Cover Artist, Paula Gasparini-Santos
The two paths of art and therapy converge in the heart of Paula Gasparini-Santos (MA in Clinical Mental Health Counseling, Transpersonal Art Therapy).
She has cultivated her passion for helping others navigate trauma and creates artwork that is as beautiful as it is deeply personal, revealing universal truths about being human. Over her life, these two themes have been woven together as she fosters a life that she loves, bringing her entire self fully to her work.
Paula is a Brazilian-born artist living in Boulder, Colorado, and a graduate of Naropa’s MA in Transpersonal Art Therapy. Early on, Paula had a deep interest in understanding what it meant to be human and looking at the intrinsic truths behind the human experience through theology. “I have a trauma background in my family history,” she says, “so I knew that I wanted to go into psychology.” She went on to get her bachelor’s degree in psychology while she also discovered a love for painting.
As a university student, she explored her love of color through ceramic classes. Her professor saw the painter in her, and together, they invented a painting class around her interest in psychology and art. The syllabus would look very much like an art therapy class.
After graduation, she was looking for a small community where she could make a difference. She moved to Hana, Hawaii, to help bring the arts back to the public school system. In order to fund her arts program, she started showing her paintings and selling them. She was surprised at how much people loved her work.
In a way, I am reflecting my internal landscape as I am creating. My artistic process is the vessel through which I land on my canvas. People come to me as a therapist, then as a therapist, I then go to my canvas.
She went on to do a solo exhibition in Miami where she sold every piece.
She liked that people were excited about her work, but she most loved that they were connecting to the story that she was telling about her own life. “The heart is a reoccurring symbol [in my work], because I do believe the element of healing is vulnerability,” Paula says. “You have to expose that heart, you have to expose everything that is within for us to be able to do the work of healing.”
While later working as a clinician at a family trauma center dealing with mental health and sobriety, Paula helped children do their work of recovery from family traumas, such as methamphetamine addiction. After a year, she was struggling with vicarious trauma from listening to the children’s stories. She knew that she needed to learn how to better sit with her own emotions while doing her job. Her supervisor recommended Naropa University’s Master of Arts in Clinical Mental Health Counseling, Transpersonal Art Therapy program.
Naropa offered exactly what she was looking for. She learned solid techniques to skillfully sit with her clients. Naropa’s body-speech-mind technique is something she uses regularly to observe how her clients are feeling in the session. She looks at the language of the body’s posture, how they are speaking, and whether their thinking is rapid or confused—she can then get a feeling of the client as a whole.
At Naropa, Paula got the clinical skills that she needed to do the job, as well as approaches for holding space to cultivate the esoteric part of therapy. It was a blend of humanism, professionalism, and theory—the application of all of her in her career.
Called to work with trauma survivors, Paula now brings her Naropa education to her current work as an EMDR therapist. Although she doesn’t use art therapy in sessions, her art has become her way of caring for herself and processing her life. She describes it like this: “In a way, I am reflecting my internal landscape as I am creating. My artistic process is the vessel through which I land on my canvas. People come to me as a therapist, then as a therapist, I then go to my canvas.” Her inner landscape and her experience as a human then become something universal, and she can understand this more deeply through her art.
This is the marriage of her art and her heart for her therapeutic work. Her art supports her heart’s calling to help people, in their transparency, bringing truth to light, so there can be an honest conversation and a more honest connection and intimacy. “The more I do that work for myself to land,” Paula says, “the better I can hold space for those who need to land on me.
