Wellbeing through Making: Art for Calm and Resilience

Learn mindful creative practice with our wellbeing short courses in Sydney!

In an increasingly fast-paced and demanding work environment, many organisations are asking an important question: are you developing your team’s capacity to manage pressure, maintain focus and work together with trust and clarity?

Wellbeing through Making: Art for Calm and Resilience offers a thoughtfully designed, evidence-informed workshop that supports staff wellbeing, team development and psychological safety through hands-on creative practice.

This offering can be delivered either as a four-session evening course or adapted as a half-day workplace workshop. In both formats, creativity is used not as performance, but as a practical, accessible tool for regulation, reflection and connection.

Facilitated by a PACFA-registered clinical counsellor with extensive experience across corporate, tertiary and community settings, the course is grounded in trauma-aware, nervous-system-informed practice. Participants are guided through simple, analogue, tactile creative processes that support calm attention, emotional steadiness and resilience — skills directly relevant to contemporary workplace demands.

No previous art experience is required. All materials are provided, and participants are encouraged to work at their own pace. The emphasis is on process rather than outcome, allowing people to engage without pressure, comparison or judgement. This approach mirrors best practice in inclusive staff training and makes the workshop suitable for diverse teams, mixed roles and varied communication styles.

Each session follows a steady, predictable rhythm of arrival, grounding, creative exploration and optional reflection. This structure supports a sense of safety and ease, helping participants settle their nervous systems and engage more fully. In workplace contexts, this often leads to something unexpected yet powerful: colleagues seeing one another in new and more meaningful ways. Participants frequently report feeling more connected, having experienced a shared process of seeing and being seen, with the creative work acting as a gentle conduit for reflection and insight. 

While this is not a therapy group, the workshop offers clear wellbeing benefits. Participants gain a practical understanding of how stress and overload affect attention, behaviour and collaboration, and they leave with simple strategies they can integrate into the workday to support focus, regulation and emotional balance.

Learning outcomes

By the end of this wellbeing through making course or workshop, participants should be able to:

• Explain how simple creative practices support nervous-system regulation and calm
• Use grounding and sensory-based techniques through mindful, hands-on making
• Create without pressure for outcomes, skill or performance
• Notice internal cues such as changes in breath, tension or temperature during the process
• Recognise signs of activation and choose creative strategies that support integration
• Experience a felt sense of slowing down and resting into a process that reveals its next step

Course content (4 sessions × 2 hours)

Session 1 – Arriving and grounding through making

Settling into safety and presence.

Medium: pastels and clay

• Introduction to the course, facilitator approach and group agreements
• Overview of nervous-system-informed creative practice
• Gentle arrival rituals and grounding exercises
• Simple mark-making to support settling and presence
• Optional reflection on internal states

Session 2 – Tactile awareness and mindful attention

Orienting to space and place

Medium: drawing with natural textures and found elements

• Exploring touch, texture and sensory awareness
• Hand-based creative exercises for focus and regulation
• Working with curiosity rather than outcome
• Reflection on how sensory engagement supports calm

Session 3 – Creativity as support during stress and uncertainty

Anchoring through the storms

Medium: three-dimensional sculpting, symbols and values

• Understanding common stress responses
• Guided creative exploration for steadiness
• Developing personal creative strategies for regulation
• Optional sharing and reflection

Session 4 – Integration and ongoing practice

Remembering where we’ve travelled

Medium: non-linear mapping and symbolic journeys

• Extended creative making to deepen calm and confidence
• Reflecting on experiences across the course
• Identifying simple practices to continue beyond the sessions
• Closing rituals and next steps