Creature Comfort:
Emotional Support Character Design
Day Long Workshop • Multiple Fall Dates Available
Find out how playful your can healing be.
Spend the day immersed in the playground of your imagination and embark on a creative journey to design a lovable creature friend. Think a beloved childhood stuffed animal, adult edition. Your adorable monster companion will be there as emotional support serving as a symbol of your inner power, agency, comfort, and humor—plus whatever other properties you choose to imbue it with.
Being an adult is hard.
Come have a little fun while you
Eat the shit adulthood requires.
In this workshop, we braid these three instruments—play, trauma support tools, and relational skills—together using creativity, lowering the entry point of learning to a place even our most tender inner children can explore.
Tell Me More
What is Creature Comfort?
Dive into a day of imaginative storytelling and visual art (no experience required) as you learn trauma integration tools and relational skills to expand your window of tolerance.
What is your ‘window of tolerance?’
The National Institute for Clinical Application of Behavioral Medicine (NICABM) says, “The window of tolerance is a concept originally developed by Dr. Dan Siegel, MD to describe the optimal zone of “arousal” for a person to function in everyday life. When a person is operating within this zone or window, they can effectively manage and cope with their emotions.”
How does your ‘window of tolerance’ impact your daily life?
When you're within your window of tolerance, you're able to:
Learn effectively
Relate to yourself and others with greater competence
Manage daily life tasks and plan ahead with greater ease
Manage daily stress and pressure
When you're outside of your window of tolerance:
You more easily enter, as I like to call it, the FFFFuck Response (fight, flight, fawn, freeze) which impacts your health over time.
You’re thrown off balance easier, and may be easily agitated, overwhelmed, and anxious.
Dissociation is often necessary to manage the taxing experience of being outside of your window of tolerance, leaving you feeling disconnected from yourself and your surroundings. It impacts your memory & concentration, distorts your perception of life, makes managing emotions difficult, and makes it harder to handle your overall mental wellbeing including depression, anxiety, and suicidal ideation.
How will this workshop help me expand my ‘window of tolerance?’
Trauma and an overstimulated nervous system reduce your window of tolerance. By learning & implementing easy to access skills that tend to your nervous system, you’ll be more equipped to adjust to the stresses of daily life.
The relational skills you learn in the workshop will also support the quiet ways your inner dialogue adds to emotional overwhelm and relational stress.
By utilizing play as the entry to these tools, we effectively reduce the amount of effort required to build new connections in the brain.
You may have seen this quote on social media by Dr. Karyn Purvis: "Scientists have recently determined that it takes approximately 400 repetitions to create a new synapse in the brain - unless it is done with play, in which case, it takes between 10-20 repetitions," The actual quote is a little different, but still very close to this misquote.
“Now what we know from research is that it takes 400 repetitions of an act or a learning skill, 400 times, to get one new synapse... or, 12 repetitions with joy and laughter and you get a synapse because there’s a release of a chemical dopamine.”
In 2019, play therapist, Kamini Verma, reached out to the Karen Purvis Institute of Child Development for more on this statement. This is the exact response the office wrote:
“This was indeed said by Dr. Purvis. Sadly, before she gave us the reference she became terribly ill and passed away. We have not been able to locate this, so the source went to the grave with Dr. Purvis.”~Karen Purvis Institute of Child Development
While we sadly don’t have the research at hand that Dr. Purvis was referencing, it isn’t a stretch to see how the impact of dopamine can support the development of new synaptic connections in our beautifully plastic brains.
Workshop Overview
This program meets live and a recording will be available once complete.
The live session is designed for you to be well. There is no wrong way to participate and I expect that you’ll take care of yourself. Stretch, eat, cook, be on camera, be off camera—you decide.
Come with what you have and go after what you want.
In This Workshop You’ll:
Explore character design
Learn relational skills and tools for regulating your nervous system
Design a character that will help you utilize your new tools
Discuss ways to engage with your Emotional Support Creature.
Fall Date Options:
Sunday 27 October 10 am - 4 pm PT
Saturday 9 November 10 am - 4 pm PT
Tuesday 26 November 10 am - 4 pm PT
Register Now
Playfully Expand
Your Window of Tolerance
Pay What You Can • Learn more about the ‘community care in capitalism’ model below
Starting at $55+ • Full Price: $555
Community Care within Capitalism
Pay What You Can Pricing Model
Community care is at the center of my work in this world—which means we all win together. My workshops and programs are financially designed to focus on us as a community rather than as siloed individuals. The ‘pay what you can model’ is an invitation to consider how you exist within the whole, and how you can use what you have to seed acts of social equity. Here’s how it works:
Full price for this program is $555, however sliding scale starts at just $55.
There are guidelines below for determining what you choose to pay.
This model is built on the balance of time & money. The closer to full price you pay, the less time you spend building reciprocity, and vice versa.
To create equity when paying below full price, spend time to invite your community to the program. Consider how you and the people you know could add up to a full priced ticket across multiple people. This allows you all access the content at a price you all can afford while ensuring I too am cared for in the process.
This isn’t about posting once on social media and calling it quits. Community Care requires care from both of us.When participating in this system, the goal is to create reciprocity.
Some Things to Consider:
-
Pay Full Price/Closer To It If You Are:
• white or white passing
• comfortably able to meet all of your basic needs such as food, housing, and transportation
• have some debt but it does not prohibit attainment of basic needs
• own you home or property -or- rent a higher end property
• fully employed or do not need to work to meet you needs
• have access to some financial savings and/or generational wealth
• have expendable income–can afford vacations, and/or to take time off from work with worry -
Calculate your discounts based on your access and social privileges.
• Race
• Gender
• Disability
• Neurodivergence
• Financial Instability
• Language
• No access to familial support
• No access to generational wealth
• You work in a highly stigmatized industry such as SW
• Trauma history
• Housing Access
• Ability to take time off without financial ramifications that would destabilize you or your family. -
You can also consider my access points.
• single mother
• chronic illness
• PTSD, & C-PTSD
• Healing from Intimate Partner Violence
• Autism, ADHD, Dyslexia
• No access to financial support outside of what I make in my business
• No generational wealth
• No family close to me as a childcare resource
• Genderqueer
• Contentious Co-parenting Dynamic
Testimonial from Kate Bowdren
Vyana guides students in a way that makes huge concepts and deep thinking manageable with accessibility for all learners in mind every step of the way.
WHO IS THIS COURSE FOR?
• Huemans feeling overwhelmed with daily life.
• Those who are ready & willing to put effort into their wellbeing.
• Creatives who are seeking ways to support & sustain their inspiration.
• People in grief seeking a little sparkle and easeful support.
• Parents & caregivers who desire adding to their own resources, while learning tools to share with their children.
• Artists–aka, people. We’re all artists. Mastery over a specific medium is not required here.
• Anyone craving a little more play in their day.
• Those that are independent learners and are willing to learn in a way that suits them best.
• People who desire taking a program that is both rich with content, and spacious enough to relate in real time together.
• People that are willing to fail.
• Folks that are willing to feel their emotions, to the best of their ability right now.
WHO IS THIS COURSE NOT FOR?
• Those seeking 1-1 support/coaching. For that, see my 1-1 sessions.
• Those that prefer to be ‘right’ and ‘good’ (external judgement) rather than cultivating was feels ‘right’ and ‘good’ to them (internal judgement).
• People who want a facilitator to tell them exactly what to do and who to be.
• Anybody that is currently in crisis, as I am not a therapist or mental health provider.
• People who don’t want to take responsibility for their own learning.
• Anybody that requires individualized feedback before taking action.
• Anyone not feeling ready to engage with their healing right now.
• Learners seeking a traditionally structured educational container (sit still, be quiet, etc.)