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In this thesis, I explore numinous experience in Expressive Arts Therapy (EXA). Numinous experience, as the powerful experience of the sensed presence of a non-concrete "other", is a variant of human experience that has often been seen as deviant, especially in the medical model of illness. Moving away from the idea of illness (hallucination or delusion) and having an appreciation for the numinous, it can be conceived as a bodily-given potential for guiding images. The expressive arts can provide an approach to utilize creativity to image through all the modalities of imagination (visual, movement, words, acts, sounds, rhythms) to encourage the emergence of works of art. The approach is artistic and the inquiry seeks to deepen experience and expand the possibilities of the numinous in the language of the arts particularly because the numinous itself is by it´s very nature compelling, inexplicable, and difficult to express otherwise. The arts can allow the movement from the numinous through the imaginative reality of artistic work and effective reality bridging to everyday life that confirms the world.

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Kali Dukowski has practiced arts therapy since 1992. She has worked extensively with First Nations children and with women who have suffered severe trauma. She teaches at the Vancouver Art Therapy Institute and at Campus Alberta, in an online art therapy Master´s program.

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