Season 6, Episode 8

Today’s Guest: Dr. Madeline Ofina is a speaker, community educator, Clinical Psychologist, and Mental Health Consultant. Her training focused on program evaluation, the Wellness and Recovery model of mental health, and serious, persistent mental illness. After her clinical training and work in the hospital system, she realigned her work and decolonized her mind and practice through training and studying decolonizing mental health and liberation psychology. She founded MO-fina Wellness and Education, an education and spiritual business, and separately owns a Private Practice working with predominantly BIPOC adult children of immigrants on healing from intergenerational trauma, racial trauma, and oppression through decolonization.
 
SHOW TOPICS

• The marriage between creativity and spirituality both in and out of therapy
• Pushing back against the idea of using spirituality to avoid pain and suffering
• Dr. Ofina's journey to decolonize her work and align it with social justice and liberation principles
• The tug of war between wanting to work inside or outside the field of therapy
• Framing the insidious nature of colonization within the framework of mental health

Season 6, Episode 3

Today’s Guest: Tracy Taris is a Licensed Marriage & Family Therapist who holds a master’s degree in Clinical Psychology from Azusa Pacific University. She owns a group private practice where she and her team provide individual, couples, and family counseling in person and via telehealth. Tracy is the author of Many Voices One Truth, published by Winged Publications. In the book, Tracy shows readers how to differentiate between voices that compete for our attention. She uses psychotherapy techniques and meditative and prayer practices to teach readers how to calm the mind and tune into the Voice that created them. Tracy also serves as a therapist in the Health Center at College of The Canyons in the Santa Clarita Valley. She enjoys spending time with her husband Michael, their two daughters, son-in-law and granddaughter.

SHOW TOPICS

• How Tracy makes time for her creative pursuits
• How creative brains are different, and the things that can help bring clients back to themselves
• The creativity of using intuitive understanding and devising individualized interventions in the therapy room
• The similarities between journalism and therapy

Season 5, Episode 6

Today’s Guest: Sara Montague Miller is a Licensed Professional Counselor in solo private practice on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. She specializes in working with members of the LGBTQ+ community and clients struggling with spiritual or existential concerns. She provides clinical supervision for those seeking counseling licensure in Mississippi as well as business consultation for therapists starting solo practices. She also owns Uninvented Colors Photography, capturing lifestyle portraits locally and decorating walls all over the world with bold and colorful art prints. 

​SHOW TOPICS

• The many similarities between therapy and photography
• Logotherapy and asking the big existential questions
• The creativity and cognitive flexibility needed to challenge dominant worldviews around topics such as gender and religion

Season 2, Episode 7

​Today’s Guest: Jamie Kohanyi is a licensed psychotherapist practicing in the state of California. She is a graduate of Pacifica Graduate Institute’s Counseling Psychology program, with an emphasis in Depth Psychotherapy. Her interest lies in the interplay between the unconscious, the body, and creativity, which began with her experience as a multi-award-winning singer-songwriter and graduate of Berklee College of Music. Singing was Jamie's primary therapeutic modality until she moved from New York City to California in her 20s to initiate studies at The Institute of Transpersonal Psychology and Sky Mountain Institute for the Expressive Arts. The following 20 years of education and experience lead to her current expertise in women with eating disorders, perinatal mental health, dreamwork, the expressive arts, and psychedelic psychotherapy. Jamie is currently pursuing a certificate in Jungian Psychology from the CG Jung Institute of Los Angeles. She is married to David Kohanyi, also a psychotherapist, and is a mother of three.

SHOW TOPICS

• The relationship between creativity and transformation, and how psychotherapists can serve as ministers to aid in that transformation
• Bringing mindfulness and beauty into our daily routines
• The importance of leaving time for imagination and not feeling the societal pressure to “produce, produce, produce” as a creative

Season 2, Episode 2

Today's Guest: Nattan Hollander, LMFT, was an artist first and became a psychotherapist along the way. He made art as a child in Israel, where he grew up, and later moved to the US to train in art and get his fine arts degree at CalArts in California. He was living in a Zen Center during that time, where he spent many hours meditating and learned to cook great soups for Zen retreats with a woman who soon became his wife. He earned his MA at Pacifica Graduate Institute, a school that emphasizes care of the soul as being central to mental health. This aligned with his own sensibilities as an artist. For Nattan, art and spirituality are inseparable. When he works with artists as a therapist, he treats their creative life as sacred.

SHOW TOPICS

• Wrestling with creativity and making within an institutional space
• Reconnecting with creation through writing an experiential thesis centered around meditation and imagination
• The importance of treating a client’s creative life as sacred and helping them find value in creation in a society that doesn’t always lift it up
• How lacking opportunity for expression and creativity can be a matter of life and death​

Season 1, Episode 8

Today’s guest: Ann Taylor McNiece is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist practicing in Southern California. She comes from a family of creatives and loves using out-of-the-box methods to help people with different kinds of minds find success and healing. Ann hosts the Soul Grit Podcast, which covers faith and mental health. She is an extrovert who loves tacos and the beach.

SHOW TOPICS

• Finding new modes of expression as we become busy adults
• How the artist’s brain functions differently 
• Adapting common therapeutic methods like Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for creative clients (with a demonstration of how it works!)
• The 4 C’s of where we want to be 
• Discussing the advantages of having a creative background when working with creative clients​

Season 1, Episode 5

Today’s guest: Morgan Myers, LPC, is a therapist in East Dallas, Texas, with her own private practice. Her favorite clients are postpartum women, people working through spiritual hurt from the church, and creatives. She has begun to use horticulture therapy in her practice as a way to help people work through grief. She also plans to use horticulture therapy in her community to help with chronic depression, anxiety, and grief from the effects of COVID. Morgan has two daughters and has been married for 13 years.

SHOW TOPICS

• Art as a spiritual practice
  
• What is horticulture therapy?
• How gardening can help people find understanding in their current season of life
• Morgan discusses her own experience of spiritual hurt
  
• Why postpartum women need special care and often feel misunderstood