What is Sandplay Therapy?

Sandplay therapy is a non-intrusive and primarily nonverbal form of 
psychotherapy. It allows individuals to work through emotional and 
spiritual issues, and to grow through developmental roadblocks by naturally engaging their inner lives. As founder Dora M. Kalff said, sandplay can also become a way of life, facilitating an unfolding of profound meaning that deepens the personality. Sandplay therapy provides the space, freedom, safety and opportunity to work with the psyche’s capacity to heal itself and to move to a new stage of life.  Because sandplay is primarily nonverbal and heals on a deep level, it has great success with children.

Sandplay therapy has a deep and permanent healing effect for two reasons. First, solutions arise organically out of the individual, and second, the sandplay process involves the whole person -- body, mind, soul, and spirit.

Sand as a Living, Psychic Symbol

In European folklore, the sandman sprinkles sand into children’s eyes to put them to sleep. Dogon and Navaho medicine men, Tibetan Buddhist monks, Australian Aborigines, and healers in other ancient cultures have long used sand in rituals of divination, initiation and healing.

We find sand at the threshold between worlds - between the world of land and the world of ocean, just as between the world of conscious life and the mysterious world of  unconscious, psychic life. To dig in the sand is to delve into the creative world beyond. To play in the therapeutic sandtray is to uncover the workings of one’s inner life, and to invite its healing secrets to arise.

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