Weeping Canvas
An Intentional Creativity Process for processing grief and trauma
Weeping Canvas is an Intentional Creativity process designed to help you process and release grief and trauma. We will use image, language, and active imagination to move through and beyond the tears.
While this is a painting class, it's not about artistic ability or even about making a painting. We will use paint and markers as tools to shift energies and experiences that can take over our lives, if we allow them too. This experiential painting class will help you regain control of your story and allow you to move forward, without carrying the burden of pain with you every day.
This process is one that I hope you will come back to and repeat as many times as you need to. There's something powerful about pouring your story out onto the canvas, and then seeing the canvas witness it back to you.
Your Instructor
Tricia Ballad is a writer and artist, visionary entrepreneur, mental health advocate, and crazy busy mom of four. She is passionate about the healing potential of creativity for herself, her children, and for our world.
She is familiar with the complexities of living with anxiety, depression, and PTSD both in her own life and her work with women, children, and teens. Growing up, she thought the patterns of thinking and seeing the world through the eyes of fear and self doubt were just how things were - except for those brief moments she broke free, almost by accident. She innovated and found new ways to break through the fog of anxiety and depression through her creative inquiry and desire.
During her journey of self-healing she sought help from mental health professionals, but talk therapy didn’t seem to take her where she longed to go. Like so many others, knows that genius is often hidden within these challenges and that access to working with them was essential to her personal and professional life. Her search for healing for herself, her family, and for others, that struggled called her forward.
Tricia has been a trail-blazer since childhood and instead to taking a backseat, she chose to bring her gifts to the world. In 2004 she started her first business working from home.
Becoming a mother intensified her search for healing modalities, as she witnessed her children experiencing the same challenges she faced. As they grew, she learned new language to describe their experience and hers. She became a passionate advocate for the benefits of neurodiversity and the need to create therapies and ways of healing that integrated the whole self and respected the wonderfully diverse ways that human beings experience the world.
Tricia started using art journaling to explore the challenges she faced through creativity. This led her to Intentional Creativity, and to the answers she was desperately seeking. For the first time, she had a way to release what was trapped inside. The experience of her own powerful creativity left her feeling safe, in control, and at peace for hours afterwards. She was able to draw from those experiences for days after a creative process. The constant panic melted away at the canvas. This experience was so life-changing that she knew she had to share it with others.
In 2017, Tricia made the decision to take her personal healing into a form that could truly serve others. In 2018 she earned her Intentional Creativity Teacher Certification and teaches groups in the Chicago area and online.
Her work encompasses three core areas: teaching creativity as a life skill for the 21st century, creativity as healing modality for anxiety/depression/PTSD, and creative entrepreneurship as a way for people to adapt to a changing economy and for those with disabilities to make a meaningful contribution from their gifts and talents, without being held back by external assumptions about their abilities.
Tricia spends her days writing, painting, helping with homework and figuring out how to infiltrate some of our most serious institutions - schools, businesses, and the medical system - with creativity and play.