Here is another of my stories about the healing dreams offer us.
Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ category
Love Supreme
March 11, 2026Art Wisdom Explorer’s (AWE) Circles – 2025 Cohort forming – starting this summer!
March 6, 2025Feeding Our Creative Fire (even when – and because – times are hard!)
A contemplative approach to continuing education and vocational formation for arts-based therapists, LMHC’s, and spiritual directors.
Facilitated by Liza Hyatt, LMHC, ATR-BC, ATCS
2025 Cohort forming – spaces open – starting this June!
AWE Circles provide a unique, much needed, approach to art-based learning through sustained nourishment and intentional practice supported by community. Through a combination of virtual webinars, self-paced art-as-meditation practice, self-paced reading and journaling, individual mentoring sessions, and group sharing sessions, AWE Circle participants will nourish personal creative vitality. We will also explore how to keep that fire strong while also drawing upon it as we serve humanity and the world. This training provides a long, deep, and supportive learning process to guide arts-based practitioners in increasing their fluency in the expressive arts as a therapeutic process. This training also supports our growth as contemplative artists who need well-fed creative fires to act as effective healers in the complex and challenging times our world now faces.
Topics covered include:
- Why and how the creative process brings healing, insight, and change
- What contemplative art-based practice is and how it can enliven us and help increase our courage in hard times
- the essential role of the body in our creative lives
- how cultivating kithship relationships with natural places is essential for authentic creativity and rooted strength for the work we are called to do
- how to creatively respond to personal and collective grief as a recurring presence
- the importance of keeping imagination alive and at the heart of our vocation
- the wounds to creativity affecting our clients, ourselves, and the world
- practices to build community, share rituals of mourning, and awaken collective awe through intermodal arts engagement
Virtual webinars meet bimonthly, followed by self-paced creative meditation, individual mentoring sessions and virtual group sharing gatherings in alternate months. Live participation in webinars and group sharing sessions is needed. (Recordings of virtual group program content can be provided for those with occasional schedule conflicts.)
Proposed calendar for training dates and detailed format is provided below and also on my “2025 New Programs and Events” Page. (Dates may change depending on time needed to recruit cohort participants)
Learn through Sustained, Nurtured Growth Instead of Information Overload
The work and ongoing learning-needs of expressive arts therapists and contemplative artist spiritual companions is complex. Our vocation as artist-healers requires a lifelong commitment to feeding the creative fire and living within its transformational energy. Yet, how to sustain this creative fire is rarely taught. Over the course of nearly 40 years as an art-therapist in clinical and spiritual companionship settings, I have often felt the need for deeper, more carefully sustained learning opportunities designed to help healing artists nurture both the long-term wellbeing of soulful creativity and our capacity to be led by its wisdom. I developed Art-Wisdom Explorer (AWE) Circles as a way to respond to this unmet need (while also providing CEU hours!) Through these AWE Circles, I future generations within our vocation who seek a learning community committed to keeping alive the creative heart of our vocation.
Program Facilitator: See my Bio page on this website
2025 Calendar, Program Format and Fees
- Virtual group sessions occur as 1.5 hour gatherings one Monday evening each month, 7:30-9:00 pm ET, June 2025 through January 2026. (8 sessions – 12 CEUs)
- Cohort members also schedule 3 Individual 1-hour mentoring sessions with the course facilitator to support learning and creative process. (3 CEUs)
- Self-paced study and engagement in art-meditation is sustained throughout the 8 month training period through learning modules provided monthly. (about 2 hours per week)
Total CEU’s 15
Program cost: $550 (about $36 per CEU)
Payment schedule: $275 to enroll
$275 by June 1st
(please reach out if you have other needs regarding payments)
June 23, 2025 (7:30-9 pm ET) Webinar 1
Learning Module A – Self-paced art-meditation and study and Individual mentoring session
July 21, 2025 (7:30-9 pm ET) Group Creative Process Sharing 1
Learning Module B – Self-paced art-meditation and study and Individual mentoring session
August 18, 2025 (7:30-9 pm ET) Webinar 2
Learning Module C – Self-paced art-meditation and study and Individual mentoring session
September 15, 2025 (7:30-9 pm ET) Group Creative Process Sharing 2
Learning Module D – Self-paced art-meditation and study and Individual Mentoring Session
October 20, 2025 (7:30-9 pm ET)Webinar 3
Learning Module E – Self-paced art-meditation and study and Individual mentoring session
November 17, 2025 (7:30-9 pm ET) Group Creative Process Sharing 3
Learning Module F – Self-paced art-meditation and study and individual mentoring session
December 15, 2025, (7:30-9 pm ET) Webinar 4
Learning Module G – Self-paced art-meditation and study and Individual mentoring session
Final reflection and creative response
January 19, 2026, (7:30-9 pm ET) Graduation Sharing and Celebration
Not ready to join the 2025 AWE circle cohort, yet craving more nourishment of your creative life and healing-arts vocation? Please reach out for individual art-based mentoring/spiritual companionship sessions as a way to begin.
To register or for further information, contact Liza Hyatt at: elizahyatt@moredeeplyreal.com
Grief and Dreamwork
March 2, 2025
My podcast interview on Little Losses Everywhere (and some big ones too)
This week I was interviewed by Dr. Jan Lundy, a grief support specialist and director of The Metta Center which provides training in companioning those who are grieving. (www. GriefCompanionTraining.com). In this podcast, I described how talking about dreams with a trained dreamwork practitioner can be helpful and healing to those who are grieving.
Here is a link to the podcast. I hope it invites you to find a deeper connection with your dreams.
Coming Soon
December 28, 2024Art Wisdom Explorers Circles (AWE Circles)
An in-depth training in expressive arts for therapists and spiritual seekers.
2025 Cohort will be forming soon.
Further Information will be posted on this site soon!
Dreamwork: Learning to Feel the Difference between Making Progress and Being Born
July 10, 2022Soul desires in every moment to be born…
Source: Learning to Feel the Difference between Making Progress and Being Born
Becoming an Earth Monk
April 30, 2022
I haven’t been active on the is blog for several months because I have been writing chapters of a book whose working title is The Dark Night of the Earth and the Earth Monk’s Vigil. I am now ready to share here what my writing and research are enlivening for me.
Like many people, over the course of the past few years, I have felt growing despair for what is happening on our Earth and to our Earth. I feel a deep need to be with others who feel the same despair – and the hope that humanity can mature through the dark times ahead and learn to live more compassionately with each other and with reverence and caring for our local ecosystems and the planet as a whole.
Here is an excerpt from the introduction to The Dark Night of the Earth and the Earth Monk’s Vigil:
As a young woman, I hoped that our collective transition away from the Earth-destroying culture we currently inhabit and participate in, toward new, sustainable, more just and compassionate systems, would be completed in my lifetime, with a relatively brief and collectively chosen period of transformation. Now, I grieve for how we are only just entering what must be an extremely complex, dark, painful, disordering, chaotic, conflict-filled, multi-generational liminal expanse, from which a radically altered, profoundly humbled human culture might emerge – into a very different kind of rebirth than the world-conquering Renaissance of the past – if we don’t render Earth uninhabitable along the way.
Now, as a woman entering my crone stage of life, I am starting to see that I will live my elder decades as a participant within a time of global descent into disorder and confusion, revealing that what we have lived through in recent years has been merely the beginning ripples, the early distant rumblings of the much larger storm of change, struggle and painful psychological and spiritual initiation necessary to make us surrender our old familiar ego-centric cultural systems. The transformation that we must undergo will be humiliating in the truest, root sense of the word – a process in which we are brought low, back down into the earth, into the humus nature of being human, a return of Adam to adama – the clay, the earth to which we belong and must be real stewards of. Initiation, the soul’s process of ripening us, is humiliation of the ego, rendering us more in service of community and of the needs of soul. Only through such an initiation will humanity learn again to live in relationship with earth and each other. I do not expect this human-humus initiation to be completed in my daughter or granddaughter’s lifetime. Perhaps my great-grandchildren, and even more fully, my great-great grandchildren will be born in a truly Earth-stewarding culture.
At the same time as I’ve been stripped of my younger naïveté, which hoped for an easier transition and an easier era in which to live the second half of my life, my soul life and spiritual love has grown and deepened. This is a love that encompasses the whole Earth, humanity, and the sacred web of interconnected relationships within which we are woven. The spiritual formation through which this love has expanded gives me strength, courage, groundedness, and personal commitment to living as one engaged within present and future suffering, complex and scary as it will be. I want to be as present as I can, in deep relationships with people around me, witnessing and staying awake, keeping vigil throughout what is to come – the collective dark night of both the human soul and the planet itself.
The state of being in vigil is a state of being liminal. Of opening to silence, unknowing and darkness. Of suffering and lamenting and witnessing the pain within our depths. Of meeting our own demons, which we created in fruitless effort to be in control. Of surrendering to waiting in prayer dark for dawn.
More than anything, the Earth needs us to enter this state of vigil. To stop doing what we have been doing, to surrender our being in control, to face the demonic mess we have made of things, to meet the trauma we have inflicted and carry within us. To grieve, soften, and acknowledge the collective pain in which we live. And to wait, learning to listen to nature itself for what will heal us, and for the real work that is needed of us.
To grow capable of such vigil, we need to learn to be more patient within the liminal. We must be willing to become monks – Earth Monks born from the spiritual and communal needs of our era, committed to living in service of healing the collective trauma of humanity and our planet.
I hope this post finds its way to many others who are also called to become Earth Monks. In the coming year, I will continue to post excerpts from my book project, including suggestions of practices to help us unlearn the conditioned behaviors of Western society and its colonizing and consumerism. One of the key wounds to our soul-life in this society is the impairment of imagination, without which we cannot experience the world as alive and sacred. Therefore many of my upcoming posts will be about ways to heal our relationship with the imagination, first through the primary imagination that we encounter in our dreams, and later through the secondary imagination found in contemplative art making practices.
Poem of the Month
June 18, 2021
Song of the Cicada
What will you do,
you, who have endured
month after month,
year after underworld year,
in a dark silent place
and now wake to a strange new strength
and the desire to unbury yourself
with which you squirm free
and emerge
into a world
of sun and thunder,
catalpa flowers and bees,
birth upon voice upon song?
Join us,
the other ecstatic souls
who are already here celebrating.
Grow gold wings,
devote the rest of your life to love-making,
and raise an irresistible ruckus.
Poem of the Week 3-7-21
March 7, 2021
Poet God God is a poet of few words, singing, over and over in meditation: And, yes! let us be… And, yes! let us be… And, yes! let us be…
Poem of the Week – December 13
December 13, 2020As we head toward Christmas, this poem spoke to me, I wrote it after winter's meditation during my workday commute. Commute Home The audiobook is talking about the disappointment of the early Christians, waiting and waiting for the transformation they believed would happen in their lifetime, until they grew to find eternity and salvation inside the waiting, as waiting changed them, teaching them to love each other. A livestock semi-trailer is slowly passing me. Pushed into each oval air-hole, black and white fur of cows packed in for a long journey. From one of these holes, a single, velvet cow ear, flapping in the winter air. I long to reach out and touch its softness; I feel sudden tenderness for these animals and their life of sacrifice. I arrive home less disappointed in marriage, practicing the faith born from knowing we failed and fail and will fail yet continue to chose a forgiving-love, with which we redeem each other.
Poem of the Week
November 29, 2020To encourage, enliven, and inspire your journey as seeker, I am now offering a "Poem of the Week", sharing one of my own poems. Here is the first offering. Prayer for Choosing to Soften At best, we will need therapy and meditation practice for the rest of our lives, and some of us will soften and begin to heal, and some of us will keep resisting, afraid to be other than alone behind walls. And the world goes on as it always has and always will, warring more wherever we resist, and warring less wherever we soften. Sometimes we feel like fools. We could be getting drunk and screwing around in opulent, burning fortresses, instead of humbly sitting here, becoming naked. But the love we seek needs us to live in the wound like maggots cleansing an open sore of infection, like bees finding pollen to make honey, like mystics waking in the heart of the cosmic rose, realizing what we called self was a simple portal, a crudely carpentered door, we are quietly passing through, beyond which compassion is forever opening.
More Deeply Real 