‘You who let yourself feel…’ -Exploring SoulCollage as a human way of ‘roosting’.
You who let yourselves feel: enter the breathing
that is more than your own.
Being a human walking on the earth means getting knocked off centre by people, places, and events. These disruptions often point us back to a core wound we’ve built an entire survival strategy around avoiding. If we let them, they reveal the habitual pathways taken by our personality.
Enneagram teacher Tom Condon describes our patterns as strategies that once worked but become overused and rigid. When they stop working, we sense the life around us widening and we feel the pull to grow. Recognising these patterned responses is a form of waking up: the moment you see how you keep yourself small, something in you starts to loosen.
Let it brush your cheeks
as it divides and rejoins behind you.
While extolling the enneagram as a ‘superb diagnistic tool’, Condon also sees that this tool
‘ lacks much in the way of method for getting over the dilemmas it describes. The Enneagram offers deep diagnosis, and lots of content to identify with, but it’s not a method, properly speaking. This is why just knowing about your Enneagram style is often not enough’.1
When you find ways to soften these patterns, and to see new possibilities, your life experience can open up. This piece is about sharing one of the ways that I have found to shine more light on my patterns and to open more into life, presence, community and creative practice – and about the trusting the world as a collaborator.
SoulCollage® is a powerful modality for hearing from known parts of yourself, and for reclaiming lost parts of you – a kind of soul retrieval through your own creativity. It’s a deceptively simple and highly accessible process of cutting and pasting images onto card.
The intuitive step of asking an image to choose you can be a very powerful one – a kind of trusting that the universe might have something new to say to you in any given moment. It’s a little intoxicating especially if youre stuck in a mood, a thought spiral, or an inner story! This modality, and indeed this post, is not only about seeing these layers of habitual patterning, but rather standing at a threshold where more of your life force can arrive and be integrated. How a creative practice can take you more fully into your life so you can join in with its movements.
I drew cards from my deck to share as part of this piece, to share a little of the worlds they can open up, and I also invited the poet Rilke to accompany us. The cards and his words are guests punctuating and re-sourcing this writing.
Blessed ones, whole ones,
you are where the heart begins.
Openings are to be found in each time you become present to the world around you and notice what it is asking you or telling you. This is opening to the part of you that is awake, and creative. If you allow the world to become animate and alive, then it is communicating with you all the time.
Look at the community of humans you have around you. What are they showing you about how to live? How are they your teachers?
Look at the place you have made your home. What is it showing you about life? How are you part of its unfolding story?
You are the bow that shoots the arrows
and you are the target.
A card from my deck: This image represents John. (It is not actual John) My friend and co-worker John was an immense character. Full of love of life. Lived from his gut and fiercely protective of those he loved. Husband to one of my closest friends and a kind of second dad to me. He died of prostate cancer three years ago, and I often feel his presence around me. Honouring him in my deck I get to hear from him whenever I imagine into his voice.
Fear not the pain. Let its weight fall back
into the earth;
For heavy are the mountains, heavy the seas.
Going on an inner journey with SoulCollage® as your companion can be profound. These next two cards are about a strange time where I struggled with something I did not fully understand. It had to do with becoming more involved in my own life, and the resistance I felt to it.
As I cut the images and assembled this card, I entangled the puma and the snake and I felt a visceral sense of being constricted in my throat. The first card is about the struggle – where the puma observed by the dispassionate sheep, is being devoured in a parched landscape by the strangulation of the snake. The second is the answer to the question - he thought himself destroyed but what happened to the Puma afterwards? The answer is he found himself reconstituted in a new landscape. This new landscape has flowing water, and both fish, and human signs of life. But in a SoulCollage® journey, the description I am offering is not where the real vitality is.
This comes when you allow your card to speak in their own words. To sing their own songs. This is not analysis from the outside – it’s more a kind of being gently with your own becoming and listening to allow more of life in.
The trees you planted in childhood have grown
too heavy. You cannot bring them along.
Each card you make is a piece of the universe that is meaningful to you, and offering itself as a portal. Seena Frost, the incredible teacher who brought SoulCollage® into the world described this journeying with imagery like this:
‘Collage is a metaphor for any discovering, gathering and reweaving of energy bits already formed and present in the universe. A new and personal creation can be made from the ever-present divine chaos of images all around us. Just choose, assemble, name and then inhabit your SoulCollage® cards’2
Owning the depth of your connections to aspects of the world by noticing what is happening in your three centres when you encounter imagery is a wonderful way that your enneagram journey can meet this collaging journey. Your contact with your humaning is the throughline; the embodied lightening rod and meaning maker. From here you can meet and correspond with your community, your inner parts (committee), archetypal energies (council) , spirit animals (companions) , and more
I was moved when this second card in my community suit arrived. I found this image when I was going through old magazines donated to me, and its resemblance to my mum when I was a child was striking. This is a card that speaks in a gentle and restorative way to my heart and to the child inside of me. It’s too much to try to talk about. But to hear from the image itself, is something different. Then I can just listen to her voice speaking to me as her child. This card supports me as my mother grows older and we find into new ways of sharing our human journeys together.
Give yourselves to the air, to what you cannot hold.3
Not being an artist in an accomplished or experienced sense, is actually key to this journeying. If you are an artist already, you can have the pleasure of a deep freedom in laying that identity at the door when you arrive for a SoulCollage® session. The making itself is incredibly simple. You can come to a SoulCollage® gathering, and allow the images that want to be collaged by you to choose you.
As you can see by my examples, it’s not a complex thing – a foreground image and a background image are all that is needed, although you might sometimes use more. Cut and paste them onto a card that’s just a little bigger than your hand. This means that you can regard it almost like looking into a hand mirror. And then, an aspect of soul is reflected back to you.
I want to beg you, as much as I can…to be patient towards all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue.
This is a card in my council suit that I made when I was exploring the major arcana of the tarot with a wonderful SoulCollage® facilitator called Stephanie Anderson Ladd4. It is my card for the hierophant. Not a typical image for this archetype, but one I love as it offers a feminine aspect. A wise old woman hierophant. One who acts as a bridge between the divine and the human. Someone who initiates others into spiritual mysteries.
This image of this woman’s lined kind wise old face helps me to embrace my own aging, and what I am losing in youth but gaining in understanding and capacity to meet with more and more of life with an open heart. This hierophant invites me into an embodied spirituality full of human connection and celebration of what it is to be alive and walking a human life on the earth. She also inspires me to stay with the trouble. With the mess.
Hierophants and their signposts are all around us if we allow them to be. In a way the whole of the world is offering itself to your imagination as a portal into mystery. You just get to choose where to look! That’s a perspective poet Mary Oliver offers us, in her beautiful poem, Wild Geese5. Who are the trees? The rocks? The birds flying through? Might they all be messengers, and what if for a while, we allow them to be? Messengers with different kinds of voices to listen to. Mary Olive and Rilke are for me poets that both offer these thresholds into the wonder in nature.
Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be give to you because you would not be able to live them.
If a person or a place or a thing is troubling you, then making their card is also an option. Not all cards need be intuitive. Sometimes you will know exactly what you need to look at.
Seventeen and very full of my freedom, I was driving my beloved Triumph Dolomite to college when a man on his first day at a new job as a sales rep drove his brand new company car into the back of me at traffic lights and wrote it off.
Making this card of this car acknowledged how full of life being lifey (as my friend Kristin would say) that moment was, that came out of nowhere. No one was hurt, there were just two very disappointed humans literally bumping into each other one day. My Collage is a way of allowing for this thing that doesn’t make sense but still happened. This card is a kind of wheel of fortune card.
And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now.6
Joining the things that don’t make sense, with the things that do, makes for a rich life, full of all the mess and wonder that being human has to offer. A SoulCollage® deck is big enough to contain the all of it. The sense and the nonsense. The pain and the wonder. The ordinary and the sublime.
If you’re enjoying this post, you might like to consider becoming a free or paid subscriber on my Substack. Subscribe to receive posts every 1-2 and to join a community of those dedicated to playing a creative part in the unfolding human story. These posts explore nature, archetypal patterns, and the enneagram wisdom teachings through the lens of intuitive creativity.
Over the course of this piece I’ve shared from different suits in my SoulCollage® deck. We move in and out of different layers of experience and cross different thresholds between them all the time. When I shared the two puma cards, I felt as though I was charting a movement from the archetypal into the actual. That wrestling with the struggle to become a human had turned into a more alive kind of humaning in the world. My second puma feels integrated and a part of my capacity to walk on the earth.
Roosting is a metaphor for what I believe we do as humans when we gather together in a creative circle. It’s a bit like wintering, in that connects us into a rhythm of rest and restoration that our beings can really benefit from. This next card connects me to a deep sense of peace that I know when I’m in the presence of snow covered trees. I’m inviting you to find into something that offers you that sense of deep calm spaciousness, along with a sense of being accompanied there. Roosting is like this.
We gather and make our SoulCollage® cards in community and these new other energies our souls call forth,, for their wisdom and company on the journey, can join us. It is both regulating and reassuring. When birds roost, they lower their metabolism, rebuild energy reserves, process and digest food, and they maintain their feathers. When we SoulCollage® together, we co-regulate in shared creative play and deep mutual respect, we find new resources, we make sense of things in new ways, and we celebrate being human. I’m so happy to be sharing this with you each time we SoulCollage together at The Soul Shed: SoulCollage® is a forest we enter into and find a place to roost together.
Raise no monument. For it is the roses
Which salute Him year by year with their petals.
It is time to find these openings. Where are your portals? Is there a place you can go in nature to find your own? In Rilke’s spirit - need we build churches when we are offered these kinds of windows into wonder?!
Each time we gather in this spirit, more is shown to us.
This, you see, is Orpheus. His transformations
runs through this and through that. No need
to trouble ourselves with other names. All signs and tokens
are Orpheus, if they sing.7
I look forward to the next time we gather and make our SoulCollages and listen to their songs. Thank you, Rilke. Thank you, Mary Oliver. Thankyou Seena. Thank you, Nature.
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References
This post was first published on Substack @TheSoulShed
1
Tom Condon Enneagram Monthly interview
Frost, Seena. SoulCollage Evolving Handford Mead Press. 2010
Rilke Sonnets to Orpheus. Book 1. sonnet 4 Translation by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy
Stephanie Anderson Ladd is a facilitator of SoulCollage® and author of ‘Goddesses of Self-Care’: 30 Divine Feminine Archetypes to guide you. pub 2022. Check out her work here and her writing here on substack
Oliver, Mary. Wild Geese. Bloodaxe Books.2004
Rilke. ‘Letters to a young poet’. translation by Norton. 1934
Rilke Sonnets to Orpheus Book One. sonnet 5. Translation by Robert Temple