 
															- Ireland, Spain & Online
- mariaortegagarcia@gmail.com
Maria Ortega Garcia
Experience
My practice weaves together trauma-informed principles, poetry therapy, journaling, and narrative therapy to create spaces where words can become tools for healing and self-discovery, individually and in community.
As an educator and language teacher, I’ve spent years exploring how language shapes the way we think, feel, and connect. My background in the humanities (with a focus on languages and literature) and a master’s in scenic arts deepened my understanding of storytelling, expression, and the transformative power of creative process.
Alongside my academic work, my lifelong passion for expressive and autobiographical writing has given me an intimate, lived understanding of what it means to write from experience: to give form to what aches and find meaning through words.
I believe in the power of language to heal and transform, and I also recognise its shadow, how words can wound, silence, or hold us in place.
My purpose is to guide my clients toward the healing, generative side of language: where words soften pain, restore connection, and open space for new stories to emerge.
Qualifications
▻ Community-based mental health and psychosocial support in emergencies and displacement (30h) by IOM (2025).
▻ Diploma in trauma and mental health-informed schools and communities (Level 5 diploma, practitioner status) by TISUK (2024).
▻ Intercultural Awareness, HSE, Ireland (2022).
▻ Understanding trauma and supporting the needs of people fleeing war and/or persecution, webinar delivered by Jennifer Hayes, Department of Psychology, HSE, Ireland (2022).
▻ Poetry Therapy Practitioner by iaPoetry (2023).
▻ Transforming Business, Society and Self with u.Lab  (Online, MIT X, 2016)
▻ Diploma Teaching Spanish as a Foreign Language by Instituto Cervantes (2011)
▻ MA. in Scenery Arts by Universidad de Burgos. (2008)
▻ BA. in Humanities (Applied Languages) by Universidad de Burgos (2005).
Skills & Interests
I am co-founder of Lexquimia in Spain, where I design and facilitate poetry-therapy workshops, retreats and professional training in Spanish. I also provide individual therapeutic-writing sessions and group workshops in both English and Spanish, online and in the south-east of Ireland. In addition, I have self-published a multilingual poetry chapbook entitled “Wild Life”, an essay on language learning (Weaving Words: The alchemy of language), and an autobiographical expressive-writing book (El regreso de la cigüeña).
