SoulCollage® Facilitator!

I am officially a trained SoulCollage® facilitator as of March 1, 2020!  I would do the happy dance if it weren’t for my bunions.

I was deeply immersed in the SoulCollage® facilitator course I took in Bellingham for four days.  It was one of the most heart-opening experiences of my life.   I completed all of the prerequisites plus a lot of extra study and made more cards than I already had and I was well prepared.  I fully embraced this precious experience.  The trainer modeled everything she was teaching and we weren’t being lectured.  We were experiencing what we want to give others.  I was the only one in the class who had never been to a live workshop before this training.  All of my experience has been on-line and through written material.  That is because there aren’t any active facilitators in this area.  I wasn’t the only one who got emotional but I believe it happened to me more often than the others.  This is probably one of the reasons I will make a very good facilitator.

I have shared SoulCollage® making with only a very few people.  I found that what I shared with them is barely skimming the surface of the SoulCollage® experience.

More than half of us in our group, including the instructor, had recently lost dogs to age related illness and one person had a dog still in the process of transition.  This was another powerful space we all held for each other, particularly poignant for me since I’ve lost two dogs and a friend since November.   

One of our assignments was to create the blurb we plan to use on our flyers.  Thinking of all of you and how I might describe SoulCollage® to you motivates my next paragraph.

SoulCollage® is heart-opening dive into our inner essence and motivations.   In silence or with wordless music we create our card by first going to a table filled with images and choosing one.  Once we have cut the image out, we take it to another table filled with backgrounds.  When we have picked our background, we sit with the image and decide how we want it placed before gluing it down.  We trim our final image to 5 x 8 and glue it onto a card.  Once we have made our first card, we began using the “I Am One Who…” phrase to see how the card speaks to us.   Over time a person makes cards that fall into four suits; committee, community, companion, and council.  The committee suit represents parts of ourselves such as our inner critic, or our “Betty Crocker” neter, and maybe our shadow self.  The community suit represents people and creatures who are parts of our life such as our siblings, parents or pets.  The companion suit uses animals to relate to energies in our body. The council suit are archetypes which have motivational meaning for us, like angels, superman, or possibly even Scooby Do.  Once we’ve learned how to assemble a SoulCollage® card, we can make our own at home if we want.  A card making session doesn’t always end in a reading, but sessions devoted to readings never include card making. Nobody can read our card but us. This isn’t tarot or about predicting the future.  Readings often reveal our hidden understandings or motivations.  The cards we make, speak only to our experience and often surprise us with what they have to say.  While SoulCollage® is therapeutic, it is not therapy.   

I am reconstructing my plan of action but I still want to have a SoulCollage® exhibit at the Burley Hall so that I can get my feet wet.  It is not likely that I will start with more than one type of collage at this time considering this modality is so powerful and spreads out so far.  This will also give me time to ask my friends for old magazines and get my collection started.

It is my goal to hold one or two free workshops for local therapists.  I would then collect their business cards if they were agreeable, for my referral basket. 

You may be wondering where SoulCollage® is used and how it could benefit you.  It was created by Seena Frost a psychotherapist, for her own self expansion.   Therapists familiar with it find that it can save a lot of time in getting to the bottom of something because the cards that we make, connect us more deeply to our subconscious and can allow us to see hidden motivations.  It is being used in hospitals, schools, churches, prisons, to a name a few.  I personally have found it to be more powerfully healing than any of the 12 step programs I’ve tried, although that doesn’t mean it takes the place of a 12 step program.    I like to experience a reading when I need advice or simply can come up with an answer to something bugging me.

In closing, I want to say that the cards we create with magazines cannot be copied, traded, or bartered.  I can make copies for my personal back-up and that is all.  The only cards we can use in advertising are those we make with copyright free images.  I’ve been taking a lot of pictures, making my own copyright free images, so that I can create meaningful cards that I can use for my literature.