On August 29, 2025, the Poltava Polytechnic Centre for Contemporary Art hosted the art therapy event “Sounds of Nature”, aimed at helping participants restore inner peace, find grounding, and strengthen their connection with the surrounding world through the conscious perception of natural sounds. For people who have experienced trauma and often live in a state of hypervigilance, working with sound in a safe environment is a powerful tool for normalising the nervous system and returning to inner balance.
Olena Ostrohliad, Senior Lecturer at the Department of Fine Arts, and Maryna Teslenko, Associate Professor at the Department of Psychology and Pedagogy of Poltava Polytechnic, moderated the event.
The “Sounds of Nature” art therapy was based on the psychological concept that sound is not only a source of information but also a powerful channel for expressing emotions and restoring inner harmony. Unlike visual images, which can evoke painful memories in trauma survivors, working with sound allows emotions to be processed at a deeper, intuitive level.
For this session, Olena Ostrohliad and Maryna Teslenko carefully selected the soundscape: the rustling of a beech forest, the singing of birds, and the buzzing of bumblebees. These natural sounds are associated with calm, the peaceful flow of life, and the natural cycle beyond human conflict. Perceiving them in a safe environment helps reduce anxiety and hypervigilance, shifting the focus from potential threats to calming and stable phenomena. Participants worked with paper and various art materials, allowing them to freely express emotions, associations, and feelings evoked by the sounds, transforming invisible sound waves into visual images – from abstract forms to concrete objects.
The event was structured into three key stages, each with deep psychological significance. During the immersion and listening stage, participants took comfortable positions, closed their eyes, and focused entirely on auditory sensations, including the rustling of leaves, bird songs, and the buzzing of insects. This phase facilitated deep grounding, allowing participants to dismiss intrusive thoughts and accept sounds as they were, eliciting free associations and feelings. For individuals with traumatic experiences, this is critically important for reshaping the perception of sound from a potential trigger to a source of calm. After the listening session, the stage of visualising associations followed, during which each participant had to reflect on their associations with these sounds on paper. This was individual work, during which participants translated their internal auditory experiences into visual images, shapes, and colours. This stage allowed for non-verbal expression of emotions that are often difficult to verbalise. Colour, shape, and line became a language for describing inner feelings, promoting their awareness and processing.
In the final stage, mutual integration, participants viewed each other's works and had the opportunity to add their own elements to others' works, according to their own opinions. This created a space for interaction, empathy, and collective creativity, symbolising how people can complement and enrich one another's lives. The act of trust, when a participant allows another to make changes to their work, is a crucial step in restoring confidence in others and the world – a key aspect of the healing process from trauma.
After completing the work, everyone gathered for a discussion. Each person had the opportunity to share their impressions of the process and describe what they felt when adding elements to others' works. This was an emotional experience, with many expressing gratitude for others' contributions, which strengthened the sense of community and interaction.
The “Sounds of Nature” art therapy session proved highly effective in providing psychological support to the participants. It enabled symbolic processing of sound triggers, facilitating the restoration of a sense of safety through conscious listening to nature, deep grounding, and inner peace – crucial for individuals who have experienced trauma. Strengthening a sense of community and interaction, restoring trust in others and the world, and creating a visual reminder of peaceful sounds and inner calm were the key outcomes of this session.
The event was held as part of the international, large-scale EU-funded Erasmus+ KA220-ADU project “TRUST” – Trauma of refugees in Europe: An approach through art therapy as a solidarity program for Ukraine war victims (Grant No. 2024-BE01-KA220-ADU-000257527).
The project title is decoded as follows:
TRUST
T – Trauma
R – Refugees
U – Ukraine
S – Solidarity
T – Therapy
The project is co-funded by the EU and led by the Centre Neuro Psychiatrique St-Martin from Belgium, in partnership with the National University “Yuri Kondratyuk Poltava Polytechnic” (Ukraine), Greek Carers Network EPIONI (Greece), Fondazione Don Luigi Di Liegro (Italy), Lekama Foundation (Luxembourg), EuroPlural Project (Portugal).
We express our sincere gratitude to our partners for their invaluable support, which makes it possible to implement such vitally important initiatives that bring the light of hope and healing to those who need it most.
It is worth noting that Poltava Polytechnic lecturers are eligible to participate in academic mobility and internship programs. Students can study abroad through Erasmus+ credit academic mobility grant programs for a semester or a full academic year at leading universities in Austria, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Germany, Greenland, Latvia, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Spain, and the Czech Republic.
For more detailed information regarding current internship, teaching, and academic mobility programs abroad, please get in touch with the International Relations Department (office 213-C, interoffice@nupp.edu.ua) or the International Relations Coordinator of the National University “Yuri Kondratyuk Poltava Polytechnic” – Ph.D. in Philology, Associate Professor of the Department of Germanic Philology and Translation, Anna Pavelieva (email: kunsite.zi@gmail.com, phone: +38-(095)-91-08-192).
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