Genevieve Camp’s journey from art therapy and mental health counseling to soul work and spiritual evolution is a testament to the power of embracing one’s true calling. With a deep passion for the mystical and metaphysical, she integrates Guided Drawing®, Internal Family Systems, and Evolutionary Astrology to help clients heal trauma and reconnect with their soul’s purpose. In this conversation with Petar of Mystic Mag, Genevieve shares how these modalities work together to facilitate deep transformation, offering insight into the intersection of psychology, spirituality, and creative expression.
How did your journey from art therapy and mental health counseling lead you to focus on soul work and spiritual evolution?
I think I have always been drawn to the mystical, magical, and metaphysical perspectives of life but it took until recent years to have the courage and clarity to be more open about that in my professional work. I became an art therapist because in my personal life art making was a way that I processed my emotions, explored my subconscious, and connected to something greater than myself, and I wanted to help others do the same. As an introvert, raised in an introverted family, expressing myself through art always felt easier and safer than having to talk openly and directly about what I was going through.
I became a licensed mental health counselor mostly because it allowed me to be more employable early on in my career. Even though art therapy as a profession has been around for over 50 years it is still considered somewhat fringe and many people have never heard of it or don’t really understand what it is. In my opinion the field art therapy has a bit of an inferiority complex and has attempted to earn the approval and respect of the greater psychological community by overemphasizing the ways it is similar to mental health counseling and devaluing the ways it is different and unique (Guided Drawing® is an exception to this). I mention this because I see a parallel in my personal career journey. In an attempt to “fit in” and be taken seriously I had to tone down or deny some of the parts of me that might be perceived as more “woo woo” or “out there.” While I greatly value and appreciate all my years of experience working as a mental health counselor, in a way I feel that by making the shift to focus on soul work and spiritual evolution I am reclaiming the parts of me that led me down this career path in the first place.
If you were to look at my birth chart you would see that Vesta (the asteroid that represents spiritual focus and devotion to following one’s calling) is in Pisces (dreams, intuition, creativity, compassion, spirituality) and my 10th house (career). So from an astrological perspective, taking a spiritual approach to modalities like IFS, dream work, trauma processing, etc. makes a lot of sense for my career.
What role does Guided Drawing® play in trauma healing, and how has it influenced your approach to working with clients?
I was so excited when I discovered Guided Drawing® in 2022 and simultaneously sad and disappointed that I hadn’t learned about it years earlier in my graduate art therapy program. Guided Drawing® is a sensorimotor art therapy process developed by German born art therapist Cornelia Elbrecht, who lives and works in Apollo Bay, Australia. Guided Drawing® has roots in Jungian psychology while also integrating bilateral stimulation (a foundational aspect of EMDR therapy) and concepts from Somatic Experiencing®, resulting in a very unique body-based approach to healing trauma. While art therapy in general involves both top-down (focus on thoughts and beliefs that stem from traumatic experiences) and bottom-up (focus on trauma as it is stored in the physical body) processing, Guided Drawing® is inherently bottom-up and involves very little talking. In my imagination Guided Drawing® is like an unapologetic “f-off” to the Western medicalization of psychology with its bias towards CBT and short-term, solution-focused therapies, lol.
It’s important to note that the word “guided” in Guided Drawing® refers to the client’s inner guidance, not the guidance of the therapist. The client is invited to go inside and reconnect to the wisdom of their own body to know how to heal. The drawing is done on large paper with both hands simultaneously and eyes closed. The marks created on the paper (using crayons, pastels or paint) are simply a visual record of an internal process of deep listening and responding, moment to moment, to the implicit felt sense experience happening in the body. I am doing my best to describe it in words but It is something that is best understood through direct experience. I am immensely grateful that in 2023 I had the opportunity to go to Australia and do an in-person session with Cornelia Elbrecht. Both my training in Guided Drawing® and my session with Cornelia have increased my general somatic awareness when working with clients regardless of what healing modality I am using.
How do you integrate Evolutionary Astrology with Internal Family Systems (IFS) to help clients understand their soul’s journey and life challenges?
Evolutionary astrology (EA) and IFS actually play really nicely together and I feel like when they are integrated it is a situation of the whole being greater than the sum of the parts. Unlike mainstream astrology which tends to focus at the personality level and doesn’t assume reincarnation, EA asks the question, “Why do I have the particular birth chart that I have?” The EA perspective zooms way out to view the soul’s journey over many lifetimes and looks to the birth chart (specifically analysis of the lunar nodes) for a deeper understanding of the particular themes or lessons a soul came here to engage with and guidance on how best to navigate these lessons for the purpose of karmic resolution and spiritual evolution.
A simplified way of understanding unresolved karma is as unprocessed trauma from past lives. In the same way that childhood attachment trauma that you don’t even have a conscious memory of can impact your attachment style in your adult partnerships, unresolved karma from past lives will impact the kinds of experiences and relationships you create in the present life. Why? So that you have (another) opportunity to work through it, heal, and come to resolution. EA provides the framework and guidance for understanding the soul’s evolutionary purpose for the current lifetime and IFS provides the tools to create a life aligned with this purpose through releasing karmic burdens carried by parts and restoring trust in Self/Soul leadership. I believe that by doing our own work in this way we are contributing to the evolution of human consciousness and to a more compassionate, loving, and harmonious world.
In doing IFS both as a therapist and as a client, I have had experiences where parts will recall past life memories that are directly related to the current life issue being explored. As far as mainstream models of psychotherapy go, IFS is particularly suited to incorporate past life work because there are built-in protocols for clearing what IFS refers to as “legacy burdens.” These are burdens of thoughts, beliefs, emotions, habits, etc, that were not acquired through direct personal experiences but were inherited from elsewhere, such as from ancestral lineage, culture, religion, or, I would add, past life personas (the soul lineage). I find that understanding a client’s birth chart from an EA perspective can help focus the IFS work where it will be most impactful. It can also increase self-compassion and provide helpful context for whatever challenges the client is currently facing.
What was the most profound personal realization you had through your own healing work with astrology, dreamwork, and trauma processing?
I had my first natal chart reading with an astrologer when I was in the midst of a marriage crisis. I knew hardly anything about astrology let alone evolutionary astrology at the time but had followed an inner urge to schedule a reading. Unbeknownst to me, transiting Pluto (transformation, death/rebirth) was conjunct my natal, 8th house Juno (marriage) which prompted my astrologer to ask casually, “How your marriage going?” wink, wink. Over the course of the next two hours he proceeded to talk to me about my soul’s evolutionary purpose and the karmic issues my soul had come here to work through. Without knowing anything about me or my life story he noted that my relationship karma would’ve come into play in 2008 when transiting Pluto entered Capricorn and was conjunct my lunar south node—which just so happened to be the year I started dating my husband. I left that reading feeling seen in a way that I had never felt before. Not only did my marriage crisis, and the years leading up to it, make a lot more sense but I now felt more clarity and confidence about how to navigate it.
As Pluto continued its slow passage through my 8th house (transformation, death, sex, intimacy, deep psychological processes), my husband and I committed to doing the deep work to heal our relationship karma (turns out this is not our first lifetime together!). One of the most powerful rituals that we created during this time was to share our dreams with each other. We both developed a personal practice of recording our nightly dreams and then we would make time to share them with each other as a way of rebuilding trust and intimacy. Working our dreams together allowed us to get to know ourselves and each other in new ways and to create the kind of relationship and emotional intimacy that we both deeply desired.
How do you see the collective healing and evolution of humanity unfolding, and what role does your work play in that vision?
I believe that each of us is a microcosm of the macro, a unique expression of divine consciousness in a human body-mind complex. As such, our external world is a reflection of our internal world. Our essence as divine beings is unconditional love but the trauma and karmic conditioning that we experience as humans can cause us to feel disconnected from our essential Self and to act out from scared, ashamed, and angry parts. Unburdening our own systems and reconnecting to our Soul and higher consciousness is what allows us to shine pure unconditional love out into the world. One of the most efficient ways to raise the vibration of the planet and decrease the amount of hatred and violence out in the world is to turn inward and clear the blocks to loving ourself. It is each of our responsibility to explore our own shadows, to heal and integrate the rejected parts, and restore trust in our own Self-leadership.
Whenever a client is going through something really painful or challenging, perhaps a situation in their present life is triggering some unresolved trauma from the past, I remind them that the timing isn’t random—this issue is showing up now because they are ready to deal with it. I believe this is true when we scale up to larger systems as well. We are seeing some major themes around power/control surface in the collective right now and are being given another opportunity to confront these themes as they manifest the ugly forms of fascism, dictatorship, tyranny, patriarchy, White supremacy, capitalism, etc. How are we going to respond? Astrology can predict themes and issues that are likely to show up but it can’t predict what we do about it. We have free will. We can choose to keep repeating our karma or we can choose to evolve. I believe these issues are surfacing now (again) because as a collective we are ready to deal with it. There are lots of ways to fight for liberation and justice. Everyone has unique gifts to offer and diversity is a beautiful thing, always. My world service and form of activism is in supporting and helping others do their inner work so that they can discover their own soul purpose and spiritual gifts and shine their light and love more fully out into the world.
To find out more about Genevieve Camp and her work, visit her website www.genevievecamp.com
