Four Workshops in July in Chennai (Registration link at the bottom of the page)
1) July 14 to 18 – Art Therapy Workshop – Dr Charitra Ballal
Your investment – Rs 20,000 / Time: 9.30 AM to 4.30 PM all days
Art therapy, a vital modality within expressive arts therapies, invites individuals to explore healing through creativity. As Cathy Malchiodi explains, “Art therapy is not about making art, but about creating change.” For counselors, therapists, and coaches, this approach offers a powerful, non-verbal way to help clients express emotions and gain insight. Natalie Rogers emphasizes, “The creative process, in all its forms, helps us access our inner wisdom.” Integrating art into therapeutic practice fosters emotional release, self-awareness, and transformation. This short course introduces the foundational tools and techniques of art therapy, empowering professionals to support healing through color, image, and imagination.
Here are 5 key takeaways from attending a short course in Art Therapy:
- Self-Expression and Emotional Release: Learn how to use visual art as a non-verbal medium to explore and express complex emotions safely and creatively.
- Understanding of Art Therapy Principles: Gain foundational knowledge of how art can be used therapeutically, including basic techniques and psychological frameworks.
- Stress Reduction and Mental Clarity: Experience firsthand how engaging in art-making can reduce anxiety, promote mindfulness, and improve emotional well-being.
- Increased Self-Awareness and Insight: Reflect on personal experiences and inner thoughts through guided art activities, leading to greater self-understanding.
- Tools for Personal and Professional Use: Take away practical art-based tools and exercises that can be integrated into self-care routines or used in work with others (for educators, counselors, or caregivers).
2) July 18 to 20 – Exploring Dreams through Psychodrama – Magdalene Jeyarathnam
Your investment – Rs 10000/- / Time: 9.30 AM to 4.30 PM all days
Why do we dream at night? Dreams are the language of the unconscious, offering a window into our deeper thoughts, unresolved emotions, and hidden desires, symbols, emotions, and forgotten memories come alive in sleep. They may reflect our fears, hopes, or memories, often using symbols and surreal images to express what words cannot. Exploring our dreams can uncover insights about our inner world, guiding us toward healing, creativity, and self-awareness. In this workshop, we invite you to journey through your dreams—not to interpret them literally, but to engage with them as stories your psyche wants to tell. Let your dreams speak, and discover what they reveal about you. Carl Jung believed dreams guide us toward wholeness, calling them “the guiding words of the soul.” Sigmund Freud saw them as expressions of repressed desires. J.L. Moreno, the founder of psychodrama, viewed dreams as scenes waiting to be enacted, revealing unresolved conflicts and hidden roles. This workshop invites you to explore your dreams—not for interpretation alone, but to live them in action. What is your dream trying to tell you? Step into its world and uncover its message. Magdalene is skilled at bringing dreams alive and helping you understand them very deeply.
Here are three key takeaways from the “An Exploration of Dreams through Psychodrama” workshop:
- Uncover Hidden Meanings: Participants gain insight into the symbolic language of their dreams by enacting them, allowing unconscious thoughts and emotions to surface for reflection and understanding.
- Transform Internal Conflicts: Psychodrama techniques such as role reversal and mirroring help individuals work through unresolved issues and integrate conflicting parts of themselves revealed through dreams.
- Enhance Emotional Clarity and Self-Awareness: By stepping into the roles of dream characters or symbols, participants develop greater emotional awareness and a deeper connection to their inner world.
3) July 21 to 25 – Jungian Psychodrama on Dreams and Transgenerational Issues – Maurizio Gasseau, Italy
Your investment – Rs 17,500/- / Time 9.30 to 4.30 all days
Jungian psychodrama is a theory of psychodramatic technique, articulated in a complex model of conduction and observation. It derives from Jung’s analytical theory on dreams, from his concepts of the personal and collective unconsciousness, of archetypal images and individuation as well as S.H. Foulkes’ concepts of the net and the personal and basic matrix.
The conductor will provide an explanation of the theory behind Jungian Psychodrama and then a more consistent experiential part will follow. The conductor will demonstrate how to play dreams belonging to different categories: symbolic dreams, visiodreams, nightmares, oracle dreams, recurring dreams and social dreams. The conductor will also present new warming up techniques – suitable for online psychodrama, integrating Moreno’s sociometry and Jungian active imagination exercises. He will demonstrate the dream incubation technique according to the ancient medicine of Asclepion and the utilization of opening and closing rituals. Two or three dreams will be played in every session of the training course.
After the final sharing, there will be an observation which will communicate the sense of the dreams which have been played, using a narrative style. It will enrich the plays with mythopoeic amplifications and will try to connect individual themes to the group’s collective unconsciousness as well as to the transcultural themes.
The objective of Transgenerational Psychodrama is to loosen the bonds of loyalty and invisible scripts inherited from previous generations, making them explicit and releasing the psychic energy they encysted. Transgenerational Psychodrama is based on the concept of co – unconscious to understand the invisible bonds of loyalty, tasks unfinished, trauma and wounds of love that is passed down through the generations. The awareness of a strong family constellation, free the individual from the unconscious compulsive repetition of relational models and opens up the possibility of an authentic life. Participants will be accompanied on the streets of the Ancestors in a frame with warming up on transgenerational and exploration of dreams and active imagination in the encounter with Ancestors, through the Jungian psychodrama.
Here are three key takeaways from the Jungian Psychodrama and Transgenerational Healing Workshop:
- Bridge Dreams and Ancestral Memory: Participants explore symbolic, recurring, and social dreams as pathways to access ancestral stories and unconscious family legacies, using Jungian dream theory and psychodramatic enactment.
- Transform Inherited Patterns: Through active imagination, sociometry, and dream incubation, the workshop helps release invisible family scripts and loyalties, allowing participants to interrupt transgenerational cycles of trauma and relational repetition.
- Access the Collective and Personal Unconscious: By engaging with archetypes, rituals, and mythopoeic amplifications, individuals connect their personal narratives with the group’s collective unconscious and transcultural themes, fostering deep psychological integration and individuation.
4) July 26, 27 – Healing Transgenerational Trauma through Psychodrama – Magdalene Jeyarathnam
Your investment – Rs 5000/ Time: July 26 – 9.30 AM to 4.30 PM & July 27 – 9.30 to 12.30 PM
A weekend workshop for self-exploration and healing generational trauma
Explore how trauma is passed down through generations—unspoken, unseen, yet deeply felt. This experiential workshop uses psychodrama and expressive arts to uncover inherited family patterns, bring them to light, and release their emotional grip.
“The body keeps the score: Psychodrama helps people experience what it’s like to be safe and in control, and to rewrite the script of the past.”
— Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
Take away
Step into the stories of your ancestors and reclaim your own.