How often have we found ourselves in a foreign skin, disconnected from ourselves through accommodation, duty, habit or fear? How do we find our way back inside our natural skin?

In this retreat, we will follow the story of the Selkie, a seal woman whose seven-year pact with the human world has left her diminished, depleted and untethered from her true home… until she can find her way back! We have all accommodated to the structures of the patriarchal cyber/industrial world, and long to reconnect with what is lost, disavowed or hiding within ourselves.

In our 15th year of offering this retreat we will gather as a community of women to explore this story through the messages of our dreams, our bodies, our meditations, the creative arts, and the natural world around us. Diving into this wellspring, we will work to reawaken, nourish and reclaim our vibrant, authentic embodied selves.

A BodySoul Community Workshop for Women

Inspired by the original Marion Woodman Foundation Mission Statement: To continue the tradition of BodySoul Rhythms® work, as developed by Marion Woodman, Mary Hamilton, and Ann Skinner through trained teams. The BodySoul Rhythms® work has a strong base in C.G. Jung, and supports the individual’s process of working towards consciousness, and the contained group process of descending into the unconscious and the body.  The BodySoul Rhythms® work holds that psyche and soma are inseparable, and must be worked on together to come to consciousness—to the positive feminine in our bodies and the positive masculine in our creative pursuits.

A Workshop for Women

In these deeply polarized times, we feel the wounds of the body politic, the body of the earth, and our own bodies, all at once. It is ever more important that we come together as women, allow all these wounds to breathe, and, finding their beauty as well as their pain, let them germinate into something entirely new, born to us and to our communities.

Every year our workshop Reclaiming our Lives, Reclaiming our Earth, works with a myth or fairy tale because tapping into archetypal wisdom deepens our understanding of ourselves and our world. This year we will be examining the Norwegian tale Prince Lindworm, the tale of the queen who gives birth to boy twins, one human and one a serpent. She conveniently puts the birth of the serpent twin out of her mind and when he comes of age he challenges her entire kingdom to examine its “forgetfulness.” The results are dramatic and transformative.

Join us at the Menla Retreat Center in Phoenicia, NY (http://www.menla.us), April 3-8, where through body work,  dreamwork, meditation, and the expressive arts we will investigate what remains hidden in our unconscious and bring it to light, in the warm embrace of our women’s circle.