Once upon a time, at the castle…
Wednesday, May 4th, 2011
Last weekend I facilitated a workshop with one of my best friends, Mary Alice Arthur. We were hosted at Kasteel Nieuwenhoven and had a very pleasant, fine, inspiring time together with the participants. I’m copying here her blogpost… (she writes way better than I do!)
As is a tale, so is life. Not how long it is, but how good it is, is what matters. – Seneca
I’ve always wanted to spend time in a castle. We have so many romantic notions of high ramparts, soaring towers, maybe a moat and drawbridge. I’ve visited many of those kind of castles and realised that our romantic ideas are not what it might have been like to live life there. This was something quite different.
Kasteel Nieuwenhoven, about an hour north of Brussels, began its life as a Benedictine Abbey more than 1,000 years ago. At some point it was acquired by a noble family who lived there until very recently, when, like many families, it found that the children had left home and nobody wanted to care for the place. It was then that a group wanting to become an intentional sustainable community bought it, and is slowly but surely transforming it into its next life stage.
It has always taken a large group of people to run a place of this size, so on one level, nothing has changed. But now the focus on the inner work of the spirit and the housing of family has combined into something that speaks to our time. A deep sense of stillness and spaciousness for inner work envelops you there, but also the sense of family and of life, enhanced by the way Spring is showing itself on the land in the form of newborn animals and millions of dandelion seeds, ready to take to the air and find a new home. It was the ideal place to talk about transforming our life stories and stepping with courage into the challenge of the crossroads.
The dandelion became our collective symbol over the weekend, a physical reminder of the seeds we all carry that are ready to find fertile, new ground. I’ve continued to learn over my life that there is such a thing as divine timing. Ria Baeck and I first talked about combining our fields of storytelling and bodywork/constellation work more than two years ago and it has been an interesting journey sensing into right timing for a workshop. Every so often, we would talk about it again, but it wasn’t the time to bring it to life.
It finally felt like the time this past weekend and we decided to still use the name we’d come up with more than a year ago: Embodying (Y)our Calling. We felt drawn to working with calling and also working with shadow, knowing deeply from our own journeys that your greatest gift can come from the deep wounds you carry. We had worked separately and together within other workshops with the potency of sharing stories, the release and focus of bodywork, and the ability of group constellations to show us the collective wisdom of a situation or system. It was finally time to dance as practitioners and co-learners together. We also wanted to work in a new way, not to be the experts, but to play in a co-creative field with people who decided to be there and to see what would emerge, if we all took on the role of stepping into supporting each other into naming and engaging with our calling.
There were two main parts to our story work. On the afternoon of the first day, we talked about the “Legacy Suitcase” everyone carries. I remember distinctly when I discovered mine. I was 25 and I’d just moved to New Zealand. I was very far away from anyone who knew me and I had the sudden inspiration that I could completely transform my identity and become someone totally new. I was the modern day example of someone escaping over the border with a new identity! I would be able to do whatever I wanted, be whoever I wanted to be and act however I wanted to act. It was time to throw off my past habits and embrace the new!
The rush of excitement and possibility didn’t last very long. I discovered I had an invisible suitcase that felt like it was attached to my ankle with a legchain. The suitcase was filled with conditioning from my family life and my experiences that caused me to react in certain, predictable ways. There seemed to be no way to leave the suitcase standing by the side of the road. I was forced to start unpacking. Bugger!
The bottom of the suitcase was filled with scars — both visible and invisible — as well as strengths — both known and unknown. They were thrown in there together and had become a bulky mess. There was also a toiletry bag filled with wounds and what I used to cover them up. Little did I know that my gifts were hiding in the same bag in the form of the shadows that needed to be integrated. In addition there was a whole pile of stories I was carrying that came from my family life, my cultural upbringing and all my life experiences. They were well-folded, but there was a musty smell about them. They desperately needed laundering. I somehow seemed to have lost the torch that I felt instinctively I was carrying, so I often got lost at night. And the sunglasses I had packed were particularly good at reflecting the shadows. I couldn’t really see them; every so often I walked into walls and wondered how that had happened. It is a wonder I was never charged excess baggage!
I realised what I needed was a new set of instructions on the inside lid of my suitcase. I needed a new shaping of my story, a mirror that reflected the best of me, and a list of powerful questions that could be pulled out at any moment to focus me on possibilities instead of breakdown. As a longtime traveller I can tell you that it is a skill to know what to pack, when to unpack and to do that intentionally!
The group grappled with the suitcase idea. ”I’d rather have hand luggage!”, someone said, while someone else admitted that theirs was coffin shaped. It is a challenge to open the suitcase, have a look and not fall in. Having an idea of what the journey might look like, helps. That evening I shared the story The Queen’s Cloak, by Joan Chamberlain Engelsman, as a first mapping of the road ahead.
The following morning people got to work creating a Life Journey Map. Then they shared it and their suitcase in trios, with two supporting the storyteller to look for the red thread or the river below the river, to rename what is in the suitcase and together to identify the crossroad the teller was standing at now. After lunch we did a constellation in pairs, with one of us representing the calling and the other person sensing how it felt to move around it, now coming nearer, now facing away, now embracing the calling. We shared what we both experienced. Simple, but powerful work!
On the morning of the third day, everyone wrote their own fairytale. Here are the story elements they worked with:
Writing the fairytale & the key question for the workshop – How do we listen, watch & engage each other into wholeness & mastery?
* Once upon a time there was…
* S/he was given the gifts of…
* And also…
* And then…
* Finally s/he came to the crossroads called…
* Standing at the crossroads was…
* Who tells her/him that _____ must be left behind and _____ picked up to move forward, and hands him/her a parchment which reads…
While small groups had been working together the day before the Muse came to visit me and I created a poem briefing of the exercise. It sounded like this:
Once upon a time – A fairytale in the making
Once upon a time, she said, is a very good place to start.
It takes you very far away, yet stays close to the heart
Of things that were and things that are, both difficult and true
And yet, if you can look this way, they seem outside of you.
Start right at the beginning, when someone gave you birth
And tell a bit about the frame of sadness or of mirth
Did you come into a castle, a village or a shack?
Did you have everything you need or did you live with lack?
What were those gifts, given there, that stayed with you since then?
What have you used, what have you left, what have you to befriend?
What was it in your character, your nature or your play
That pulled you to the centre or made you stay away?
Of course a child, must grow up soon and leave the family home
So did you find a place to be or take to the world and roam?
What were the challenges you met, what was the love you found?
Where was the world a swampy mess and where was solid ground?
What lessons still remain in you, what have you had to shed
That makes you who you are today, with all the life you’ve led?
What brought you to the crossroads, the place where you now stand
And by what name are they called, that place of sacred land?
Who stands there now to challenge you, what message have they brought,
About that which now could lie ahead, the calling that you’ve sought?
So take courage first, and take a breath and then pick up your pen
And craft a story for us now, the journey can begin…
At the end of our time together, we heard the crossroads part of everyone’s story. When they finished, we took a deep breath together and told them WE SEE YOU!, and then we gifted each person a round of words of power to accompany them on their journey. It was beautiful to see these words sink into the people and land. There was a quantum more strength and courage to go on, and the circle shimmered.
Deeply thoughtful stories like these are not heavy weights in the suitcase, but like the light but comforting sense of a warm angora shawl you can wrap around your shoulders against the cold of a long night and the loneliness of a challenging road. That ring of deep listening and glad sharing remains with me still, a castle I could live in.
Thanks Mary Alice for this beautiful harvest with words, and thanks Helen for the pictures!
