Sexuality Art (fringe and sparkles optional)
What if your sexuality were a room that you could enter and explore? What would it be like? Textures? Colors? Shapes? Movement?
There are more than 1 million words in the English language. Yet there are experiences that we just don’t have enough language for, like sexuality. We often have trouble talking about sexuality because so much of it comes from a non-verbal part of our brain. Art can be a way out.
Art taps into emotions and felt senses, the other side of our brains. Seeing, feeling, and touching allows you to externalize what’s on the right side of the brain so that you can put words to it.
Art becomes a way around the restriction of language. Color, texture, shape can say what words can’t. Tamara Galinsky knows that intimately.
Tamara is a psychotherapist and an art therapist who's leading a very cool workshop at Freed Bodyworks on March 5th, 3D Sexuality: A Diorama Experiential. It’s a chance to explore your sexuality through art, specifically the diorama. (Remember dioramas from school? These will be much more fun!)
This workshop will be a safe, fun, and non-judgmental space to play with understanding your own sexuality as it manifests today. You’ll have about three hours to do whatever seems right to you with the materials Tamara provides (you can also bring your own if there’s something special you want to use).
She advises also bringing music and headphones so you can really get lost in the process. As Tamara says, “the more you think about it, the less effective it is. Don’t think about it. Process matters, product not so much.”
Which is a nice way of saying your diorama does not have to be pretty or artistic when you’re done. It just has to express your reality. It is, literally, impossible to do this wrong. In fact, Tamara says the people who have the most fun with this are usually not artists.
Even if you’ve explored your own sexuality, there’s always more to learn and uncover. And if you’ve explored it a lot, this diorama will invite you to go plunge even deeper into the realms of lacking desire, dismantling taboos, and your pushing your continued sexual evolution.
Everyone has a sexuality. Asexual, pansexual, heterosexual, trans*, cis-, polyamorous, monogamous or non-monogamous. Maybe you are a sexual abuse survivor who wants to understand their own sexuality with new boundaries. Or are you post-menopausal and exploring sexuality with less estrogen-fueled desire? People in the midst of gender transitions may be trying to make sense of an expanding sexual repertoire. While middle-aged parents may be trying to resurrect their sexual selves after fertility treatments, birth and post-partum depression. Everyone has a sexuality.
Tamara says she is “amazed, astounded, and impressed at what comes up for people and what they discover for themselves, even the most self-aware people and those who identify as sex positive. They come to the workshop and they discover something new. Every time.”
She explains that sexuality and art therapy are not often combined. Sexuality is not even talked about much in psychotherapy circles. She thinks “art and sexuality is a match made in heaven, it’s endless.”
If you want to explore your sexuality in a fun, free, and artsy space, the workshop will be Saturday, March 5, from 1-4. Register here.
