2025 Healing Doll Way Classes

Mother Mugwort

​​It has been 36 years since I began my journey with dollmaking and healing. I started this work while working as a graphic artist, at the age of 40, married with two small children. On January 2nd, I will turn 76, and my commitment to this work has only deepened over the years. Here’s a quick review.

In 1989, I created a set of feeling dolls/puppets called Numbfull and The Fulls (now known as Kobe Feeling Dolls). For many years, I manufactured and sold these characters to social workers and therapists. My intention was for these dolls to represent feelings that lived inside the body, offering a way to externalize and explore emotions—“Let’s take the feeling out of our body and look at it, touch it, think about it.”

In 2006, I launched an online class called the Healing Doll Project, teaching the process through Yahoo Groups. The first class had 10 students, and I later renamed it Medicine Dolls. I started a blog in 2008 to share my work (https://www.blogger.com/blog/posts/797653385511920810?pli=1) and continued teaching both online and in-person at retreats and creativity centers.

During the 1990s, I began working in local high school libraries, managing, and supervising computer centers. It was the perfect environment for researching my idea of drafting a book about dollmaking and healing. By 1995, I decided to pursue a degree in psychology. I began with an associate’s degree at a local community college and completed my bachelor’s degree in 2001 at the age of 50.
Around the age of 54, during menopause, I began experiencing panic attacks at the high school. These episodes kept me from working for a time, but they also became an opportunity to view my experiences through the lens of my work. I sought meaning in this “healing crisis” and found that the dolls I created during that time deepened my understanding of their transformative power. These dolls became metaphors for healing, containers for emotions, and keepers of powerful, transformative stories. I continued working in computer labs until 2013, when my life fully opened up to this work.

In 2000, I wrote a college research paper that became the foundation for my healing doll curriculum and eventually my book. My professor wrote on the paper, “This will be a book someday.” Initially, I called the book The Transformative Power of Healing Dolls, but the name The Healing Doll Way came to me while driving. In 2018, I published the book, which went on to win two Indie Book Awards and is now in its second edition.

Over the years, the healing doll process and classes evolved through many iterations. More than 1,000 women, both in person and online, participated in creating art dolls, contributing their stories and photos to the Healing Doll Way process. The classes incorporated the book as a guide and workbook, along with ZOOM video conferences, coaching calls, finely tuned visualizations, intuitive self-connecting art-making activities, and ever-evolving practices in self-discovery, awareness, intuition, expressive art healing, and transformation.

The Healing Doll Way class became a year-long online program based on the principles in the book, The Healing Doll Way: A Guided Process Creating Art Dolls for Self-Discovery, Awareness & Transformation. It was an intuitive and creative process in which I served as a guide, coach, and mentor. Using the book as a foundation, the class offered a structured yet transformational path. Spanning 48 weeks, it included education, inspiration, coaching, group engagement, art, and dollmaking, supporting participants as they moved through the stages of Discovery, Self-Awareness, and Transformation.

Why Make Healing Dolls?
Dollmaking allows you to change how you see yourself. You can communicate with yourself through a doll you’ve made. By using the imagery of dollmaking—“thoughts and feelings in concrete visual form”—you can focus your energy on evolving new ways of being and doing. These dolls become symbols of emotions, sensations, struggles, or celebrations. A self-made doll honors something sacred, either within or outside yourself.
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Dollmaking differs from any other art form. It allows you to hold a part of yourself in your hands in the form of a three-dimensional figurative piece of art. You will see yourself in the doll; she will represent an aspect of the human condition and your personal stories. The doll you create will bear witness to your life, embody your worth, and reflect your feelings and transformative journey.
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I am excited to announce the next round of Healing Way Classes in 2025, featuring some updates and additions!
The Healing Doll Way 2025This will now be a seven-month journey, running from January 12 through July 31, with a break in August. Throughout the year, there may be additional offerings to support this wonderful community as we move through 2025.

Starting in September, I will offer a four-month-long class called Healing Fields Story Mapping. This class is a creative process that incorporates the dolls and art you have created in previous sessions. Your dolls will become the characters who play and interact within your Story Map.
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Prerequisite:
To enroll, you must have completed The Healing Doll Way and created at least one doll for each archetype covered in that class.

More details to come. Email if you are interested and I will put you on the list [email protected]

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