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Stories Within is a deeply engaging creative process that weaves a love of books, story and the expressive arts.
By blending the power of art and story, we can travel alongside those tales and adventures already written, explore unfamiliar terrain, and learn the language of the soul. We can pick up breadcrumbs along the way that illuminate connections to our own life story. And when portals and doorways to sense- and meaning-making appear, we can seize the opportunity to create possibilities for transformation, healing and re-storying to occur.
“There can be a perverse pleasure, as well as a sense of rightness and beauty, in insisting on flowering just when the world expects you to become quiet and diminish.” ~ Sharon Blackie.
From the inside jackett: For any woman over fifty who has ever asked, ‘What now? Who do I want to be?‘ comes a life-changing new book showing how your second half may be your most dynamic yet. Rich with the combination of myth, landscape, and ecofeminism that took her earlier work If Women Rose Rooted to cult status, Hagitude reclaims the mid years as a liberating, alchemical moment – from which to shift into your chosen, authentic and fulfilling future.
Dear Reader, I invite you to join me on this highly anticipated journey of re-storying the second half of our lives. ‘Hagitude’ is the book I wish I’d had to read.
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Please note that although the books and content discussed can be an opportunity for deep inner work, this is not therapy. Rather, it’s a supportive environment that offers space for participants to listen, create, and witness to others. It is the responsibility of each participant to seek out therapy should the readings or discussion bring up unresolved issues.
We enter into a story through the door of inner hearing. If a story is seed, then we are its soil.
Just hearing the story allows us to experience it as though we ourselves were the heroine who either falters or wins out in the end.
If we hear a story about a wolf, then afterward we rove about and know like a wolf for a time.
If we hear a story about a dove finding her young at last, then for a time after, something moves behind our own feathered breasts.
If it be a story of wresting the sacred pearl from beneath the claw of the ninth dragon, we feel exhausted afterward, and satisfied.
In a very real way, we are imprinted with knowing just by listening to the tale."
~ Dr. Clarissa Pinkoka Estes
Since the beginning of time, story-telling has been a way to teach, learn, and transform self and others by way of the lessons and wisdom gained through personal experience and the world around us.
“I firmly believe that story is our primary inspiration – an ancient, much-neglected tool which helps us conjure up sharply hones images of who exactly it is that we might want to become if we are lucky enough to grow old. Because stories are spells; they change things. When they hook us and reel us into their magic, they change us. It’s stories that will save us, in the end. Not just the stories we read or tell, or the stories we want to be in, but the ones that live inside us and the ones we live inside. The stories we invite in; those that we choose to inhabit.” ~ Sharon Blackie, Hagitude
I invite you to step IN to story…
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I look forward to meeting you!