Narrative Arts Therapy

Inside your brain — that soft, folded, spongy organ — is a map of your life. Deep grooves and wrinkled pathways form a living landscape of memory and meaning. It may look like biology, but it’s also biography. Every joy, every sorrow, every turn in your story leaves a trace. Indelibly recorded. Yet constantly changing.

Learning to read this inner map is part of what it means to be human. In fact, it’s something humans have always done — sitting around fires, marking walls with ochre, shaping clay into figures, telling stories to make sense of what cannot be named directly.

This is the heart of Narrative Arts Therapy: a practice that bridges ancient creative wisdom with modern neuroscience. It’s not about producing “art” in a traditional sense. It’s about using story, image, symbol, movement, and sensory experience to bring healing to the nervous system — and to the self.

In our work together, we might trace your story through a map, stitch it into fabric, breathe it into being, or coax it from silence with colour, drawing, or a song. We engage your creative brain not as decoration, but as medicine. Because storytelling isn’t just something we do — it’s how the brain makes meaning. And meaning is how we heal.

Neuroscience shows that when we create — when we draw, paint, sing, move, or share story — we activate multiple brain systems at once. The emotional brain (limbic system), the body’s stress response (amygdala), the memory centres (hippocampus), and the imagination centres (prefrontal cortex and default mode network) begin to harmonize. Long, slow breaths and rhythmic gestures regulate the nervous system.

This is what Indigenous traditions have known for millennia: that art is not separate from life. It is how we remember who we are. Narrative Arts Therapy invites you to step into this tradition. To use your hands, your voice, your breath — and your story — as tools for healing and reimagining.