One of my favorite paintings hangs over my altar. I bought it in my early thirties after seeing it displayed in a local shop. It seemed like the woman was following me, tapping me on the shoulder, begging me to take her home with me!

The image portrays a woman in the midst of a wide, colorful arc of a dance. Her skirts billow and swirl; light radiates from her body into the sky. Her arms are lifted in an open-hearted gesture. I can’t find the image online or I would share it with you here.

I was originally drawn to it because of the explosion of bright light and colors. At first, that was all that I focused on. But as my own journey unfolded, I began to notice that there is also darkness in this painting. I could see that the woman is rising up out of many layers of darkness at the bottom of the image. She is surrounded by dark blue shadows; her hair is awash with darkness. Since noticing this, I have to admit that if the picture was full of bright colors only, I wouldn't be so attracted to it.

It is the darker colors that give the more vibrant colors their beauty.

Isn’t this also true of our lives? As I look back on my journey, I see myself meandering in and out of murky pathways. It becomes apparent that I have spent as much time off the bright side of the road as I have spent on it. I see several detours into darkness: several years of living codependently with an alcoholic, a decade fraught with the difficulty of raising stepchildren, two bouts with cancer, letting go of beloved pets, and my parents’ deaths.

Yet my journey is my journey. The brighter parts of it are made more beautiful because they contrast so deeply with the times that I have spent wandering in the shadows.

Make a list of times in your life when you retreated into the unbalanced parts of yourself, intentionally or not.

Review the times in your life when you walked fully on the bright side of your path.

Can you accept all of these times as part and parcel of your own wonderful journey? If not, can you at least make a commitment to begin to accept them?

Make a SoulCollage® card that includes a blending of light and shadow. Or create a card to honor the more unbalanced parts of your life’s journey. Then make a card to honor the brighter parts.

Do a reading with your whole deck where you randomly draw three of your cards and let them answer this question: “Who has wisdom for me about how the shadows of my life’s journey have added beauty to my life?” Feel free to reword this question in a way that feels perfect for you.

Anne Marie Bennett is a SoulCollage® Facilitator / Trainer, published author, website goddess, and two-time cancer survivor who was mentored directly by Seena Frost. In 2005, she fell in love with SoulCollage® and was inspired to use her professional experience along with web technology as a means to serve the world by putting SoulCollage® "out there" in a really big way with KaleidoSoul. Anne Marie lives in eastern Massachusetts with her middle-aged husband, one adolescent feline, and a treasury of birds, squirrels and chipmunks who keep them hopping. Her other books about SoulCollage® are available here.

Let's create a shrine to honor Seena Frost (or whomever or whatever you would like to honor), using just a large kitchen matchbox and other materials you already have. Kat will walk us through the steps, and by the end of the session, you will have a one-of-a-kind shrine that will be happy to sit on your altar or could be given as a gift.

What to bring: Collage papers such as scrapbook, text, sheet music, magazine pictures, etc., thin cardboard to support an image, Glue stick, Other strong white glue such as Mod Podge, Fabri-Fix, or Tacky Glue ( if you want to attach items that need a little more oomph), Paper towels, Baby wipes (optional), Any items to add, such as beads, charms, stickers, or other ephemera that relates to the subject of your shrine

Date: Thursday, July 22, 2021

Time: 2 pm Eastern

FR*EE for our KaleidoSoul Kindred Spirit members.

Visit this page for more info now.

“Let’s have a go at Tree Pose,” says my yoga teacher Sara as she guides her class into the pose. As we take the weight onto one leg, turn the other leg outwards with toes pointing towards the floor, then consider placing the second leg either below or above the knee of the standing leg, Sara adds helpfully, “Remember: there are good balance days, and bad balance days. Let’s just give it a go.” There are indeed good and bad balance days! And until you move into the pose, you don’t know which kind of day it is. I may be feeling calm, happy and at peace with the world, yet as I take my foot off the ground, I sense suddenly how challenging this is – a “bad balance day”! I may be fragmented, stressed, frazzled even, yet just as I lift my foot, I enter a moment of inner calm that I wasn’t expecting.

Body-based practices offer wonderful opportunities to experience life’s paradoxes. As trying out Tree Pose shows, balance is dynamic and unpredictable – a process rather than a state of being. As Albert Einstein said, “Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance you must keep moving.”

The Chinese Yin Yang symbol, thousands of years old, communicates with deep wisdom the subtle process of finding our balance. There are no straight lines in the symbol. The central division between black and white is a ripple; there is white within black and black within white; the whole symbol is held within an all-embracing circle:

As part of my SoulCollage® kit, I have a big print-out of the Yin Yang symbol. Sometimes it helps me to engage with the symbol before consulting my cards. And as with Tree Pose, often the smallest micro-adjustment can help us in our balance-seeking journey. The curvaceousness of the Yin Yang symbol can be nurturing and supportive, reminding me of the difference between thinking about balance, and balancing:

One of the precious gifts of SoulCollage® is that it enables us to connect with balancing as a live and ever-changing process. It can also be supportive and self-nurturing to create at least one card to remind you of the importance of balancing in your life. If you don’t yet have such a card in your deck, here are three suggestions to tantalize your creativity:

- Print out a copy of the Yin Yang symbol - as big as your printer will allow. Then with the Yin Yang in front of you, close your eyes, take a few deep breaths, open your eyes and immerse yourself in the symbol as fully as you can. Move your eyes slowly over its curves. Run your eyes from the black side to the white side and back again, several times. Trace your finger down the central curve and round the outer circle. Imagine the central curve as a slide in a children’s’ playground. Get on the slide! Then move into making a Balancing SoulCollage® card.

Read the poem softly to yourself, several times. Then move into card-making.

I wish you a wonderful time engaging with balance through SoulCollage®!

Linda Woolfson, MA, PhD is a SoulCollage® Facilitator and Trainer, writer, translator and creativity catalyst. Of South African origin, she usually enjoys living a dual-based life between the United Kingdom and Portugal, running SoulCollage® and creativity workshops, SoulCollage® Trainings, and retreats in both countries. For the duration of the pandemic, she is in the UK, where she is exploring the intriguing experience of dwelling in one place for more than a few months at a time. She trained with Seena Frost as a Facilitator in 2010 and has been delving with enthusiasm into the depths of SoulCollage® and introducing others to this empowering process ever since. To find out more about Linda’s workshops, SoulCollage® Facilitator Trainings and retreats visit Collage Your Life.

All of our Magical Inner Journeys (MP3 guided imagery recordings) were created by Anne Marie Bennett with your SoulCollage® journey in mind. There are inner journeys regarding each of the four suits (Volumes 1-4), plus miscellaneous topics (Volumes 5-7).

ALL of them are designed to inspire SoulCollage® card making and journaling.

FACILITATORS: You can use these in your workshops. You can build a whole workshop around just one of these Magical Inner Journeys. Anne Marie has done that with many of these, and you can too! Check them out and see which ones resonate with you most!

NOT A FACILITATOR? Use these to deepen and expand your own inner work with and beyond SoulCollage®.

Active Balance

Committee Suit

Kas

Pennsylvania

August: Home

September: Trust

KaleidoSoul - Spinning the fragments of your world into wholeness and beauty through SoulCollage®.

SoulCollage.com - The official website of SoulCollage® Inc.