Meet Your Future Self Through Expressive Arts: A Somatic Exercise for Healing and Self-Trust

Future Self Connection: An Expressive Arts Somatic Exercise

Meta description: A trauma-informed expressive arts somatic exercise to meet your future self, build self-trust, and support nervous system regulation through creativity and body awareness.

What is the Somatic Exercise for the Future Self?

This expressive arts somatic exercise invites you to meet your future self through gentle movement, creative expression, and embodied awareness. By engaging sensation, imagination, and art-making together, this practice supports nervous system regulation, self-trust, and emotional integration in a way that feels grounded, accessible, and trauma-informed.

Expressive Art and Mental Health

Expressive art is not about creating perfect artwork. Expressive art is meant to be a freeing modality where you can allow the feelings and thoughts from your inner self wordlessly take form through color, shape, movement and mixed media. This process can help you:

• Activate your healthy "flow" experience by engaging in a mixed media project

• Experience a sense of playfulness and fun

• Discover hidden aspects of the self asking for expression

• Gain insight into your thoughts and feelings about a situation using creative, free association

• Uplift your mood through play and movement

• Improve self-esteem through self-reflection and self-growth

• Engage in creative activities and lower cortisol levels

Future Self Connection - An Expressive Arts Somatic Practice

This is an experiential, somatic, positive exercise. It's not meant to be a goal setting exercise, but an exercise of self-discovery and self-expression. Here are some suggested ways to use the art materials.

To Prepare:

Create a space

where you can relax and spread out your materials for your expressive exercise.

Gather together materials

Gather together materials you'd like to use in a multi-modal expressive art experience.

Items such as large pieces of paper, a notebook, an assortment of crayons, colored pencils, oil or chalk pastels, watercolor paints, colored markers, bits of fabric and ribbon, buttons, stickers, beads, magazine pictures to cut up .....whatever you have around the house that strikes your mood! Make it fun, textural and colorful!

Choose your music 

The exercise uses movement to open the free flow of feelings. Choose your music as a meditative or jubilant accompaniment. Silence is fine, as well.

To Begin:

Set your intention for this exercise

Set your intention for connecting to and discovering aspects of your future self in a positive manner. Look forward. Let the feelings spontaneously move forward to be accessed. Think about:

• Who am I at this moment?

• How have I grown and changed?

• Who do I want to become?

• What qualities or goals do I envision for myself?

• What does healing, peace, or success look like for me?

• Let this be your most hopeful image - your future self-portrait reflecting your inner vision and dreams for personal development

Gentle allowing of the energy of self-discovery

Collect yourself, take a few breaths and allow the energy of self-discovery and self-care flow through you.

Clear your mind and allow the feelings and images around your intention flow through your body.

Allow the feelings about your future self to develop. There is no right or wrong.

Use color to access your mood

Use color to connect with your emotions visually and incorporate color into your Future Self discovery.

Start by spontaneously choosing colors that represent how you feel during the exercise. Use crayons, markers, or paints to fill a page with these colors. Don’t think about shapes or objects—just focus on the colors and how they flow.

• Notice which colors dominate

• Observe how the colors change as you add more layers

• Reflect on what these colors might say about your current state

  
  

Use collage pictures to add another dimension to your Future Self exercise

Gather magazines, newspapers, or printed images. Cut out pictures, words, or textures that make you feel safe and calm. Arrange and glue them on your Future Self work.

• Include places, objects, or symbols that feel like your Future Self

• Add to it over time as your sense of self evolves

• This visual representation can build up your inner strength and resources.

Use music, movement and mark making

Put on some music that matches your mood for the Future Self exercise. Let yourself be moved by the music for a few minutes, allowing however you need to move today, using free dance and movement to help the flow of feelings move in your body.

Take whatever art modality strikes you..I love to use oil pastels...draw what you are feeling. It can be large arcs of color, large shapes, not necessarily a realistic form. Just free flowing feelings about your future self, follow the feelings evoked by your body’s movement.

• Let your hand move freely without planning

• Use sweeping lines, dots, or shapes that feel natural

• Notice how your body and emotions influence the marks

  
  

This exercise connects physical movement with emotional expression, releasing tension through art.

Process the feelings that have come up

Take a step back and look at what you've created/drawn.

What stands out? What does this say to you? What did the experience say to you?

Anchor the right brain experience with left brain words

Choose words to descrine the feelings on the page. Uaing a pen or marker, write them all over the page, around and around, giving voice to the feelings.

Let the words flow in circles around the colors.

Reflect on the messages in this expressive exercise

Expand on the messages you received.

• What messages are a surprise to you?

• What messages are familiar?

• What messages would you like to incorporate into your self-concept?

• Imagine what you would like to accomplish

• How you would like to feel, how you see yourself during the coming year?

• Who do I want to become?

• What qualities or goals do I envision for myself?

• What does healing, peace, or success look like for me?

  
  

Journal the thoughts and feelings that you need to expand

Visualizing your future self can inspire positive change and hope.

The Future Self: Manifesting Growth

Let this be an exercise to reflect on who you are and what you'd like to add or subtract. Let this be a hopeful exercise,

Expressive art offers a flexible and personal way to support self-discovery and mental health. These exercises encourage you to explore feelings, reduce stress, and build resilience in creative ways.

Remember, the process of expression is the point, not the creation of perfect art. Keep your materials accessible and make time for these practices regularly. Your self-growth and mental health deserves this kind of care and attention.

References

Ganim, B. (2001). Art and Healing. USA: Echo Point Books and Media

Ganim, B. and Fox, S. (1999). Visual Journaling. Massachusetts: Quest Books.