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Self-Expanded: The Somatic Painting Residency
Grounding, Mapping, & Integrating the Shadow
An 8 Session Somatic Painting Practice
This is a transformative painting practice refined for dropping into the body, creating a deeper intuitive relationship with your art practice, and learning techniques for healing the nervous system. Through our time together, we are excavating a deeper channel through the body as we go from dark to light, bottom to top, exercising wholeness across three distinct phases of your creative journey.
Phase I: The Shadow
We look at the heavy energy stored in the body that arises as shame, fear, or the persistent inner critic. We bring that to the surface, express, and ground it using the color black as a primary tool for Shadow Mapping, all while building a visual diary of work on paper to deepen our technical painting practice. I will teach you a daily technique for holding space for these difficult emotions, helping you somatically heal and soothe your nervous system without continuing to reject the shadow self. We ground, become friends with it, and learn to integrate it back into the whole through Somatic Mark-Making.
Phase II: The Golden Shadow
We invite the Inner Child into the process to look at the brilliant parts of ourselves that were hidden—the too much, the most powerful, and the most talented parts. We use Transformative Painting to explore these vulnerable and playful parts of our inner child, turning them into a tangible practice. I will teach you a portrait formula so that any person can paint successfully, regardless of experience. We use brushstroke, color, joy, humor, and play to repaint the narrative, rewiring the nervous system and integrating this expanding self back into the body.
Phase III: Creative Integration
We close by looking at the artwork that we’ve made and the space between where you started and where you landed. We identify what remains, what was reclaimed, and look towards continuing wholeness in your art practice.
Tuition: $440
The Residency Experience
This is a shared journey of intentional art practice. Across our 8 sessions we go deep — through private one-on-one video meetings, I guide you into your creative process at whatever pace your body needs.
You will build a physical archive of your transformation — daily mapping pages and a finished portrait of your Inner Child as your most celebrated self. And you will leave with a repeatable framework of Somatic Mark-Making to carry into your practice long after we’re done.
Scholarships available — reach out directly.
The Path: 30 Years of Embodiment
For thirty years, my body has been the archive of my work. I have used my acute awareness of the subtle energy body as the primary material in my performance art, large-scale installation art, and meditative painting over the years.
Parallel to this, my Buddhist practice—also spanning close to thirty years—has been the essential teaching of how to hold space in the body. It taught me how to sit with the nature of suffering and how to remain present within that internal landscape.
In my early performance art years in Atlanta, New York City, and residencies in Italy, I embodied female and shadow archetypes using an audience-forward-facing process of vulnerability and confrontation as a vehicle for embodied self-awareness.
I brought my body with me into installation art by embodying the materiality to be the object of focus in the room, allowing me to participate as an audience member—observing, having conversations, and seeing it from all sides.
As I continued to explore mediums, I found a pull to float in the middle of the ocean, buoying in that place between that deep, dark unknown below the surface that we cannot see and that beautiful sunrise or sunset. Buoying there, feeling the weight of the void, along with the glorious bright light of life itself—this led me to painting the gradients, which became a somatic healing process of merging these two worlds.
Tulum has been a way of bridging that distance even more; it is a somatic environment where the power of the land—the cenotes, the jungle, the deep water—is an inherent support for this work.
I have spent my life learning how to hold space for the shadow and the light, and I have learned that the most important work is the work we do to reclaim our own territory. This residency is the current iteration of that thirty-year practice. I’m not just teaching; I’m bringing everything I’ve learned about how to inhabit a space, how to confront the shadow, and how to use the body to find stillness.
I am Kirstin Mitchell. You can see more of my work here: