Julia Weaver, LMFT, BFA

Julia Weaver is an environmental arts educator, a licensed psychotherapist, and an exhibiting artist. She has more than 30 years experience combining the arts, and cross cultural practices, particularly the creation of mandalas and gardens for individual, community, and global healing. Her 30 years of spiritual practice include Buddhism, Advaita Vedanta, Navajo and Sufi traditions.

Everything I offer has come through my own lived experience. My body-oriented/ spiritual psychotherapy training also includes EMDR, Gestalt, Diamond Logos, iRest, Authentic Movement, Integrative Body Psychotherapy, Voice Dialogue, Jungian Sandplay and Psycho-synthesis and Continuum Movement Meditation, Focusing and Sensory Awareness along with Neo Reichian somatic therapy.

While swimming off the Kona coast in 1996, Julia had a mystical experience where she spontaneously received mandala images, which took her artwork into deeper dimensions of healing and spiritual practice. Two weeks later, she began studying with Dr. Judith Cornell, author of Mandala: Luminous Symbols for Healing and Willow Scheel-Kushler. She gratefully apprenticed and assisted her mentors in workshops through 2001.

“For several years I had been praying for a vehicle to express my spiritual visions that wasn’t about me personally, but encompassed the whole. The Mandala process turned out to be the ideal form.”

After receiving the mandalas, she was blessed to swim with a small pod of wild spinner dolphins with only her family and two other women for several hours. She has experienced deep physical healing and spiritual awakening through her contact with these highly evolved beings.  Many of her mandalas have been birthed in her annual pilgrimages to Hawaii.

Since 1996, she has offered mandala workshops for adults and children in her studio in the San Francisco Bay area and across the US, as well as dolphin swims retreats in Hawaii. Her adult workshops were featured in New Age Journals Body and Soul (spring 2001), and she co-facilitated a workshop for children with Julia Butterfly Hill and Jane Goodall at the Kinship with All Life conference held in San Francisco.  A passionate environmental arts educator, Julia designs and facilitates rites-of-passage ceremonies and combines the Mandala Process with tree planting, gardening, and collages to promote community revitalization and ecological healing.

She also uses the mandala process as a creative consultant with non-profit organizations and is available for consultations or embodied psychotherapy sessions in person and by phone. Her chapter on "Goddesses of the Ocean, Healers of the Sea" is featured in the forthcoming book Feminist Mystical Artists. Julia lives with her husband, son, and two golden retrievers in the woods of Northern California.