Ep25 Play and Sand Tray; An interview with Marshall Lyles

Podcast Episode Description:

This week on the podcast, I'm joined by Marshall Lyles, an expert in using sand tray therapy to support children, adults, and families. Marshall shares his insightful experience on how this powerful therapy helps individuals explore their early experiences and better understand their present situations. We ponder the importance of approaching sand tray therapy with curiosity and openness, encouraging people to examine the judgments and limitations placed on them by family, others or society. Marshall shares how sitting with the emotions that arise during these explorations can be therapeutic, allowing them to become more conscious and empowering for personal understanding. Don't miss this deep, reflective conversation on the transformative potential of sand tray therapy.

Website: https://www.marshalllyles.com/

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Transcript

Play and Sandtray, an interview with Marshall Lyles

Philippa: [00:00:00] Welcome to this week's episode of Pondering Play and Therapy with me Philippa. And this week my guest is Marshall Lyles from Texas USA. So it's a real honor. Marshall has over 20 years of practice in family and play therapy. And he says he draws on lessons learned from working with attachment trauma in a variety of mental health settings.

Marshall regularly teaches Sand tray therapy and other modalities such as poetry, attachment informed family work, and he does this all around the world as well. Marshall, which you can tell us a little bit more about. He's also co-authored a book called Advanced Sand Tray Therapy and he's contributed to multiple chapters and articles and publications. And Marshall does have a website, which [00:01:00] I will put in the link of this episode if people want to go and just check him out and all the amazing things he does. So welcome. Marshall and thank you very much. So it's evening here for me and it's afternoon there for you. Is that right?

Marshall: That's right. We just passed noon. 

Philippa: Okay. And I can see in the background is that your Sand Tray therapy? 

Marshall: Yeah, this is my training center. This is where I teach from all in the back all the trays hanging on the wall that everybody uses, and then all the sand is dispensed from the middle part of the room, and then all the mini figures.

Philippa: Sand Tray is a very specific kind of therapy. Is that right? 

Marshall: That's right. Yeah. It's under the umbrella of expressive therapy approaches of which, play is one and Sand Tray is one, and music drama, different things. And then a lot of them [00:02:00] interact with one another. And Sand Tray is. One of the three modalities that I spend the most time in. 

Philippa: Okay. And have you always done this or have you had a life before then That's led you to this point? How did you come to be doing Sand Tray therapy? I. 

Marshall: Yeah, it's still a bit of a mystery to me, to be honest with you how life evolves in the way it does.

I at university I studied writing and journalism and so I fully planned on being a writer. But while I was still quite young I just got an opportunity an invitation into grad school, into family therapy that was a little out of the blue. It was, it's a wild experience how it came to be.

And I had grown up, without a lot of financial resource and there, wasn't, generations of people having gone to college or anything like that. And so whenever I was just given the opportunity for continued education, I just stepped through the door having no idea what therapy was.

[00:03:00] I had never seen it. But the family therapy program I landed in had a primary professor. Who did Sand Tray. And so I was as a 22-year-old introduced to Sand Tray therapy. 

Philippa: Okay. And is Sand Tray used primarily with adults, with children? How do you use Sand Tray? 

Marshall: Yeah it's used for all ages and all populations, individual to couples, to families, to groups.

It has a long history, of course, before professional therapy ever existed as a discipline. Most cultured had healers and healers used ceremonies that involved earth. Images and stories. This is not a new phenomenon from the time of Freud on we've always been using these materials to help make sense of the stories we inherited and the stories that have happened to us.

And once professional therapy landed as an organized [00:04:00] profession very early into its development in the early 19 hundreds, there was a woman from the uk Margaret Feld, who started experimenting with what was called the world technique. And she was bringing. Miniature figures and then eventually into trays of sand for clients to be able to not have to tell their story so directly, that they got the benefit of metaphor, which felt a little safer sometimes for dealing with some of the more intense moments of life.

She originally designed it to primarily be for children, especially, following the wars children were being really left out of mental health treatment and so she wanted to find a way to give them a language but quickly started realizing that adults who go through their own traumatic stories deserved the same opportunities.

And so it, very early in its innovation started being more age inclusive. And it's been around, for a hundred years. 

Philippa: And the idea is [00:05:00] when you say metaphors, is that you take figures or items that are personal to you, or are you giving them and then you arrange them? How does that work?

Marshall: So most therapists have shelves of different. Categories of figures, from spiritual figures to mystical fantasy, humans, animals, plants, objects houses, these sorts of things. And so a client is given an invitation. To choose as few or as many of those figures as they need to create a world, so to speak, in the tray that represents something.

But there are options for the client and for the therapist based on their orientation that it might always stay in metaphor and it might just be working implicitly, or they might start assigning external meaning, they might say, oh, this dragon is my teacher, or my [00:06:00] boss. And clients are given room. To, allow this to work in the background if that's what feels safer, or to bring it more explicitly forward and to experiment with, self-assigned meanings. that part seems to work at multiple levels. I think what most sand trade therapists or sand play therapists, depending on orientation believe, is that clients should get to choose, how much direct contact they need to make with internal things.

Philippa: Okay. So do you play with the items in the sand as a therapist, are you engaged with them, with the client or do they, what's your role as a therapist 

Marshall: they depend on probably a few variables. One being the age of the client. If this is a 5-year-old and the sand tray exists inside a playroom, then it might be more interactive.

If they're an older client there's probably gonna be a place where they arrange the figures and then you take a pause and you would give a story [00:07:00] and then you work with the story. And that story might then prompt the client to go back in and make changes to the world. But largely as people age, the world's become a little bit more static and you practice looking in it and exploring meaning when they're younger it tends to be more dynamic.

But that also depends on the therapist theory. And Alerian therapist might, have one way as of hand handling that versus a cognitive behavioral therapist might have a different way of being in it. So there's room for a lot of options that when Lowenfell created. This has a therapeutic approach.

She intentionally said she didn't want it to belong to one community of therapists, that she wanted it to be broadly applicable to anyone who might see benefit from it. 

Philippa: Okay. So you've talked about what I read out about trauma and attachment is Sand Tray. A [00:08:00] helpful way for people, children, adolescents, o older adults who've experienced maybe early life adversity, is the sand tray a way that they can explore some of those, especially the pre-verbal experiences.

Marshall: Oh yeah, I think so. I don't think there's any approach that's a perfect fit for everyone. But it, since Lowenfell was really starting to put these things together in the context of great worldwide calamity it feels like it was inherently. Trauma sensitive from the beginning because the whole world was going through a trauma.

And so it felt like there was a lot of intentionality when it comes to the attachment piece. There's so many of our attachment wounds that we don't have words for. We don't have narrative memory of what happened, but those, that energy is still alive. Inside of you. And so something like sand [00:09:00] tray allows you to take a pocket of the invisible, that it's driving so much energy in you and that you are able to give it a concrete form.

And so even if it doesn't match an exact memory, moment by moment, you still get the opportunity to witness something that has been behind the controls of your mind and to exert influence over it, to feel empowered as you explore. What does it feel like to hold that inside of you and it really can be security generating.

And another thing about the attachment piece that comes to mind. Is the more insecurity that was, given to you through your needs, being not always honored or handled in the way that you deserved the harder mindfulness can be. It's very hard to hold on to an open mind whenever your needs have been violated in such a way that you need to believe that you have the ability to [00:10:00] predict. The next moment I'm like, I know I'm about to be hurt, so I want be ready for it. Whereas mindfulness approaches say, be open to whatever might happen, and that's really scary when you have large amounts of insecurity. Centre for me feels like a way to. Practice baby steps toward mindfulness, exploring options, imagining different ways of thinking, or being from the point of view of these different figures that doesn't maybe feel as threatening or as violating to the system as maybe traditional talk approaches could.

And so it feels sensitive and honoring. Caring a lot of the time. Again, not for every, it's not a great fit for everyone, but I think when it's a match for someone, it can be so holding of their attachment trauma experiences, so caring, so thoughtful and really [00:11:00] patient. It allows things to happen incrementally.

Philippa: I was thinking there, when you were talking about. The nonverbal, the playing out what's held inside. I guess it's that thing that the body keeps score and that we, even if we haven't thought about something, we don't have the cognitions or the words for the experience.

We still went through them, whether we were three months or three years, we went through something and our body experienced it. Our. Our whole being experienced, those, whatever it was, being lost, being neglected, being hurt, we experienced those. So it's like you say, stored up inside. So the sand trait sounds is a way that people can then, whether they're still children or even as adults can play out in the sand.

And I, I use play as a. As a term rather than a, [00:12:00] that they can, act out or represent that bodily experience that maybe they don't have words to in one way. And I suppose what I was wondering was, do you see that each week or each session the same scene is played out a little bit with a little bit altered, I suppose you saying testing out?

I wonder if people test out different outcomes or begin to accept that maybe it's not. All this one way. So you might feel like you were a bad kid or it was all your fault that, these things happened to you. But maybe in the sound, you can start to play out the doubt that maybe it wasn't because I was a bad kid, or maybe it wasn't, and do you see that progression over time? 

Marshall: [00:13:00] Absolutely. Those early experiences that you're describing that we all have, every human has some years before they start having explicit memories. We are still. Holding on to all that happened and instead of it feeling like a memory that we can press, play on and see a movie, it's more like it's become the filter that we look through when we watch movies and Sand Tray becomes this way that we can work with our explicit memories.

But more than that, we're working with the filter. We're looking at the way that we see our memories we're starting to get some mastery over being able to realize, wait, I have a mind that was shaped by something and there might be another way to look at that. It might not be an automatically true thing about me.

And you do watch week to week, people grow in their ability to be reflective about the filters that, that they were given and to ask, [00:14:00] does that filter still serve me? So we are working with direct memories, but we're also working with something more meta than that, and it feels like just such a wonderful gift to have these approaches. That are appropriately sensitive for people and not trying to bypass their protective mechanisms that have just been called symptoms. Oh, that's a symptom. We can eliminate that. I'm like, no, we need to honor it. We need to ask why has it resided? What has it been trying to say? It's a messenger and in sand tray. All of those things get to be spoken to with reverence instead of only trying to change them. 

Philippa: Yeah so you can work with the here and now. So somebody maybe struggling, I'm just thinking about an adult now, or even a child maybe struggling with anger, if they are. Corrected or dismissed or they feel [00:15:00] they've been dismissed or that they feel rejected with maybe the normal cadence of relationships where there is a rupture in a relationship.

And we all have those ruptures in relationships, but sometimes, and I guess when you've experienced a lot of loss and a lot of rejection yourself, those. Those natural ruptures can feel bigger and so what I'm hearing you say is sand tray as a way of being able to think about the here and now.

But then try and understand it from these places of the past, because when you experience lots of loss as a child, one of the ways that you protect yourself is to say, okay, I don't care about that relationship anymore because otherwise it hurts too much to keep losing. But then when you are 24 and you've met somebody that's really important to you and there's a rupture, then actually you need to find a way to [00:16:00] repair it. But this thing that kept you safe in the past is now somehow getting in the way. And I think what you are saying is sand tray can help you think about that. Is that, is that right?

Marshall: Oh yeah. It becomes a way that I can both deal with this rupture that happened at 24, and I'm dealing with why it feels so familiar. You know why the pain feels bigger than what just happened? I get to both reach far into the past before I even had memory online, and I'm working with that version of myself while I'm also working right now.

And it is a very, and because it's so sensory with the sand and the the tactile and the kinesthetic aspects that, that really allows the part of your brain that helps you stay rooted in the present to stay online while you're just visiting. You're just looking to the past instead of reliving it. And then it [00:17:00] becomes a way to be introspective safely is the goal. We want people to feel secure. To the degree that's reasonable while they're trying to make new meaning of their pain. 

Philippa: And it feels like it could be less judgmental because you're just I say just in a very loose way, but it, you are like you say, visiting the past.

You're just wondering about, you're just curious. You don't have to go there if you don't want to because you are choosing the items that you've put in the sand tray. As the therapist, your job is to notice, and I wonder if for people that can feel less like you are judging all this happened in your past, then did it?

Oh my goodness. Yeah. More oh, I noticed you've put a bridge in there. What does that mean for you? That metaphor. I wonder if that's helpful to be able to explore it in a way that you aren't feeling judged or worried. 

Marshall: It, I think [00:18:00] removing judgment is always beneficial.

That I just actually wrote an article on Substack about judgment about that it's a version of. Anger that doesn't know how to be curious. When you remove curiosity from anger, it becomes judgment. It becomes bitterness, it becomes resentment, and then there is a possibility I.

To be angry as an example, and to be open at the same time. And when we manage to do that, we can look backwards and forwards and stay right now without falling into any of those old experiences. 'cause in all of the ways where we have felt a lot of judgment, we then play out on ourselves, we recreate the judgment internally to some degree.

And so a therapeutic experience has to be a disconfirming one. Like it has to be the opposite of the judgments that created, the pain. And you have to really feel that in, in really profound [00:19:00] ways. So if it's helpful to someone, that has chosen a little beat up. Animal figure, let's say that they've got a little scared dog figure that they've represented as some part of themselves, even if they haven't named it as part of themselves.

When they get to watch me compassionately, talk about that dog. There's the part of them that it connects to is getting an indirect experience of feeling what compassion could be like. So it becomes rehearsal. It becomes a way to practice a relational thing that might feel too intense to do. In real life but we're still doing it in the here and now. So it's mind expanding to me as a therapist to think about how many levels of things are happening with something that looks so simple on the surface. 

Philippa: So when you talk about, I'm just thinking about, when you talk about judgment and judgment of yourself, can [00:20:00] you expand on that?

Do you, what do you mean is that if you are like a child and people are like, ugh, you're just rubbish at doing jigsaws, or you are, that you start to feel that people are seeing you in a certain way and then you continue then to see yourself through that perspective through that way.

Is that what you are meaning? 

Marshall: Yeah. Without necessarily knowing that's what you're doing, when you've really internalized those intense judgements I. You don't necessarily always know. Sometimes you do and know explicitly, we always implicitly know, like we feel that.

But let's say that you grew up I do a lot of work in the disabled community. I'm a person with a disability and so let's say you grew up in a disabled mind, disabled body and you collected. Judgments along the way about your capability. You know about if you're [00:21:00] someone whose mind works differently about your level of intelligence, about your level of creativity about, about.

What can accidentally happen is those things just become self-limiting. You don't know it was a judgment. You just think this is what's true because it's how you've been treated. It's how you've been spoken of or not spoken to. And then you accidentally start living into a self-fulfilling cycle with that and through something you never deserved to have experienced in the first place until someone comes up and becomes an opposite experience for you. Someone that doesn't try to shrink you but tries to amplify you. And then through the contrast you can start dismantling some of the experiences that caused you to believe that you're limited or a burden or inadequate, or fill in the blank.

Of course, not just limited to the disabled [00:22:00] community. I think gender women have experienced this. I think people in the L-G-B-T-Q community, people of color people, we have marginalized so many communities who have felt this collective judgment that has just become a part of the experience and so we're. We're needing some reckoning with empowerment. Sand tray becomes one small way to practice, doing that work. But it becomes really tricky when you try to talk about anger and judgment because what ends up happening is once you let go of a judgment, sometimes what you've done is you've let go of a collapse there's a numbness that you might've inherited, and what happens is then you feel anger without. The judgment and it, but the anger is still really loud in you and it becomes very awakening. It's not that you go from, oh, I've let go of this judgment and now I'm at peace a lot of times you feel the injustice of what [00:23:00] you've lived with for years and we don't always have mechanisms ready to hold people in that transition state, we're like, now you just get to be pissed for a little bit.

Let's be mad. Let's feel that without feeling, agreeing with it, and so it's a process. And again, sand tray is one way to get to explore that. But it's a powerful one when it works for someone. 

Philippa: And I suppose as you were talking, I was thinking about we can get that from lots of different ways.

So we can have family stories of you are the one that's. Sick in our family, or you are the one that is always naughty in our family, I guess children coming into care can be, if it was my behavior that, that I did these things and therefore I'm needing to be looked after in foster care or away from the home and that can become a family story, can't it? But you are also talking about actually society can put these stories, these judgments [00:24:00] around us. You can't do this because you're Orman. You can't do this because you're a person of color. You can't do this because you've got a DHD or you've got autism or, and we can create these stories as a society for people.

Yeah. And that must be, yeah, quite. Mind blowing and empowering at the same time to to be able to explore. Actually, maybe I don't go for these jobs or I don't go and travel here or I don't because I. This is what I am thinking of myself. Or actually it wasn't my fault that my family separated it was the alcohol my dad was drinking or the, the mental health of my mom where she needed care and the, and care wasn't there and, but then, yeah. What do you, what do you do with that then? What, where do you go with that? That's quite. Yeah. Freeing and [00:25:00] mind blowing all at the same time. 

Marshall: It is, and it's tricky because if you start letting go of some of that past pain, it doesn't automatically mean the world is safe for you and so we have to continue to make sure that we're not being unrealistic. That you might be healing some. Of what was spoken over you in the past, but then it's just opening your eyes to how some part of the world still thinks that about you and you're not agreeing with it, but you now have to still navigate that same level of insecurity or unsafety in your physical world. And so it is a really complicated, I'm saying this as someone who lives in Texas right now, so I'm feeling, very aware of those dynamics. It is, it's a tricky thing to say you deserve to get to heal and I in no way want to communicate to you that the world is different than the world that implanted this in you in [00:26:00] the first place. And so we've got to have methods and modalities and relationships that allow us to hold the complexity of more than one thing being true at a time so that we don't get some sort of false certainty that allows us to then accidentally communicate something that sets someone up for more pain.

Philippa: And how do you work, with younger children, are the parents in the room? Because, I wonder if you've got a 10-year-old who is exploring some of these things and, maybe mom or dad or grandparents are part of their story or they are gonna be part of their story, some of it they're trying to grapple with or work out.

How do you support families within this sand? 

Marshall: Back. I used to do a lot of work with young children. In more recent years I've worked more with older people but I was trained up in the way of family therapy and even family play. It was [00:27:00] always my preference to involve as many members of the system has made sense because.

A person, a child is trying to heal, but they still have to return to a system where they don't have a lot of power. And so the system has to support any change that's happening and the system needs to heal instead of us only identifying the child as the one with the struggle. And so it, it was always my preference, there, there are some times where that doesn't make financial sense, both parents can't afford to be there all the time, or sometimes it doesn't make safety sense, if there's a caregiver or a member of the system that is not yet capable of handling what might come up. So you always have to make judgment calls based on who's available both pragmatically and emotionally, but I never hesitate to, I think if parents of a Six Yearold are coming in to do an intake with me, I think [00:28:00] it's my job to be able to look at them and say I'm so looking forward to working with all of you. Here are some things that I could really benefit from having the two of you work on so that you can be therapeutic allies that we can all be a part of this treatment team together? I think parents are waiting for us to often safely let them know. You know how they can partner with us, and sometimes that's, could you read this material or watch this video?

Could you come in for a practice session with me before we do this with your kiddo? And sometimes it's, would you be willing to work with your own therapist and maybe do some trauma work around what happened to your. Child so that when you're in the room with me, you are not reliving the trauma like they need you.

They need you to be a step ahead of them in that healing. And so that's just part of our responsibility as therapeutic caregivers is to be able to lay out to, and then it's the whole [00:29:00] family's right to get to decide what they're willing to do and what they feel like they have the bandwidth to do and if they agree or not that needs that.

I don't think it's my job to withhold something that I might think to be helpful for fear of deciding what they're gonna think it means. Like they need me children, parents. They need me to treat them like they're trustworthy they need me to say I believe in you. I believe that you can do this so I'm gonna name it and let's figure it out together. Sometimes I had a mentor that told me once, sometimes therapists early in their training or given really problematic information, that is our job to get clients to trust us when it's our job to figure out how to trust our clients, and we've got it we've had it backwards. That trust isn't something we extract from people. It's something we give. And then in the return trust, that's a byproduct of that. And I, and so I think family involvement is beautiful. It's needed. But they also really need us to do our jobs well and to with trust.

[00:30:00] Tell them, our approach and what we would recommend and need from them. 

Philippa: I suppose, children and young people playing out in the sand, those early life experiences, I imagine parents witnessing them and you giving voice to them can be very powerful and quite emotional especially if you've, adopted a child or fostering a child and they're playing out some of their early life, experiences before I. They're with their parents now that can I imagine it can hurt their parents' hearts really seeing that happen. Oh yeah. 

Marshall: It can open really like large grief portals where you're feeling for your child, but even if you've adopted, a lot of times, you know the stories that your children are working through are ones that are generationally true for you as well. 

So it's not always only hurting our [00:31:00] parent heart. It's also can be painful when we realize, oh. That's familiar to me as well, and I may have gone a lifetime without ever looking into that pain of my own had I not brought this child into my home, who needed me to look at their pain. So there can be this. Backwards, ripple in time for caregivers as they come to understand. Some of their own experiences are tied up in, in this without substituting them or comparing them to their children's. We all come from attachment stories regardless of our background.

Philippa: Absolutely. And that. I guess that's, part of your job as a therapist is to provide a space where they can safely do that and they can safely leave. How do you help people leave your sessions? Really? Because I am thinking as a therapist, you don't want them [00:32:00] to leave with all this rawness that you almost somehow need to put them back together a little bit and then so they can go out and go back to school, go back to work, go back home. How do you end or finish a sand tray session? 

Marshall: Yeah, I think preemptively, if we can brainstorm what days of the week or what times of the day make sense, some of that deserves to be prearranged as much as humanly possible. For a child if they do have to go back to school, can we at least build in an hour or something after a session where the transition's not so abrupt and they get the experience of more slowly coming back into themselves Or for an adult, going straight back into work or even, I was working with a young adult recently that came to see me and they had a, they that a couple hours after a session, they had a [00:33:00] first date and they were telling me very excitedly. And we had a plan to go into a certain trauma story and I said, I, you know what I don't think it would be very kind of me too open this up with you knowing that an hour and a half from now you're going to be trying to make a certain impression and have a new conversation. How about we do something different today? So it, there's some, a lot of that whenever possible, it's not always knowable that collaborate on the front end.

Yeah. To what does your spirit need to be handled gently. But there are gonna be other moments. We might try to wrap down the content part of a session early for certain people so that there's more time together on the other side of looking at a hard story. But there are just gonna be other times, Philippa, where I think it would be insensitive of me to try and overregulate someone. That there is an element of I'm meant to be also working with the systems they're gonna [00:34:00] receive these clients. So if it's a child, and have I got permission to talk to teachers to let them know, Hey, sometimes after meeting with me, they're gonna need a little support.

Can we build in something there that it. Why it can't all be on the responsibility of the client to pull it together. Yeah. In this like time limited way that our systems need to be receiving us and honoring the hard work that's happening. They might need to be a little collapsed or a little aroused, that's the proper nervous system response.

To what they just did. It's proof of the work and their protectors are loud maybe, and I don't wanna try and flatten them and to accidentally recreate disempowerment and try by overriding their nervous system. So as much as possible, I wanna give them the containment and ground support they're asking for, but also to not make it all their responsibility. Which [00:35:00] is sometimes the how the pain was created in the first place. 

Philippa: That's very true. I work with little people and often I will say they just need the morning or the afternoon off school because they need an hour and a half, two hours with you as their parent just, watching TV or coloring or running around the park, whatever it is.

To send them back into school. It's just. Not gonna be realistic for them. Where possible. For some children it's not possible, is it? For some families it's not possible, but yeah, I think you're right. It's about having those conversations around how does the system also support this work, that it isn't 50 minutes an hour a week and it doesn't go on for the rest of the time.

Actually, this is something that we hope is gonna permeate through the whole of their life really, and help them make sense of things. So therefore it [00:36:00] isn't just an hour a week, it's going to, they have to make sense of it in all the other aspects of their life as well. 

Marshall: Yeah. And they deserve that long suffering, temperate holding.

I think sometimes when someone steps into my office, regardless of age. It's possible that they might be the first person in a long family line that's pausing to look at the inherited pain. And so what the metaphor that I used with someone the other day, it's like trying to turn a cruise ship around you're just gonna be hitting the brakes for a long time. 

Like you're not gonna point that boat the other direction. It's just gonna be slowing. And so based on where they are in that healing line, it's not just within their lifetime, but what effort has happened ahead of you to make sense of this ongoing story that's been possibly perpetuated over generations?

When you think the [00:37:00] gravity of that, it's not just trying to pause what's happening in their life for an hour. It could be that they are feeling the impact of the momentum of 10 generations of energy going in one direction, and they're trying to turn that around. I have so much compassion and really reverence for the bravery it takes to say I'm gonna be the one I'm willing to I'm willing to look at what's been happening and to try and create a new version of future history I wrote a poem one time that said I'm in a place where I'm not just focusing on the ancestors that created me. I need to focus on the ancestor. I will become, and what am I doing in this transition space of my lifetime where I'm sandwiched between what has been and what will be.

Philippa: And that's very powerful, and yeah, especially when lots of people are still living in a system that maybe that is still around. I just wanna move on to the next topic. Yeah, Marshall, because we're gonna be running outta time [00:38:00] and, but I could talk about that for ages. Age. Glo you talked about, or I, in your introduction said you work globally.

So tell us a little bit about your global reach and what you do outside of Texas? 

Marshall: Yeah. It's sort of Texas. I live in Austin, so most of Texas doesn't consider us real Texas. Oh, okay. But the they try to sell us to California every once in a while. The rest of, I don't really know how to make sense of the international opportunities I love the friends and the communities I've gotten to learn from. But it is a bit of a mystery about how these things come to be. But, therapy healing Sand Tray even as. Happening all over the planet. And so from time to time I get the chance to be with a group of healers and therapists who are in different, geographic locations from me.

[00:39:00] And so I've more recently been getting to do some work in South Africa. Have some ongoing relationships with a wonderful organization in Turkey centered in Istanbul and have some dear friends and community in Jordan that, so a lot of this has become places where I've been able to go repeatedly and come to know the communities in those moments. I think my job is to not think that culturally I understand, that every therapy is always held culturally and contextual and I've gotta bring some humility when I get these opportunities. And I often feel like my job is to get to go hold therapists and to say, I believe in you and so here are some things you know that we know about Sand Tray or about trauma, or about attachment or about poetry or what have you. But I don't know what it's like to live here. Trying to do those things. And so it becomes a [00:40:00] lot more interactive, which I think is why it gives me so much joy in life. There's more of an exchange that's happening in those moments. So yeah, it's a great joy. I have a lot of gratitude for how much I've been able to learn through that work.

Philippa: So you go and support other therapists and help them grow their skills rather than going to do the therapy directly.

Marshall: That's right. Yeah. I'm always with the therapist and there are times, a couple of times when I was in the Middle East, I was there for training therapists, but we would go do some volunteer days. In refugee camps where I get to be a part of moments of direct service provision.

But largely I'm there to support the community of healers because the last thing a young child living in a refugee camp on the Lebanese Syrian border needs as an American to come through with some savior complex. You know what they deserve more is for. The everyday heroes that are living there, that are [00:41:00] starting to burn out because of the excessive need, get to have someone come and love them so that they can then return to the work.

And so that's often my role. 

Philippa: Lastly you've co-written a book, the advanced Sand Tray. I have a copy of it and I share it around our office quite often. People having a good read. It's very good. And you said about, you've written an article on judgment.

Where are these on Substack, did you say? 

Marshall: Yeah, there are chapters and articles around, on different things, but the easiest place if people want to read some of what I've been writing is on the app called Substack. I'm not on social media. I'm not a very networked person, Philip, I hide from the world as much as possible. But Substack is this, wonderful app for writers and readers. And so there's, two channels on Substack that one is just under my name and the other I co-create with a lovely [00:42:00] therapist in Colorado named Abdi Quel. And that channel is called the Poetics of Belonging, where we're starting to explore spirituality, and, what can, what harm can come through spirit through maybe religious harm or different experiences where people have felt spiritually exposed, but also how do we reclaim some connection with whatever part of that world that makes sense to us as a resource. So we are gonna be writing, there are a couple of places on Substack under my name or under Poetics and Belonging where you can get some things to read. 

Philippa: That's lovely. And you've also got a website, and I did a couple of your webinars that you can, if you are interested in ra you've got webinars up there, can't you? And people can just buy, I think I bought. F four and there was a deal and I watched the four.

So people can go, if they want to learn more about Sand Tray, if they want to have some teachings from you, they can go there. [00:43:00] I know you also do online work as well. Is that right where you do people can join live trainings? 

Marshall: Yeah, there's on the website, there's still all the recordings.

We try to keep those as inexpensive as possible, but just anyone who's listening know that if you can't afford it, if you email us, we will just give you access. The goal is to make sure that the people have the resources, they deserve to have and then there are also on the website, live events.

And some of them are as simple as poetry readings. We host virtual poetry readings. Often the poems are being read written and read by therapists and healers, but anyone can sign up to listen, just like an hour all the way through more intensive retreats or trainings that could be in person or online and so you'll see a variety of. Of offerings there. 

Philippa: And they don't need to be in the US to be able to access the online stuff. I guess the time [00:44:00] sometimes is a thing, but you are five hours. 

Marshall: It depends on, I think right now we're at seven, six or seven. Okay but yeah, it's to you and the uk and sometimes I'll do something in the evening and that works out for people in Asia and other times it works out for people in Australia. And so you are trying to move it around. But the most of the things that I offer if you sign up for it live, you'll also then get the recording 

Philippa: right.

Okay. And the very last thing before I let you go is the World Sand. Organization. Is that right? So you are a member of the board. I thought you'd founded it. Marshall, I I retired. Forever, since I've known you, I was like, oh, Marshall. I don't know why. I think it must have appeared in my Facebook at the same time that, that you and I were connecting.

I was like, oh, Marshall's done that. So I elevated you. It was a 

Marshall: part of the board. [00:45:00] Before I moved over to the advisory board I wasn't early. Board member I, and I guess probably one of the, one of the first board members of the organization, but there was a small group that did a lot of work to create the organization.

So I would never want to take credit for, they, there were so much work they did, but I. I think I was on the opening board. I just, I'm not enough of a leader to have that kind of initiative. But I've, some years ago, moved over to being an advisory board member, which means, they call me when they need me, but as a wonderful organization called the World Association of Sand Therapy Professionals, and the website is World Sand Therapy.

And they are trying to be an inclusive, international organization that supports professionals, mental health professionals and healers who use any version of sand tray. And so they sponsor community events and there's trainings and they've just announced a [00:46:00] credential that you can submit, trainings that you've gone through for review.

If that, based on where you live, if it helps you to have some sort of known credential. But I highly recommend the people go and check out the work. That's happening there. And there's also a free access journal. So if you go to the website, you don't have to be a member. There's no paywall. You can read any of the archived journal articles.

And Dr. Linda Meyer is the editor and has done so much work to make sure all of that is freely accessible to any person who might benefit. 

Philippa: And I'm on the Facebook page. There's often links and sharings. It's a very good yeah. Resource, I think. And your last, very last bit is you've got Marshall's miniatures and basically I know what anything because I don't do enough sunshine, but they are the cutest things sometimes.

I'm like, where did he find these little things? 

Marshall: I can't take any credit. [00:47:00] That's my wife. She does. It's that it started years ago. I'm, Philippa, you can see behind me that I'm part pottery studio. So everything over there is all ceramics. And so that's my other great love. And so I was making figures for people.

And then Heather had the idea of what if we had. In a website where if people wanted to place orders that you made things, but that quickly overwhelmed me. And then I was like, oh, it's too much. And so she said let me start finding other artisans and, other places.

And then that became what it is. I have very little to do. With any of that. That's really become. Or it just has my name in it because of the original way it started. It is, yeah. Marshall's Miniatures does have an Instagram and a Facebook account, even though I don't have anything to do with it.

Heather is my wife's name that runs that part of the business and she's also got a very generous heart and so has. Tried her best to make [00:48:00] sure things are people. It's inclusive. If you're international, if you're not local to the us the way that she can ship to you is through Etsy. And so there's an Etsy store that allows for international shipping.

So you can feel free to check that out. 

Philippa: And I think, when you are looking for Sand Tray items, if you are interested in Sand Tray finding. Some nuanced things to that are gonna be really important, especially for children who've ex, I work with children, but I imagine adults as well, where who've experienced trauma or specific types of adversity.

It can be really difficult finding those miniatures that are gonna fit in the sand, but I often see them on Marshall's miniatures, and I think, oh my gosh. Those are just great items to, to have really, just to help with. With children's experiences so I would recommend anyone who's trying to [00:49:00] grow or thinking about doing sand trays, just to have a look at Marshall's miniatures.

'cause there's just some amazing stuff on there. Oh, you just 

Marshall: scored so many points with Heather. 

Philippa: Thank you so much, Marshall, for joining me on this podcast. It's been a delight. I could talk to you for a lot longer, but our time is off. I'm sure you've got to go.

It's only Monday now and you've got to go back and do your day job. I imagine so. 

Marshall: That's right. 

Philippa: Thank you very much for your time. 

Marshall: Oh, thanks for having me, Philip. It's been a pleasure.