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SoulCollage� Community Update
August 2015  
Forerunners of SoulCollage�

by Katherine L. Ziegler


   

I was surprised and delighted by an article in the May 2010 issue of ARTnews about an
exhibition traveling among major art museums in Chicago, Ontario, and New York. "Playing with Pictures: The Art of Victorian Photocollage" displays how imaginatively British upper-class ladies drew and painted scenes incorporating the small portrait photographs given as visiting cards in the1860s. 

 

Over a century before Seena Frost and her groups began cutting, pasting, and consulting, the article's author Sylvia Hochfield reports that besides children, gardens, and exotic animals, one theme of these collages was the frequent gatherings of their social set:  


 

"The drawing room - the locus of social life - became a stage for psychological drama, as it must often have been in life. In a page from Lady Filmer's album, the lady herself - a notorious and successful social climber - stares at the rakish Prince of Wales, unseen by her much smaller husband. The others are concentrated in their own spheres, and the differences in scale heighten the sense of isolation. The lady has revealed more than she intended."

That last phrase hints at the non-SoulCollage� element. None of these noblewomen seem to have been using their creations for self-discovery or guidance from their inner wisdom! One might guess that Lady Filmer's diaries contain no references to "my social-climber part."

Sigmund Freud, after all, was just a boy at the time. It would be decades before the idea of everyday waking traces of unconscious experience (such as "slips of the tongue"), which Freud popularized, became widespread. It remained for C. G. Jung -- who greatly influenced Seena Frost, Founder of SoulCollage�, -- to point out the wisdom and the spiritual depths available through honest exploration of the unconscious mind and heart.

In 1987, SoulCollage� was still in development, unknown beyond Seena's home in Santa Cruz County, CA. But that year I had a personal experience in in Z�rich, Switzerland with another similar method, this one arising (apparently independently) at the same time as SoulCollage�. A student at the Z�rich Jung Institute, where I worked as an interpreter, offered to do a reading for me using some small cards she had made using magazine images.

I was just ending my second three years in Z�rich (having studied at the Jung Institute 1971-74), this time learning a Jungian/gestalt hybrid, and was now planning to return to the United States. A remarkable dream had led me to choose California, where I had never lived, and I wondered what might await me there. I told her all this, shuffled her pile of cards, and drew a few at random.

The card most memorable for me was filled with flames, a forest fire. "You drew it upside down," she said. "That means it won't be a destructive fire but a fire of the spirit, healing and life-giving." And there was something about its being all-consuming -- whether geographically or inwardly was not clear.

My guide's way of using the cards was Tarot-like in assigning meanings to them, rather than letting the energies depicted on the cards speak directly to me, as we do in SoulCollage�. Still, the synchronicity of the random draw seems to have revealed that archetypal layer of the psyche where, in a sense, all times are now. That reading keeps coming back to me, because in addition to my professional growth here in California, I have been profoundly changed by my five-year immersion in Tibetan Buddhist practice, by another period of return (deeper this time) to the Christianity of my childhood, and most notably for 20 years now by the Ridhwan� School for Spiritual Development, based in Berkeley.

Meanwhile Seena's original book SoulCollage� was published in 2001, and this unique way of weaving the life of the soul into one's everyday world grew and grew. In 2008, SoulCollage� entered my personal growth mix. Since then I've made many cards to mark meaningful events in my inner life, including a card expressing my own current experience of the spiritual fire referenced in that 1987 card reading in Z�rich: 

 

 

Spiritual Fire (Council) by Katherine Ziegler
"I Am the flame in every living soul..."
   

 

The photo source of this card's background image (flame plus many people) shows a man in religious garb breathing fire from his kerosene-filled mouth at a ceremony honoring a spiritual leader. The purple shapes look to me like the bubbles in a lava lamp: individuals not really separate from their hot fluid medium. SoulCollage� continues to fascinate me with its power to tap unexpected depths in everyone who opens to this simple process, using Image + Imagination + Intuition.

 

Katherine L. Ziegler, PhD, a SoulCollage� Facilitator since 2009, gives workshops and private consultations for individuals and groups in the greater San Francisco Bay Area. She practices psychotherapy in San Leandro, CA and is Associate Editor of two monthly online newsletters for SoulCollage Inc. Katherine is collecting, for a book, stories of people's memorable moments with SoulCollage�. [email protected] -- www.selfawarelife.com.

 

These blank cards  enable people to get started easily with building their personal SoulCollage� decks. There are 12 high quality blank matboard cards, 8" x 5" in size, professionally cut, strong and ready to be collaged. They are shrinkwrapped, labeled and suitable for resale.





The SoulCollage� iPhone & iPad App
stores and backs up your deck on your iPhone or iPad.  Make notes, share your cards, do readings, and view notes and cards drawn from past Readings.

Take your SoulCollage� cards (your whole deck!) everywhere you go. Search iTunes for "SoulCollage" and download this iOS App. Sorry no Android version yet.


iPhone 5 or 5s users  can now spread the word about Discovering Your Wisdom; Changing Your World. People will be asking you about SoulCollage� everywhere you set down your phone. It's bright and beautiful, too, so you can find your phone and differentiate it from all the other iPhone users out there.

More information and to purchase, click here. 

Read Facilitator Joan Ungar's article from the June, 2013 SCU
How My SoulCollage� Cards Predicted an Amazing Event


Interested in Learning more about SoulCollage�? 
OR Here is an online course to get you started 


  

with Mariabruna Sirabella, SoulCollage� Trainer.

  


Join the SoulCollage� Facilitator Community around the world... a place is waiting for you.

Photo by Diane Karen Born



UNITED STATES
 
August 14-16, 2015 - Diane Karen Born
California (Southern CA-Lake Elsinore)
- Pine Manor

September 10-13, 2015 - Anne Marie Bennett
Massachusetts (Westfield) - Genesis Spiritual Life Center

September 18-20, 2015 - Audrey Chowdhury, M.S., ATR-BC
Wisconsin (Madison) - Holy Wisdom Center

October 8-11, 2015 - Mariabruna Sirabella, M.S., LMFT & Sue Gelber
(and, on Sunday, Founder: Seena Frost, M.Div., M.A.
California (Santa Cruz) Click here to find info and to Register.

October 23-25, 2015 - Diane Karen Born 
Oregon (Portland) - Aloft Cascade Station

 
INTERNATIONAL

(Editor's note: US and Canada residents, keep your eye on the Euro. The exchange rate has been advantageous to you. Perhaps you can combine a European vacation with a SoulCollage� Facilitator Training!)

 

August 14-16, 2015 - Karen Mann
AUSTRALIA Sydney (Pennant Hills)  Click here to find info and to Register.

September 3-6, 2015 - Mariabruna Sirabella, M.S., LMFT
ITALY  - In English  Email to register.
 
October 8-11, 2015 - Linda Woolfson 
PORTUGAL Cascais (Hotel Baia) in English with Portuguese translation. Register here.  
 
October 9-11, 2015
- Audrey Chowdhury, M.S., ATR-BC
CANADA Quebec (Granby)  en Francais

October 17-19, 2015 - Lucy Schaaphok & Mirabai Kolari
THE NEDERLANDS (Groesbeek)

October 30-November 1, 2015 - Karen Mann
AUSTRALIA Melbourne (Templestowe)  Click here to find info and to  Register.

January 31- February 3, 2016 - Lucy Schaaphok
THE NEDERLANDS (Groesbeek)

 

*No degrees or certificates are required to attend the SoulCollage� Training. The purpose of the Training is to prepare people to share SoulCollage� with others.  The pre-requisites for  the SoulCollage� Facilitator Training are your own active practice of SoulCollage� and your enthusiasm for sharing it with others, as well as reading SoulCollage� Evolving by Seena B. Frost and listening to her CDs: Introduction to SoulCollage� and Facilitating SoulCollage� in Groups.

Before attending a Training, we want you also to have a SoulCollage� workshop experience with a trained SoulCollage� Facilitator or listen to a recorded class Fundamentals of SoulCollage�, make some cards, do the exercise, "I Am One Who...", with your cards and do some SoulCollage� Readings, letting your cards answer at least one of your questions.

Either click here or go to www.soulcollage.com, scroll down the right column and click the link to Amazon.com there before you start shopping. Thank you!