We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Helena Walsh a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Helena , thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today We’d love to hear about a project that you’ve worked on that’s meant a lot to you.

Creating my own studio was my biggest and most rewarding project to date. The intension driving the vision was to empower an international community of artists to work together and to feel supported in their lives and careers and this has been deeply rewarding and inspiring to watch unfold. To see the studio grow from these curious actors who wish to transform and evolve in their art form and lives by reaching across water and land to be together. Creating stories that matter to them, supporting each other through challenging times and the highs and lows of a life lived outside of what society suggests is normal, has been very enriching. This has also come about due to my own collaborations cross culturally with my colleagues and friends who all care about the integrated actor, an actor who can enjoy the pleasure in life and their careers while feeling good in mind and body. Fostering play and a love of practice and process and community in their art form. There are many dimensions to the work that I do and offer and explore with actors and artists and I have coined a research project called #creativecare. Many projects have been born out of this initial project of setting up the studio space and it continues to give…

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

I am an Entrepreneur, Researcher and Human Empowerment and Resiliency Coach (Organic Intelligence®) as well as an International Voice & Acting Coach. CEO and Founder of Helena Walsh Empowerment Studios. I am mentor on an international training called Neurosystemics™ a cutting-edge approach to working with the nervous system, combining elements of neuroscience, psychology, and meditation to help individuals regulate their emotions and manage stress.

Over the past thirty years I have worked with creatives from all over the world, supporting them to grow professionally, personally and collectively through creating inspiring communities for them to play with and supporting them to have rich, creative lives.

What makes the work I do and offer truly unique is the holistic and integrated approach to transformation. Drawing from a diverse range of practices, including Organic Intelligence® (OI), Fitzmaurice Voicework®, Neurosystemics™and many more. I created, with my colleague Benjamin Mathes of Crash Acting, “The Actor’s Practice: The Art of Being Human™”a ten week intensive actor training that looks at the entire experience of the actor as artist in their life and career.

We also established over the years, nature based acting retreats, in Ireland and Greece, focusing on surfing and hiking as a crucial experience for actors in grounding their creative process in the here and now. Blue Health Surfing Retreats, Green Health Hiking Retreats and #Creativecare through story, song, cooking together and time shared. .These acting retreats bring together artists from all over the world, sitting around the fire, singing together. Our desire is to bring artists together in an empowered way, creating leading lights that can then act as beacons of change in their creative communities.

I also created many more online and in person trainings, courses and workshops to offer ongoing support to the artist in their practice through their career such as “The Empowered Voice™, “Empowerment and resiliency” courses and #Creative Care. as well as establishing creative hubs in London, Dublin , New York and co-creating with Crash Acting Studios in LA. One of my main missions is establishing healthy, inspiring collectives for actors in their local cities to work with and create with. Many of these actors are attending ongoing empowerment and resiliency circles and often invest in one on one work through my OI practice.

My teachings and coachings are drawn from ancient wisdom and a profoundly empowered creative practice which offers a truly transformative experience. By addressing the nervous system of individuals and groups, I have seen it strengthen relationships, foster coherence, empower collective healing and transformation, deepen the actors relationship with their art and life so it has greater meaning, drive and purpose and becomes a form of social activism in the world around them. .

I work intimately with individual actors and collectives and unlock their unique creative potential and ability to collaborate, leading to a more expansive relationship with themselves and most importantly each other. I work with actors to develop their lives, careers , preparing them for roles on stage and film as well as leaders, speakers, and individuals from various backgrounds. My coaching and teaching not only focuses on developing presence, intimacy, honest expression and connection but also instils empowerment, resiliency, and innovation.

Throughout my extensive career, I have honed my skills in creative leadership which empowers the collective in a non dominant way, working with conflict within collaborations. My journey began as an actress and singer, giving me a deep understanding of the creative process and the complexity of being human and how to use this to change and transform an audiences’ way of seeing the world. In particular the worlds of those who come from a different experience. The power of storytelling, being Irish, is something I always had a deep respect for and it felt mystical in how it could integrate the listeners , heart, soul and mind.

Over time, I transitioned into a voice and acting coach, training and coaching actors for stage and screen then went on to spending years studying and researching the nervous system and how to offer actors skills in self regulation and collective regulation in a often disregulating industry and career .

I have made it my life’s mission to affect individual and collective change in the arts, in a hope that moving forward systemic change in how actors are trained, educated, cared for in rehearsals and on sets focuses more compassionately on their mental health and wellbeing. Actors are required by nature and their art form to remain sensitive in order to be able to transform into the stories they are asked to tell. I am committed to empowering actors to remember they are artists and get to know how they need to be inspired and supported to create. I am here to help actors unlock their potential, enhance their art of expression and navigate challenging transitional moments with compassion.

What can society do to ensure an environment that’s helpful to artists and creatives?

I feel a systemic change is needed for creatives. Our current creative ecosystem is unsustainable and is dysregulating for artists putting them into survival mode. The current framework is transactional and individually based, leading to creatives feeling isolated and alone as they move through their careers.

The framework we need to evolve towards is a more sustainable health and well being for the creative mind and body where they can thrive. This will begin to shift when we address the question how can we best support the mental health and well being of the sensitivity of the creative mind and body? This, I feel needs new systems on a policy level, in film and theatre schools as well as on film sets and in theatre rehearsal rooms.

Educating creative minds in skills that help them rest and digest after a job so they can restore and recover. Educating creative minds that nature is their most profound ally when it comes to depression, anxiety, self consciousness, doubts, burn out, exhaustion. Creating a relationship between the artist and nature as a way of giving them ongoing support in their careers so they remain inspired, healthy and attuned to their environment. The creative mind is a present mind and needs presence of mind and body. In order for this to be possible their environments need to be sensitive to their unique needs , which requires, the actor in this case, to be vulnerable. In order to be vulnerable the actor needs to be able to trust the environment they are in. Directors understanding how to meet and connect to their actors will give them a deep sense of trust in the collaborative process and therefore the story will have new depth and brilliance. There is a lot to do in the industry to begin to change how we understand the life of a creative mind and how to support its potential to flourish. I feel tending to the creative mind is no different to tending to your garden it takes daily planting and watering, it is a craft after all.

Of course financial support in relation to housing and basic needs is also something that needs to be reimagined. I feel in order for it to be reimagined we need to understand that the life of a creative artist, needs time and works off a different time frame to corporate time.

I work with. many creative minds recovering from addiction. The way to heal addiction is connection. It is not enough for an actor to connect in story they must also be supported to connect in their lives. This is why communities of artists coming together, having spaces between jobs, where they can come together to create, is crucial. This collaborative space will give them the connection they need and reduce the movement towards addiction. The corporate world has WE WORK spaces, the creative world needs affordable, collaborative creative spaces. I believe this would be a game changer and offer creative minds the peace and support they need. It is not much considering how they serve us with their innovative natures. Creative minds are asked to work in their life and art in intense environments that are often oppositional to the complexity they are being asked to access in story and the creative flow they are required to be in. If we can make their lives more simple and more structured on a societal level then they have consistency and from which they are free to create.

What do you think is the goal or mission that drives your creative journey?

In order to be a creative I need to experience my life, be present to the people and places I am in and create out of that. The work is timeless coming form my relationship to myself in this moment, connected to something much greater than me, the creative inspiration. It is a constant leap into the unknown, to encounter the unexpected, a constant questioning of what I thought I was or was educated to believe and now I feel it differently , a constant change within, transforming how I see without. An ever evolving mystical alchemy between my body and this world. A sense that the world is moving through me and expressing in a way that only I can express it. This is what being a creative feels like to me.

So I wonder what it would look like if we had a nature-centred world and not a human-centred world. So that all that we did had the awareness that first and foremost we’re in service to the more than human world.

I’ve often felt quite agitated with us as the human race when we speak of enlightenment, that somehow it’s something that channels through only the human world forgetting to consider there is no existence without the natural world.

I have a dream that if we, for the next few years, decades work with the cultural body of the international artist in relation to the more nature-centred and more than human existence, a deeper more complex artistic community will emerge and will create stories that will deepen our experience of what it is to be in service to our planet right now. In all of the artists I work with, the profound healing that happens initially is more rich and empowering when that artist gains their sense of self from building a relationship with the natural world.

I know for me, ever since I started Organic Intelligence®, I’ve done two daily walks, whether by the ocean or in a forest. And it has been that, that has in many ways, enriched and deepened my relationship with the here and now. The only way to the here and now has been through building my relationship to the natural world.

As someone who grew up in Ireland, grew up by this very ocean in West Cork, I spent days in a relationship with the more than human world, the natural world. And that’s where my imagination flourished.

So I would love, even if we could start a movement called #CreativeCare #NatureCenteredWorld for all artists across the world, in particular for countries where there has been a lot of oppression and colonisation. Our ancestors have gone to the woods, gone to the water to heal. So instead of a human going to the human world, we’ve gone to heal, to the oceans, to the forests. And then that’s brought us back together to sing together, to tell stories together.

A lot of what I’m speaking now is deeply been re-inspired by Easkey Brittany’s book “Ebb and Flow” where she speaks about this nature-centred world, the blue care of the ocean, the green care of the forest.

So just as contemplation for you moving forward, what would it be like to allow the natural world to be your healer, your inspiration for your art, for your person? And that the very thing that is on fire right now across the world or weeping through storms and rain, that very thing is the thing that has the response and answer to all of what is uncomfortable in our lives. And that only after building that relationship can we then start to include one another, have the space to include each other’s differences.

I’ve seen within International Resiliency circles topics of gender identity and cultural identity being really beautifully explored in a diverse group of peoples, when those people have the space to hold each other’s differences. So the space to hold each other’s differences, for me, is found in the natural world. Consciousness, in many ways, is painted in front of us, moves in front of us in real time when we watch the ocean or the forest.
So I’d like to create a movement called #CreativeCare. How can we bring the holy trinity of the creative mind back into existence through honouring the poet, the dancer, the artist in us all ?

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.helenawalshempowermentstudios.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/helenawalshcoaching/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/HelenaWalshVoice
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/helena-walsh-2559661b
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/Helenavoicebody
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@helenawalshcoaching
• Other: www.tiktok.com/@hwempowerment

Image Credits
Laine Alcantara