SHADOW MAPPING™

Shadow Mapping is a somatic exercise designed to expand you by dropping into your deepest places while lifting you into your most expressive.

An excavation and a scaffolding is being built at the same time. This is the creative channel in practice. 

EXCAVATING THE CHANNEL 

This practice begins by dropping into the body to create a foundation of trust and deep listening.

We observe what’s already living in the body: aggression, grief, exhaustion, unworthiness, boredom. Instead of turning away, we give it shape, a color, a texture, and presence.

Once we’ve created a sense of safety in the body, we go deeper, bringing in more hypnotic imagination to find the shadow parts hidden in the psyche, using the body as the container.

MEETING THE MATERIALS

We bring them up to the surface and out of our body onto the paper in front of us, using the circle as a reliable architecture that changed as our emotions change. This activates mental integration along with a physical integration. 

We move outward from the body with our arm, moving the eyes across the page and creating soothing circular motions. We move the nervous system to integrate what we observed as well as experiencing them through the materials. And in seeing this out on paper, it begins to lighten.

This is where the inner life becomes the creative life.

SESSIONS BUILDING MOMENTUM

1 · Trusting Gravity

Building trust in the body to create a foundation for the practice.

2 · The Gutter

Finding your shadow and giving it a voice for integration.

3 · Whole Body

Introducing full bilateral movement to open the intuitive and creative channel.

4 · Color Streams

Color enters and gives alternative language to the hidden parts.

5 · Island Hopping

Mapping when there are different parts of yourself or other people in the room.

6 · The Vista

Integrating this practice into daily life and into the future.

CYCLE 

Each session follows the same arc: questions to meet you where you are, a guided meditation to drop you into the body, somatic mark-making to bring what you found to the surface, reflection to close the loop, and body homework to integrate what moved. Every session invokes and soothes. You go down and you come back up.

PRACTICE

Running underneath every session is a five-layer methodology: observing, feeling, making, moving, and playing. The bilateral mark-making, rhythmic, left-right, body-led, works in the same register as EMDR, using the body’s own intelligence to process and integrate what talk alone can’t reach.

Space is created in the internal experience as the practice emerges onto the paper. Emotions and sensations move through the body across the full arc of the session. Safety and wholeness completes the cycle as our nervous system integrates and returns to the body.

As we heal these blocks we gain more energy and confidence to show up in our lives by developing the intuitive, the imaginative, and the creative channel.

DEEP MEDICINE

Your quickest path to liberation is falling in love with your dark places. The discomfort is where your magic lives. If you can begin to see that point of tension as a portal, a way into your soul, a way into your purpose, then you begin to get curious instead of coming at it with debilitating fear. You are excavating gold.

YOU

This is for anyone who wants to deepen and expand their creative practice. 

For stuck or blocked artists. For dysregulated nervous systems, or those who are fearful of going in alone. For anyone who has gone into therapy but never been able to fully integrate what they found there. For anyone who wants to go deep into their well in order to fully self express, and become the alive human being inhabiting their body, their creativity, and their self expression. For anyone seeking transformation, to be fully seen, and to awaken the parts of themselves they have hidden from themselves and from others.

YOUR GUIDE

I am Kirstin Mitchell, a multidisciplinary artist with a formal practice spanning thirty years across performance, installation, and painting. My work has been shown nationally and internationally with recognition from Franklin Furnace, Art in America, Art Papers, and Flash Art, as well as exhibitions and collections in the United States, the Americas, and Europe.

Parallel to the art practice, my Buddhist practice, also spanning close to thirty years, including Vipassana, has been an essential teaching of how to hold space in the body. It taught me how to sit with the nature of suffering and how to remain present within that internal landscape as things began to move.

In my early performance art years I embodied female shadow archetypes using an audience, forward-facing process of vulnerability and confrontation as a vehicle for embodied self-awareness. I was entering the shadow as a medium with 200 people in the room watching, using my body as the instrument of excavation. For years I hid in the mountains with my dog while my practice became private and essential. I was no longer performing the shadow for an audience, but living with it, sitting with it, learning what it needed when no one was watching.

I started teaching classes in Tulum and all of these women’s shadows were coming up asking for relief. What they wanted was to be seen. And from that experience Shadow Mapping channeled into the room as an accessible practice for playing with this pathway.

A CONVERSATION ON SHADOW MAPPING

Kiki speaks about fear, conflict, and what it means to go into the body on the Anxiety Recovery podcast with Valerie.

Listen