Ipsarty Creative Care Collective

Wish me luck 📱 🛑 This is something I’ve thought about for a long time and this postpartum brain is malleable sooo I’m taking advantage and rewiring my relationship with my device.

Therapeutically mystic, that’s what I’m going to name this. Welcome to my exploration and unpacking of professional identity. You can expect to hear a lot more about my musing on this.

The Ipsarty Creative Care Collective is a shared studio for independent practitioners whose work is grounded in care, creativity, relationship, and deep respect for the complexity of the human experience.

It has grown from my belief that there are many ways to support people well, and that no single modality, profession, or framework holds all the answers… how can it when all humans are so very individual?

Within these studio walls, you might find play therapists, arts therapists, counsellors, social workers, OT’s, speech therapists, educators, facilitators, and practitioners from a range of helping professions, each bringing their own way of listening, responding, creating, and walking alongside others. Support of course by a magical PINK floor 🤭

The Collective is united, not how we work, but how we see people.

As capable, as beautifully complex, and as the experts in their own experience.

This is a place for practitioners to meet with clients, run groups, host workshops, learn alongside one another, and build practices that reflect who they are.

For clients, families, and the wider community, it is a place to discover values aligned lived experience practitioners offering different pathways into healing, growth, connection, and self-understanding.

Over the coming weeks, I’ll be sharing more of the space and the vision.

If you’re a practitioner curious about joining the Collective, or someone interested in future offerings within the space (maybe you’re looking for a unicorn therapist), you’ll find links to join the relevant waitlists in my bio.

For now, though…

Welcome to the Creative Care Collective. 🤍

This is where it all began.
So much of what I know now was learned here.

Holding people.
Making mistakes.
Starting over.
Learning how to lead.
Learning how to trust myself.
Learning that business is cyclical, seasonal and you must weather the winter, and compost the garden (or be the compost).. for it to grow.

At the time, I had no idea how much this season would shape me. How much of myself I needed to meet, wrestle and dance with.
I was just trying to create something honest and human and joyful.

What a gift this has been to walk through the messy, tender, stretchy parts of building something from the ground up. And now come to a place where I can share what I’ve learned and walk alongside others building their own dreams.

This garage holds so much of the woman, therapist, mother, mentor and founder I’ve become.
And even though the grief of letting go remains, gosh I’m proud of what I’ve created and everything I’ve learned along the way. It’s all prepared me for the creative mentor shoes I was always meant to step into.

It’s an ending but it’s not the end. It turns out you cannot step into the new version by holding onto the old. So after 8 years of devotion to Ipsarty as an Arts therapy practice and over 500 clients, a host of students and mentoring some incredible therapists.. I let it go. And I was flooded with grief and gratitude for everything this practice has been. Rebirth is painful but worth it- and what’s coming will be. Still a mentor, an advocate and a therapist but just a different format and wider impact. Stepping into supporting other practitioners and creative leaders and this truly magical studio.. she gets to take on a whole new adventure 🌥️🌈

Mothers in business must honour the mother first. I’ve been feeling a lot lately like I’m disappointing everyone everywhere I turn.
I think this is the part nobody really talks about honestly. Not the juggle… we’ve heard enough about the juggle. I mean the specific weight of being someone that a lot of people are counting on, and becoming a mother again at the same time, and realising those two things are not as compatible as you told yourself they would be.
I built something I was proud of. I had expectations of myself that felt reasonable before she came. And then she came, and what felt reasonable stopped being true, but the expectations stayed. Mine and everyone else’s.
I’m learning- slowly, and not always gracefully- that honouring the mother in me is not the same as letting everyone down. Even when it feels exactly like that.
If you’re in this too, I just want you to know I see it. . It’s what happens when you’re trying to be everything to everyone before you’ve figured out what you need to be to yourself first.