You chose a song. You picked up clay or crayons. You made something while you listened. This page is for those who want to understand what that process was, and where it can take you.
What you experienced was not a therapy session. It was a taste of a process: a way of bringing what is unconscious into something tangible, of processing insights, thoughts and emotions that the earlier activities had brought to the surface. It is part of a broader practice called Expressive Arts Therapy, and what you did was only a beginning.
What you were actually doing
The song you chose was not random. The colours you reached for, the medium you picked, the moment you started giving your piece a meaning: each of these small decisions carries information about how you process experience. Whether you gravitated toward clay (malleable, immediate, physical) or crayons (more controlled, harder to undo) already says something. Whether meaning came to you quickly or slowly connects to whether you tend to feel first or think first.
The music was there to create a space where your rational mind could step back. Not to disappear, but to make room for something else: an instinctive, sensory way of responding that is harder to access through conversation alone. What emerged on the paper or in the clay came from that space.
There are patterns everywhere in what you created: in your song choice, your colour choices, the moment meaning arrived. None of it needs to be interpreted. But all of it is worth noticing. Including the song.
What your song choice reveals
Each song was selected to resonate with one of the three centres from the Alter Self workshop. Which one did you choose?
⚡
Gut / Body center · Types 8, 9, 1
Visceral, grounded, instinctual
This centre is driven by boundaries, physical presence, autonomy and strength. It does not ask permission. It occupies space. When creating art under its influence, people tend toward physical, structural, heavy, or boldly defined forms.
"Run the World (Girls)", Beyoncé
A declaration of physical and collective power, built on a driving percussive rhythm that lands in the body before the mind has time to react. Nobody listens to this quietly.
"Respect", Aretha Franklin
The Gut centre is about territory and boundaries. Aretha is not asking for respect, she is demanding it, from the first note, with her whole body. Perfect for driving heavy, decisive movements with clay or crayons.
If you chose one of these: watch for rhythmic, forceful work with clay, solid geometric shapes, or heavy dark crayon strokes. Gut participants tend to use the whole hand, pressing firmly.
❤️
Heart / Feeling center · Types 2, 3, 4
Emotional, relational, identity-driven
This centre processes reality through the lens of connection, deep feeling, vulnerability and expressive longing. It needs to be seen and to matter. Art made from this centre tends toward texture, fluidity, expressive lines, and storytelling rooted in emotional states.
"Hallelujah", Jeff Buckley
The absolute pinnacle of emotional exposure. This song bypasses the logical brain entirely, triggering immediate depth, longing, and bittersweet reflection. Few songs in the Western canon reach as directly into the chest. Use with care, it may move you to tears, and that is not a problem.
"Rolling in the Deep", Adele
Rolling in the Deep is the Heart centre at full intensity. Raw emotion, dramatic flair, the passion and internal storm of a heart navigating relational rupture. It urges an expressive, high-contrast style of creation.
If you chose one of these: watch for fluid, curved, or sweeping motions. You may have created faces, hands, or interconnected forms, and likely paused more than once to look at what you had made.
🧠
Head / Thinking center · Types 5, 6, 7
Mental, analytical, visionary
This centre is driven by the need to map out reality, understand systems, find safety in concepts, or escape mental constraints through imagination. Art made from this centre tends toward intricate patterns, abstract concepts, symbols, symmetry, or idealized blueprints.
"Imagine", John Lennon
Frequently mistaken for a Heart song due to its peaceful tone, its engine is entirely ideological. The lyrics are literally a mental exercise, they command the listener to construct an alternative reality, concept by concept. For Head types, this song feels like home: a quiet, expansive space where thinking itself becomes an act of creation.
"Bohemian Rhapsody", Queen
The Head centre deeply enjoys complexity and shifting patterns. This mini-opera transitions through distinct acts, ballad, operatic interlude, hard rock, mirroring a hyperactive mind that leaps between registers without warning. A masterpiece of structure and a celebration of controlled chaos.
If you chose one of these: watch for abstract patterns, intricate details, sorting or structuring clay into precise arrangements, or drawing symbolic maps before executing. You likely stepped back more than once to assess before continuing.
The practice behind the activity
Expressive Arts Therapy uses music, visual arts, movement, drama, poetry and other art forms as pathways to self-understanding, not as decoration, but as the primary language of the work. The premise is simple: some things live in us that words struggle to reach. Making something with your hands or your body can access those places directly.
This approach is not about artistic skill. Practitioners call it "low skill, high sensitivity." The creative act is not judged for its technical quality but witnessed for what it reveals. The artwork becomes something to listen to rather than analyse.
It is also a powerful alternative for people who seek self-understanding but are not always comfortable talking about what they feel, or who simply prefer another medium of expression. Art is a universal language, and sometimes the most honest one.
Why it belongs alongside the profiling
Personality frameworks like the Enneagram and MBTI give you a map. Expressive arts give you a way to inhabit the territory. The map names patterns you recognise in yourself; the creative process lets you feel into them, move them around, and discover what sits beneath the label.
What you built during the workshop, cognitive understanding through profiling and emotional integration through artistic expression, leads to something neither can produce alone: a felt sense of who you are, not just a description of it.
Go further
If this territory interests you at a deeper or professional level, two training programmes stand out. You can also connect directly with Inés Camino, the expressive arts specialist who led this part of the workshop.
MA and PhD programmes in Expressive Arts at EGS in Saas-Fee, the institution where the field was largely developed and where many of its founding thinkers continue to teach.
A training institute offering courses and programmes in Expressive Arts Therapy in the tradition of the European Graduate School, accessible in both Spanish and Catalan contexts.
