About Lori
Lori Reeves is a Certified Expressive Arts Therapist, Licensed Professional Clinical Counselor, and contemporary abstract painter whose work lives where healing and creativity meet. She holds a Master of Arts in Depth Psychology and has guided many people through endings, in-betweens, and new beginnings at her private practice in San Clemente, California. Her paintings have found homes with collectors for many years, and her path has moved between the therapy room and the studio through different seasons of her life.
Lori knows this terrain personally, and her studio has long been where she meets her own thresholds. Painting has become her way of listening inward, honoring what is changing, and discovering what wants to emerge next. From that lived experience grows her desire to share what she has come to know as a healing balm and a gift: creativity, and the imagination that opens a doorway to possibility. And what better companion could there be for those in-between places where we feel suspended, neither here nor there?
The Rites of Becoming and its companion journal are where these two worlds finally come together. In these books, Lori weaves her clinical wisdom and her life as an artist into one cohesive offering, so more people can experience creativity as a guide through change. They welcome every reader, with or without art experience, because at their heart is a simple practice: learning to listen to and trust the inner knowing each of us carries. Lori also leads intuitive painting, collage, and mixed-media workshops in San Clemente and Laguna Beach, as well as online, where beginners and seasoned artists alike are welcome.
“The creative process, so far as we are able to follow it at all, consists in the unconscious activation of an archetypal image and elaborating and shaping the image into the finished work. By giving it shape, the artist translates it into the language of the present and so makes it possible for us to find our way back to the deepest springs of life.”
Carl Jung
My Process
My process is a call to trust, surrender, and embrace what is revealed. Both my abstract paintings and my expressive arts facilitation are grounded in the work of Carl Jung and Carl Rogers, a humanistic, depth-centered approach that has given me a lasting appreciation for the psyche’s first language, images. When their stories are told through creative expression, they offer us space from the emotions and circumstances of our humanity, and I believe this opens the way to greater consciousness, deeper awareness, new perspectives, and empowerment.
To me, creativity is the essence of stepping away from your limitations and into your limitlessness. The arts and creative expression bring the unconscious into conscious connection and union with self and spirit. I see experiences, challenges, and transitions as sources of inspiration, inviting me to dive deeper and to seek the mysteries of life’s unfolding as abundant resources for creativity and self-expression.
My art is inspired by the unseen, the intangible, and the deeply heartfelt unfolding of whispered stories on canvas. Image, color, pattern, texture, shape, and rhythm come alive through brush strokes, palette knives, and my own hands. The circle is a sacred symbol that embodies wholeness, fulfillment, and the infinite. I hope to awaken that circle within you, so you can embrace your original perfection, enliven your creative and authentic spirit, and then go share it with the world.