Thank you for joining today in ritual as we deepened our intimacy with our own shadows, bringing home the next layer of our inner refugees so that another coping mask can fall away as we enter Autumn. Remember to seal the healing experience with your own ritual bath, cleansing shower, simple walk, or anything that helps you simultaneously nourish and welcome home another layer of you, your essential nature, consciously, and feel what was holding it hostage fall away... Here are the replays for your enjoyment (full session on the left, group view of the ritual reflections on the right). There is also a shorter, edited version of the class and meditation without anyone else's faces in it in the resource classroom. With love, Elizabeth

... Bring an item to represent your soul seed essence, and / or a small amount of epsom salt or body oils that you can bless and use later for a ritual bath. xo See you there!

"One does not become whole by remaining perfect, but by becoming complete." ~Carl Jung Much of the time when people speak of "overcoming" stress, trauma, or obstacles, they are referring to successfully managing a situation so that one can continue going about business as usual. But true overcoming is initiation. It requires entering the cave where unprocessed material has been stored in the psyche, with support (both physical and subtle), and metabolizing it fully, so that we no longer need to utilize our energy to chronically avoid that part of ourselves. This metabolization, when it occurs somatically, completely resets the entire foundation of our body and our identity, and it allows us to inhabit our lives in a radically new way. The work of becoming intimate with our shadow is the work of liberation, and like a flower in a garden pressed against the weeds, forward flourishing depends upon it. Have you been hacking at the weeds in your life (chopping the tops off but they keep growing back)? Or have you been avoiding them and allowing them to get overgrown? There is a third way: bravely sinking your hands into the soil and feeling your way along the shape of the roots, feeling the feelings that emerge in this act of intimacy, as you fully hold the bottom of the pattern in your hand, removing it from the soil with unhurried thoroughness. I created the Sanctuary as a space to support this process, with the tools of somatic integration, neuroplasticity, energy medicine, community stewardship, and support of natural forces (both seen and unseen) to shepherd the heroine's journey into that very cave in the psyche, and with guidance on how to harvest the treasure there. At each quarter in the year, we invite the Body & Soul Village to participate along with us in intimate ritual, and as we are in the depth of the cave right now, this upcoming ritual will be a deeply alchemical one. If you would like to join us on September 16th for a ritual session on intimacy with the shadow, please join us via the calendar page here next Wednesday morning.

I'll start this announcement with a quote from Joseph Campbell: "The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek."​ ​Adding a mythic quality to the work of inner integration can help to fortify the path when it gets bumpy, when old (or new) neuroses get loud, and when it's tempting to feel we are "stuck" in life, like we'll "never" arrive, or like we are somehow "broken." I tell myself and my clients often to expect this, because the unwinding and thawing of chronic patterns in the nervous system in order to become free, while a beautiful and powerful undertaking, threatens those parts of ourselves whose job it is to keep us intact, to protect not only our physical survival, but the survival of our identity, our "ego." The dissolution and re-calibration of the ego does feel like death. It activates the same biochemical processes that connect with our survival programs in the body, so this process is tender, a profound rite of passage that often goes unsupported in modern culture. I created the Sanctuary as a space to support this process, with the tools of somatic integration, neuroplasticity, energy medicine, community stewardship, and support of natural forces (both seen and unseen) to shepherd the heroine's journey into that very cave in the psyche, and with guidance on how to harvest the treasure there. At each quarter in the year, we invite the Body & Soul Village to participate along with us in intimate ritual, and as we are in the depth of the cave right now, this upcoming ritual will be a deeply alchemical one. If you would like to join us on September 16th for a ritual session on intimacy with the shadow, please join us via the calendar page here in the Body & Soul Village. Holding post in the sacred cave, Elizabeth ​Body & Soul Sanctuary -Website​ ​