20 November - Boundaries, coming back to myself

 We began by considering how we portray ourselves publicly versus privately and the expectations of others as to how we come across.  We tuned in to these Soul Card images in terms of the energies of others crowding us, what we send out to others and how we might feel when we are centred.

We explored the idea of coming back to ourselves and what that meant. Responses were varied but shared common themes of finding the true self, valuing time, our connections and being kind to ourselves.

We created a word cloud around the theme and it was interesting to see where the words fell and in particular the colour which could be liked to a warning colour or one of joy that appears in flowers. Yellow is also thought to be the colour of friendship.

We practised a visualisation that restored our own energy and we anchored that to recall when needed.  The poem enabled further exploration of the theme. whether in terms of self protection or going beyond boundaries.  To round off, I will share my own writing from the final segment:

When I create my own protected space

I feel that I am somehow valiant

in a war of boundary breaking.

I am quiet, I calm and ground.

When I let go of thoughts of others

there is more space for me to breathe.

My breathing slows, my belly softens.

I am quiet, I calm and ground.

When I do, the storm calms

and maybe the clouds in others also recede.

What if we were all to calm?

Perhaps the earth itself could breathe....

9 October - Perseverance

 This theme naturally touched on how we had all needed to persevere and keep on keeping on during the pandemic.  The gestures we made in the intros helped to embody the word that would accompany participants during the workshop.

We used some oracle cards to start us off and it was interesting to hear the responses elicited from the colours and interactions in the images. We then co-created a word cloud of words and phrases around the theme which helped us to flesh out our ideas about and approaches to perseverance:

Everyone enjoyed the poem and found the subject of the poem to embody the theme of perseverance and which enabled ideas of new horizons, fragility and inner reserve to emerge. We developed this into an image that we could keep in mind to take us forward.  It was also useful to look back at phrases we had written, either our own or that we had heard.