Life can be wonderful, messy, hard, fun, challenging, exciting, complicated. Sometimes, it’s full of twists and turns around a plethora of landscapes. At other times it’s all straight forward and plain sailing.
We can use Life Island to help people explore where they are at, or where they have been, and where they would like to go with their lives.
It can help people tell their story, reflect on their situation and plan for a better future.
It can help people get to know themselves and each other.
Life Island can be used in pastoral care, as a therapeutic resource, for mentoring, team building, community building, discipleship development, personal journaling, as a bonding experience with family or friends, or just for fun too!
It can be a narrative therapy stimulus tool for counsellors, psychologists, mentors, professional supervisors, guidance officers, case workers, youth workers, school chaplains, spiritual directors, caring family or friends and other types of support people.
Life Island is suitable for use with upper primary schoolers, teens, young adults and adults.
Life Island as a supportive or therapeutic resource
“A picture is worth a thousand words.” By using symbolic geographical sites as metaphors, Life Island helps people open up about what is going on in their lives and what they want to do about that.
Life Island can be a helpful prompt for storytelling and insight. It’s a resource for the See – Assess – Act model, the POOCH model and other reflection – action planning models.
Borrowing from and adapting the Killen and De Beer model for theological reflection,
- an Experience, when reflected on can lead to … Feelings
- Feelings, which can give rise to … an Image
- an Image, (metaphor/picture/analogy), which reflected on can lead to … Insight
- Insight, which can in turn can give rise to … Action
About the Life Island Packs
There are 3 size options, A0, A1 and A2.
Each kit comes in a hand-crafted postal tube.
They come with a canvas map printed with high quality ink and sprayed so that the inks do not run. Tom hand painted the original map using watercolour pencils and washes.
There are tokens to mark places on the map, with a few spares as well. The 4 dice are for one of the communication game options.
The Quick Use Guide is for those in a hurry and The Complete Guide lists the many ways in which you can use the resource.
