Description:

WORKSHOP: THE ALCHEMIST’S PATH:

NAVIGATING AND RECLAIMING THE DEPTHS OF YOUR PSYCHE

By Sunny Strasburg

In this workshop, we will use the dream workbook, The Alchemist’s Path: Navigating and Reclaiming the Depths of Your Psyche (Strasburg, 2007) as an entry point to discuss how each of our lives are the hero’s journey. The workbook, The Alchemist’s Path contains elemental imagery that Sunny painted from a series of “Big Dreams”. These images are based in alchemy and a visual, elemental and spatial narrative. Each of us creates a “life story” in which we give meaning to our lives. The intention of the imagery and exercises in this presentation are to facilitate a beginning of reclamation- to give meaning and importance to our life stories.

We will examine how during our lives, we have traveled through four alchemical regions as wee have walked our individual Hero’s or Heroine’s Journey, represented by the elements, water (Solutio), Fire (Calcinatio), Air (Sublimatio) and Earth (Coagulatio).

We will view these stories through the lens of Jungian, archetypal, and depth psychology, and explore concepts in mythology, alchemy, archetypal imagery, and depth psychology and how they relate to the symbols in both our waking and dreaming lives. If time allows, we will process experiential exercises which follow the path through the four elements. Using the images from the workbook, we have an evocative starting place. The written and practical exercises are intended to help facilitate the audience’s reclamation and integration of these archetypal realms.

“We must let art help us.” (Hollis, 2000)