Practice
Diane-Lee McLeod (Featherwoman) is on sabbatical at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland throughout June 2026 for her oral defence. Sessions will resume in July. All inquiries are warmly welcomed and will be responded to upon her return. Miigwech for your patience and understanding.
Featherwoman offers embodied expressive arts sessions integrating somatographic inquiry, land-based focusing, and reflective practice.
This work grows from lived experience, graduate research in expressive arts therapy at the European Graduate School, and a commitment to relational practice with the land.
Many people arrive during what can be called a liminal space: a threshold where something in life is shifting but the next form is not yet clear. In these moments, attention to sensation, imagination, and narrative can allow meaning to emerge slowly and with integrity.
Underlying this work is a recognition that the body, the land, and story are not separate. Each can act as a source of awareness and regulation when approached with respect, consent, and attentiveness.
These sessions are not clinical therapy or predictive services. They are spaces of creative engagement, embodied inquiry, and transformation. They support people engaging more intentionally with creative work, life transitions, research, or personal process.
Areas of Practice
Coaching and Consulting
Coaching and consulting sessions support creative development, research formation, life transitions, and professional integration. These meetings combine aesthetic dialogue and creative inquiry with somatic awareness, helping you examine questions, organize ideas, and move forward with steadiness and clarity.
Land-Based Focusing-Oriented Practice
This practice brings attention to breath, bodily sensation, and the surrounding environment as sources of awareness and regulation. Land-based focusing invites you to slow down, listen inwardly, and recognize how the body and the land can act as co-regulators during moments of transition, stress, or reflection. Rooted in the work of Dennis Windego and Wes Chester, and grounded in Anishinaabeg relational accountability.
Dream and Story Journaling
Dream and story journaling sessions support expressive writing as a practice of aesthetic response, pattern recognition, and narrative inquiry. Rather than interpreting dreams through fixed meanings, attention is given to recurring images, emotional tones, symbols, and the ways stories may be unfolding within your experience. This practice draws on six years of structured dream journaling originating in Treaty 3 Territory.
Somatographic Inquiry
Somatographic inquiry is an original embodied research and embodied inquiry methodology developed through graduate work in expressive arts therapy at the European Graduate School. It integrates three streams of attention:
Embodied Observation
Noticing sensation, breath, and felt sense as they arise in the body during reflection, creative process, or transition. The body is treated as a source of knowledge rather than a site of symptom.
Aesthetic Writing
Tracing what emerges through narrative, image, and symbolic pattern as a form of disciplined self-inquiry. Writing becomes a method of attending to experience rather than simply recording it.
Creative Articulation
Giving form to experience through artistic or expressive means, allowing meaning to surface that may not yet have found words. The creative act itself becomes part of the inquiry.
In practice sessions, somatographic inquiry means we work with what the body already knows. Attention moves inward to sensation, pattern, and the slow intelligence of felt meaning. This approach is rooted in Anishinaabeg relational accountability, the work of Dennis Windego and Wes Chester, expressive arts methodology, and sustained dreamwork practice originating in Treaty 3 Territory, Lake of the Woods.
Sessions drawing on somatographic inquiry are particularly suited to people navigating creative uncertainty, research formation, life transitions, or the kind of knowing that has not yet found its words.
How Sessions Work
Sessions are conversational and grounded in aesthetic response. Depending on the focus, they may include embodied inquiry, somatic awareness, expressive arts inquiry, dream and story journaling, symbolic exploration, or land-based attentiveness. The aim is to create a steady environment in which insight can emerge at its own pace.
Session Rates
Standard Rate
Coaching and Consulting: $150 per hour
Land-Based Focusing-Oriented Practice: $150 per hour
Somatographic Inquiry Sessions: $150 per hour
Short Sessions
Dream and Story Journaling: $95 per 30 minutes
Booking
Sessions are scheduled by request. Please include your time zone, availability, and whether you are seeking online or in-person support.