Expressive Arts Therapy / Therapeutic Arts in Tucson
THERAPUTIC ARTS
Therapeutic arts explore the intersection of the imagination and present-moment, embodied experience. They offer a way forward that is not prescribed, not predictable, but deeply felt, alive, intuitive, and individual. The guidance I offer, through individual and group offerings, will help you feel and trust the unique current of your own life-force unfolding in real time.
Therapeutic Arts in Tucson
These services are right for you
if you’re wanting a life of more:
- meaning, purpose, and depth
- vitality, creativity, and wakefulness
- clarity, direction, and intrinsic motivation
- compassion, connectedness, and confidence
Why Therapeutic Arts in Tucson?
Coming Home to Yourself
Traditional psychotherapy is not always the best answer for addressing mild depression, a sense of a veil between yourself and the world, a lack of vitality, or feeling unable to realize your potential. For people who don’t require a formal, clinical setting for safety and progress, engagement in therapeutic arts may be a better fit.
Therapeutic arts center the creative process and what sparks the spirit. In this context, my role is as a guide versus as a therapist. I create a nourishing environment, provide witnessing and light-handed guidance so that the Wise One within you is free to lead the way.
Authentic movement, choreotherapy, therapeutic writing, voice and poetry work have much in common with Depth Psychology. Trained in dream work and authentic movement as well as in creative writing and dance, I support a process Depth Psychology calls “individuation.” Individuation is, essentially, a process of becoming more and more uniquely you, whether or not that’s who you were taught you were supposed to be.
Expressive Arts Therapy in Tucson
SERVICES
If you’re stable and successful in some areas, but feel “there’s something more,” you’re in the right place. Perhaps you’ve done a lot of healing work and you’re ready for the next level of transformation. Maybe you’re managing well enough, but you’ve been through something that’s set you back in terms of living the life you want to live or being the person you know you are. You may know yourself to be a creative person, but your creativity’s blocked. I look forward to discussing how I can best support you!
Therapeutic Dance and Choreotherapy
In supportive environments, dance is naturally therapeutic. It allows us to sequence intense emotions (pleasant and unpleasant) through our bodies in ways that bring us relief, strength, energy and connectedness. Choreotherapy is my great love because of its power to communicate and transform personal narratives on a deeply embodied level through meaningful movements that occur in connection with others.
Therapeutic Writing Workshops
Writing doesn’t have to be either therapeutic or well-crafted: it can be both. As a trained poet, who found my voice prior to learning the craft or to becoming a therapist, I facilitate creative processes that promote personal growth and generate works of art. My workshops often involve multi-modal explorations in movement, sound and written word where language comes from the body and transformation occurs from toes to head and head to toes.
Voice Work
Voice work with me means going at a pace that’s right for you in order to make way for the one voice in this world that is only yours. This work can be vulnerable and incredibly exciting. I will support you to find your voice on all levels. I am a singer and a poet who’s spent a lifetime exploring the changes in my voice — literally and metaphorically — as I have gone through new ages, life stages, and experiences. Voice work is essential to human development! I look forward to supporting your voice to emerge.
Poetry
Poetry has the potential to offer us something little else does. It can reach up, down, and sideways — all at once. Bringing pregnant words together in ways that have never happened before is the quintessence of embodied language. It unites our mundane realities with a dimension of reality that requires time, space, and presence to know intimately. Poetry brings to our lips what’s urgent in our bodies and emergent in the universe. It is, as we are, part animal and part god. So poetry can articulate truths little else can. Find such poems at my poetry blog, Borderlands.
Authentic Movement
Authentic Movement has been called “dreaming with the body.” Beyond releasing stored up tension and emotion in our bodies, and beyond restorative movement, authentic movement invites us into the realms of the unconscious and transcendental. When our mental health is stable, we are then safe to deepen into and explore the images and impulses that can lead us beyond our conditioning. We can start moving with awareness that leads to real choice, a more expanded experience of self, freedom.
I trained extensively in authentic movement and dreamwork with dance/movement therapist and psychoanalyst, Zoe Avstreih. With Zoe, I learned that authentic movement isn’t just about a way of moving in a studio; it’s the concentrated practice of a way of life, a way of being. As your authentic movement witness, my role is not to analyze or interpret — it is to hold an alive, but neutral container in which a “truer self” can emerge. I look forward to holding space for your next authentic movements to unfold.
Embodiment Coaching
Much about the modernized, colonized world asks us — even requires us — to disconnect from our bodies: ideals about how we should look and what we should be able to produce; others’ ideas and society’s propaganda about how and who we should be; individual and collective trauma; technology; profit- driven 5-second attention spans; concrete … the list goes on-and-on. Through embodiment coaching, I will help you rediscover the world of your felt experience — and the countless gifts that offers. Once you have developed an embodiment practice that you can return and return to, it is a reliable, FREE, and extremely effective form of political resistance and self love that will be with you, always. *Embodiment coaching is often an excellent companion to or next step after traditional talk therapy. Based on our consultation, I will let you know if I think somatic psychotherapy is a better fit for you, at this time. I look forward to assisting you into deep body-mind reconnection.
These services are not appropriate for those currently struggling with active mental health symptoms; however, if you’re currently working with a psychotherapist and would like to discuss adjunctive somatic, experiential or expressive arts psychotherapy, please contact me for a consultation.
Creative work with Leslie McCormick
About Your GUIDE
Growing up on a farm as a child, my days were lightly structured. My rhythms were aligned with the hours of sunlight in a day and the seasons. The farm and its creatures were like siblings to me. The landscape was a canvas for imagination and unfettered movement.
There, I immersed myself in singing, dancing, and writing long before I had any training. The freedom of space and structure gave me access to an uninhibited and non-critical experience of essence-in-motion. Only much later did I refine that expression through technique and craft.
Rooted in both the arts and buddhist practice when I matriculated into my masters program at Naropa University in 2003, I noted how the buddhist university, its Somatic Counseling Psychology Program and Dance/Movement Therapy track seamlessly brought together everything I was noticing about what helps humans expand beyond our conditioning.
I was ordained as a Buddhist Dharmacharini in 2021. I continue to pursue development and individuation through artistic pursuits, disciplines and inspired relationships. For me, deep engagement in creative, artistic, and spiritual work/play — especially with others — is central to transformation. I am honored to guide others into reconnection with and revitalization of this part of themselves.
“The intersection of the imagination and our present-moment experience is the womb of newness, of grounded possibility.”
— Leslie McCormick
TUCSON SOMATIC PSYCHOTHERAPY REVIEWS
Testimonials
Leslie’s kindness, her genuineness, and her penetrating attention combine with decades of experience to make her in-person workshops and groups, as well as her online offerings, delightful as well as rife with immediately usable skills. I can’t think of a finer person to study with in order to cultivate my personal and professional embodied being (and doing!) in the world.
Christine Caldwell
PhD, LPC, BC-DMT, Author, Bodyfulness
Leslie McCormick is an artist and a therapist of high caliber. She brings a deep, embodied commitment to creativity and a keen attention to important and subtle detail, to her work as a clinician and teacher.
Leah D’Abate
MA, LPC, BC-DMT
Let's Connect
Tucson Somatic Psychotherapy and Arts is home to dynamic, holistic transformational work. Whether you’re looking to heal, grow, thrive, or simply rest into your authentic self, the seeds of what’s possible are in you. I look forward to working with you to tend them.