SHADOW MAPPING™ - THE FULL COURSE
Session 1 - Trusting Gravity
Building trust in the body and in the art practice, to create the foundation. The first act of embodiment.
Session 2 - The Gutter
Finding your shadow and holding a big enough space for it to be observed. Here we work with texture and material as a way to meet what is heavy and give it a voice, a shape, and a movement.
Session 3 - Whole Body
Lifting off the floor and use bilateral movement to integrate what the body has been holding. This is where the body and the practice start working in flow.
Session 4- Colors & Streams
Learning which colors and materials want to meet which feelings, and letting that intelligence guide the work. Streams come in to soothe, to respond, to begin freeing up what the black was holding.
Session 5 - Island Hopping
Mapping when there is more than one shadow in the room - either different parts of yourself or other people's energy around you.
Session 6 - Somatic Sketchbook
Integrating this practice into daily life and into the future. Mark-making wth a portable, EMDR-adjacent practice that comes with you when the nervous system needs a reset.
The Session Arc
Each session begins with setting up an impromptu studio — with a list of materials from an art store or alternatively things already in your home.
Then opening questions — observes the day, the week, and what you’ve been holding. The series of prompts are designed to lead you into a particular session.
Each meditation is to return to the body and activate the part of the psyche you are playing with in the session. A combination of stillness, observation, and hypnotic imaginative work that helps excavate what’s being held In the body.
Then you move to the somatic mark-making., bringing what you found to the surface. Playing with it. Beginning to integrate it. Moving it from inside the body to the paper. We work with a circular shape — something familiar to return to — and let each particular feeling come out in its own way.
When the mapping is complete we sit with what came through. And use another series of questions to reflect and close the loop.
Followed by somatic homework — body and nervous system specific suggestions.
If you’re going to invoke the shadow you need to be able to soothe the container.
Each session builds on the last. It is a succession - excavation into scaffolding.
Deep into the body and back out through self-expression.
Inner to outer. The full circle.
The Course Inspires
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.
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.
We begin trusting the body and the ability to work through the difficult feelings, and understanding that these uncomfortable places are really unseen parts of ourselves.
Calling you home.
The Course Heals
The one who performed to earn love. The one whose parent told them: if people really knew you, they wouldn't show up. The one who has a volatile protective part that learned to fight because nobody else would.
The estranged child. The too-much one. The blocked artist. The over-amplified one. The practitioner who has given so much they've lost the thread back to themselves.
The one who is done with surface work and ready to go underneath it.
The Big Deep™ Studio