to global efforts for peace

The practice uses the force of Focusing and Felt Arts for building Relational Empathy and community empowerment 

Practitioners learn to bodily respond to fine arts material from persecuted artists and express their feelings through experiential arts activities (embodied cultural and creative arts engagement)

Following the wisdom of the body, practitioners come to synthezise divergent emotions and feeling states, and experience a sense of the Bigger Us

INFO BOX Relational Empathy

Relational Empathy is tuning in to the whole instead of tuning in to parts only. Relational Empathyis promoting personal and collective growth. It is fostering a sociocentric instead of an egocentric world view

Relational Empathy is a person-centered concept developed by Maureen O'Hara, a former co-worker of Carl Rogers

 

Within the arts Relational Empathy is to tune in to all of what an artpiece is offering: Aesthetics that match your personal interests and aesthetics that are beyond your personal interests. Artistic Relational Empathy is to shift between both kinds of aesthetics with empathic curiosity. Instead of getting stuck in conflicting aesthetic interests you explore the interconnectedness of both sides with care and unconditional positive regard

 

In social life Relational Empathy is to tune in to inner parts and to tune in to relationships with others and respond to the needs of the persons involved (with all the interrelational dynamics of group collectives that might be contradictious to your personal needs, points of view or moral standards)

From Artistic To Social Relational Empathy

Making your journey with Creative Compassion Practice (CCP) you will stretch your empathy beyond personal preferences and limitations on multiple layers of existence.

You learn to

  • cultivate empathy for what feels aesthetically familiar and unfamiliar to you

  • process what provokes unease or looks divergent

  • tune into and connect with different bodily feelings and energy states that might feel conflicting

  • shift your perspective on parts and the whole

  • generate felt meaning in art life and in social life

  • strengthen your sense of collaboration and coexistance

 

You come to a wider range of social empathy by implicitly training interactive skills through making arts from the body sense

Coming in touch with the body sense (a kinaesthetic sense of inner truth emerging from the body's inner wisdom) your can find new ways of being in the world that make you feel more at home with where life is placing you

The benefit of operating from the body sense will be accessable by following the CCP Directives

 

The art directives you are introduced to come from different traditions: Museum art-based Therapy (Receptive Art Therapy), Guided Drawing® (Sensorimotor Art Therapy®), Dynamic Shape Drawing (anthroposophic art therapy) and Focusing Oriented Expressive Arts FOAT® (integration of Focusing Oriented Therapy and Expressive Arts)

You will be guided by art directives for warming up, art directives for stepping into the process and art directives for developing your process further

 

Your Creative Compassion Practice will be supported artistically by artwork of an early pioneer of Modern Arts, the German artist Adolf Hölzel. The artwork coming from his art school (The Hölzel Circle) had been banned during the 1930s and 1940s by Nazi persecution

Hölzels simple pastel drawings serve as reference pictures for your receptive-active arts engagement induced by the CCP Directives (low-skill-high-sensitivity approach)

 

Transfer from artistic to social Relational Empathy needs some kind of facilitation. A Creative Compassion guide (a Focusing practitioner or FOAT practitioner) can support you finding action steps that integrate your art experience and life

Take your step into Relational Empathy

Go get started with self-paced Creative Compassion Practice

Engage in Creative Compassion Practice CCP and get supported by

FAQ

I have no art experience. Can I participate?

The art exercises you are introduced to are user-friendly and designed as a low-skilled practice. You need no previous knowledge to do them

They have been developed from Museum based Self Art Therapy and therapeutic art practices that have been created for people without previous art experience

I don't know how to feel the body. Do you have any advice?

The exercises presented on this website work with the body felt from within

You get access to your inner bodily feelings through mindful breathing integrated into the art making

To help you learn sensing the body from within please visit one of the free introductions of Creative Compassion Practice or meet your Creative Compassion guide in a 1:1 session

If you suffer from a health problems and need extra kind of self-care, please contact us

What art materials do I need?

The art materials you need for this journey are simple and cheap. You will use oilpastells (crayons, colored pencils/markers will do as well), paper and tape

Are there reduced prizing options?

The directives of Creative Compassion Practice are free gifts

Group events (webinars, workshops, classes and supervision) have Early Bird. They are announced in the Creative Compassion Letters

Group events are offering a waiting list you can register for

Contact us for goup event notifications

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Creative Compassion Practice: What People Say

Being taken care of. All universe is taking care

 

Pleasant surprize how easily two far apart things come together and come into sync like in a dance

 

Both parts are coming to same ground. There is one unifying flow. All is part of this flow

 

Co-creation

 

In touch with the bigger aspect of life

 

It becomes musical. It's like a symphony where I can integrate the two

 

It is a lesson to welcome it all and be with it all

 

So surprizing: things are coming together

 

There is a blending of the negative with the positive and a new synthes

 

There is a rhythm of containing, one is containing the other, and it is grounding

 

There is an energy coming that is vitalizing and holding both together, and they can flow forward, and it becomes an inner ressource

GET THE BIGGER PICTURE. MAKE ARTS FROM FELT KNOWING