Gaia Goddess Featured Practitioner – Shlomit Oren

Shlomit Oren’s life reads like a tapestry woven with resilience, creativity, and healing. A performer turned facilitator, her journey began on international stages as a clown, belly dancer, and actress. Soon, she expanded into the world of expressive arts using them as a powerful vehicle for transformation.

Her own healing and grief led her to dedicate her life to uplifting others.Today, through her Women’s Empowerment (WE) Circles, and Gaia Goddess, Shlomit creates spaces where art, community, and therapy converge.

In this conversation, she shares how art has shaped her path, the lessons she’s learned along the way, and her vision for a more expressive, connected, and empowered world.

Shlomit calls herself both an expressive arts therapist and a performance artist, and she is a true storyteller of healing. Her life journey has carried her across continents, through loss, trauma, and discovery, until she realized that art itself can be a sacred bridge from pain into transformation.

From Israel to Colombia and Back Again

Shlomit was born in Israel, but her childhood quickly carried her elsewhere. At just two years old, her family moved to Colombia to escape war. For eight years she grew up surrounded by vibrant colors, sounds, and culture, until her parents divorced and she returned to Israel.

As a teenager, Shlomit leaned on creativity to make sense of life. Theater, philosophy, and dance became her companions. But at 15, everything shifted when her best friend died in a car accident before her eyes. The shock left her with PTSD and a heightened awareness of how fragile life truly is.

Healing began with creative expression, drawing, acting, and eventually belly dancing that opened her heart again. Belly dance in particular gave her something she’d never had before: the freedom to celebrate her body instead of criticizing it.

Discovering Her Path

Life had more surprises in store. While touring with a circus, Shlomit stumbled on a simple psychology book that lit up her curiosity about the human mind. Later, a friend handed her Natalie Rogers’ The Creative Connection, which blended expressive arts with person-centered therapy.

Her reaction was instant: “That sounds like me. That’s everything I’ve been doing.” Soon, she found herself at the Person-Centered Expressive Arts Institute in Sonoma, California, where she trained in a healing approach that unites movement, writing, painting, music, and drama.

A Person-Centered Way of Healing

At the core of Shlomit’s work is love. “I want to be authentic, compassionate, and with unconditional positive regard,” she says. “That means I will accept you where you are on your journey.”

For her, art isn’t just self-expression, it’s medicine for the nervous system. Neuroscience even confirms what ancient traditions already knew: painting, singing, dancing, or writing can shift the brain into meditative rhythms, opening imagination, calming the body, and restoring clarity.

Shlomit also weaves in somatic wisdom. “Our body stores emotions that were never processed,” she explains. “By listening to sensations like a tight chest or a racing heart, we begin to decode the body’s messages, reconnect to our intuition, and find balance again.”

Working with Trauma and the Inner Child

For those carrying trauma, Shlomit insists: healing is always step by step. “If I take somebody straight back into their childhood story, it can re-traumatize them,” she cautions. Instead, she starts by teaching grounding tools such as breathwork, mindfulness, and movement, so emotions can be observed rather than feel overwhelming.

“Our feelings are like children,” Shlomit says. “If we don’t attend to them, they’ll eventually throw a tantrum. But if we listen, they can relax.”

She often works with the inner child, that tender part of us shaped in our earliest years. “We all have an inner child, because what we experience in the first few years of our lives molds our brain, and that child always stays with us.” Through painting, journaling, breathwork, or movement, she helps people reconnect to that child, offering the safety and love it once needed.

“When we feel heard, seen, and understood we start to heal. When we can accept our shadow we can see the light!”

Transformation in Action

Shlomit has witnessed countless transformations: shy women arriving to a belly dance class who leave glowing and open; a young survivor of childhood exploitation who, after journaling and somatic practices, was able to feel her emotions again and no longer needed sleeping pills.

Even in her work with seniors living with Alzheimer’s and dementia, movement continues to work its magic. “Imagine remembering 10 times a day that your wife passed away years ago,” she says. “Through dance, we create moments of joy and regulation in the body.”

A Life of Self-Love

For Shlomit, healing isn’t confined to therapy sessions, it’s a daily practice of self-love. She also draws deep inspiration from Gaia, the spirit of the Earth itself. In her words, the body is not separate from the planet, it is an expression of it.

Just as the Earth stores memories in stone and soil, our bodies hold our stories. Healing, then, is not only personal but also collective, a way of realigning with Gaia’s rhythm and wisdom.

Words for the Journey

Shlomit believes healing is always possible for those willing to take a step toward it. Her guidance is simple and profound:

• Expand your window of tolerance. Sleep deeply, eat nourishing foods, go outside, and do things that spark joy. These choices create resilience.
• Seek support. “Having a therapist is not a weakness but the biggest gift,” she insists.
• Befriend yourself. Instead of pushing away sadness, allow it space. “It’s okay to cry. We are human.”

For Shlomit, even the tragedy she experienced at 15 eventually became a guiding light. “I chose to dedicate my life to my pleasure, to joy,” she reflects. “Because I had so much sadness, I knew I could only find the light by also connecting to the shadow.”

Shlomit continues to embody the belief that art heals and community empowers. Her story is not just one of personal resilience, but of turning loss into legacy, transforming pain into purpose.

As she forges ahead with her studies in clinical mental health counseling and expands her global programs, Shlomit’s mission remains clear…to uplift communities through creative expression and to remind us all of the healing power we each carry within.