“Traditional psychology is often spare or entirely silent about deeper issues important to women: the archetypal, the intuitive, the sexual and cyclical, the ages of women, a woman’s way, a woman’s knowing, her creative fire.” Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Women Who Run With the Wolves.
Understanding story from the inside out, from the bones to the flesh, reveals those indestructible elements that cannot be eradicated by oppressive forces. This grid, an underlying architecture, hold fragments, parts of the psyche, that comprehend knowing often prohibited or forbidden, but accessible nonetheless by instinct and intuition, whose retrieval brings us back to wholeness.
Please joins us for a six-week series exploring the symbolic journey of The Handless Maiden through the underground forest—an initiation into our own unknown and most authentic Self.
“In our own story, there is very little setting – but as it is typical in many northern European fairy tales, the dark enchanted forest is the most significant place, and it is, as always, the place in which the greatest transformation can be attained, by walking into the heart of the Mystery.” Dr. Sharon Blackie, This Mythic Life.
The Handless Maiden is a profound story about power, identity, and the courage to reclaim that which has been wrongfully taken.
The tale is a gruesome one. It involves not only the severing of the Maiden’s hands, but also the loss of the only world she has ever known. And yet, in travelling with the Handless Maiden and watching her suffer this dismemberment, we discover the depth of her insight, the range of her resources, the strength of her spirit, and the path that ultimately leads to re-growth.
In this series, we explore themes of wandering, endurance, and transformation. The quest within provides strategies and a map for how we, too, might encounter and triumph over our own psychic severing. Undertaking this journey, encourages us to access our creative center while piecing ourselves back together, bone by bone.
Image by Pantovola, La Loba; poster adaptation by Krishna Lalbiharie
