Feeling with Your Hands: Clayfield Therapy for Adults
- Kirsi
- Jun 14, 2019
- 3 min read
Updated: Jun 15, 2019
Imagine your hands lying on smooth clay… The clay resting still, in front of you, in a box, waiting…
After a while your hands start getting a real feel of the clay field under your palms and fingers…
The sensory input of touching the clay sends a message to your brain to make sense of the stimuli. Is the clay smooth? Is it a bumpy? Is it rough? Is it cold? Is it nice and warm? Is it slippery, sticky, heavy, easy to dig into? What does it feel like?
The image of your hands on the clay, or in the clay, might bring you excitement. It might make your hands tingle with anticipation. Maybe you would like to dive in right away. Perhaps you become dreamy. Emotions are evoked.
Imagining the touch might bring you joy… but it might also bring you hesitation, fear, anger, disgust. You might think that you never want to touch a box full of clay. You don’t want to get your hands ‘dirty’. If this is the case maybe there is a reason why these strong negative thoughts glide into your mind. Maybe there is an issue or life event or life situation or past hurt that manifests through the rejection. Maybe your reaction means that this is what you actually need, the work on the clay field, within the safe parameters of the clay field. Or it might well be that you would first require art therapy sessions using another, less threatening media such as pencils or watercolour on paper, or perhaps you could work with your fingers using soft pastels on paper at first.
The safety comes from the boundaries of the box. The clay is not going anywhere unless your hands move it. Your hands control the clay. Nothing is going to happen unless your hands touch, poke, massage, stroke, lift, roll, handle the clay. The idea of Clayfield Therapy is to move from ‘rational’ thinking into the ‘intuitive’ feeling. Children do ‘intuitive’ naturally. Adults have learnt to steer away from feeling, or cover them with rationalisation, mind clutter and ‘important’ tasks, expectations and requirements. Sometimes things need to be brought to the surface, or they surface naturally without conscious prompting, and when this happens, it is good to have the means to work on those things on the mind, in the mind.
Fingers and hands have a dense area of nerve endings. When hands are touching the clay the nerve endings in your hands respond to the clay, providing sensations. When hands move on the field of clay, the movement and the touch together create sensorimotor integration, that is the nerves and muscles working together. Your hands talk to your brain directly through the nerve endings in your hands. The movement and the touch on clay are therapeutic. It is a sensorimotor experience that has potential to provide healing for the mind, shifting thinking and changing patterns of behaviour. Your hands provide massage to your brain system.
The box is not actually called a box. It is called a field. It’s a field full of clay that is there only for you on that special moment in your life. Clayfield Therapy awaits.
Keywords: clayfield therapy, sensorimotor therapy, clay in therapy, beautyforgivenesshealing, logan art therapy, springwood art therapy, art therapist in logan, art therapist in springwood
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About “Work at the Clay Field” ® https://www.sensorimotorarttherapy.com/arttherapy
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