Sacred Imagination Model™
An embodied art therapy framework for spiritual meaning-making
Sacred Imagination Model™ is a three-part framework integrating embodied awareness, symbolic expression, and spiritual meaning-making to support spiritually informed art therapy practice. Grounded in trauma-informed and culturally responsive care, the model positions the body as a site of awareness, art-making as a process of symbolic expression, and reflection as a pathway for integration and meaning-making.
THE THREE PILLARS
Embodied Awareness
Spiritual Meaning Making
Symbolic Expression
What am I noticing
and experiencing?
Embodied awareness centers attention on bodily sensation, breath, emotion, movement, tension and ease, impulse, and felt experience. The body is approached as a source of information and knowing, with attention given to what is present before moving toward interpretation.
Symbolic Expression
Spiritual Meaning Making
Symbolic Expression
What is taking form? What is being expressed?
Symbolic expression allows embodied and internal experience to take form through image, color, material, metaphor, gesture, movement, word, or symbol. Art-making creates space for experiences that may not yet be fully verbal, conscious, or understood to become visible and available for reflection.
Spiritual Meaning Making
Spiritual Meaning Making
Spiritual Meaning Making
What might this mean, and what does it help me understand about my life?
Spiritual meaning-making is the process of discerning and creating meaning from what emerges through embodied and symbolic experience. It invites movement between meaning within the art and meaning within one’s larger life, including relationships, identity, spiritual
What might this mean, and what does it help me understand about my life?
Spiritual meaning-making is the process of discerning and creating meaning from what emerges through embodied and symbolic experience. It invites movement between meaning within the art and meaning within one’s larger life, including relationships, identity, spirituality, ancestry, purpose, mystery, or connection to the sacred. Meaning is invited rather than imposed and remains grounded in the individual’s own language, culture, beliefs, and lived experience.
Facilitating Sacred Imagination
Sacred Imagination is grounded in cultural humility, trauma-responsive practice, and facilitator self-awareness. The therapist or educator supports the process without becoming the authority over meaning.
Notice before interpreting. Witness before explaining. Invite meaning without imposing meaning.
Facilitators attend to their own embodied, emotional, symbolic, cultural, and spiritual responses while protecting the participant’s authority over their own experience. Choice, pacing, consent, and the ability to pause, modify, or opt out remain part of the process.
About THE CREATOR
Sacred Imagination Model™ was developed by Joselyn Spence, M.Div, LPC, ATR, RYT-500, an art therapist, counselor, educator, and embodied-practice facilitator whose work explores the intersections of creativity, spirituality, embodiment, and healing.
Sacred Imagination: An Embodied Framework for Spiritual Meaning-Making in Art Therapy will be presented at the 2026 American Art Therapy Association Annual Conference.
More workshops and training coming in 2027.
Connect:
joselynspence @ gmail.com
creativeholisticwellness.com