Dear Friends,

For those of you who are in the Lethbridge area, I have two in-person events coming up soon:  A half-day of Painting as Contemplative Inquiry on March 1, and an 8 week Coming of Age Story Circle starting on March 19 on Wednesday nights. Here is more info:

The Spark:  Painting as Creative Inquiry

with Cat Charissage, Educator and Counsellor

I’d like to offer an afternoon of painting for women (daughters welcome) on Saturday, March 1, 2014 from 1:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m. Does the idea of  painting an image of your divine spark, your inner self, or your muse pique your curiousity?

My focus is on Intentional Creativity, and on painting as a contemplative inquiry into the still, small voice within.  No previous artistic experience is needed.  I guarantee that you will go home with a completed 16″ by 20″ painting on canvas that you will be pleased with.

The afternoon will include Introduction and Discussion, Quiet Time, Writing, Painting, herbal tea and laughter.  All supplies will be here. As I can only take 4 participants at a time, there is plenty of time for individual instruction and attention.

Cost is $55 plus $15 for supplies. (Total:  $70)   If the cost is a barrier to your coming, talk to me, as I am committed to making these workshops available to those who wish to be here.  Scholarships and/or work exchanges are often available.

For Registration or Information, contact Cat at catcharissage@gmail.com

ABOUT ME:  I specialize in exploring the Depth Dimension of life, helping people to articulate their true selves and make meaning through the paradoxes and challenges that life gives us. In 2013 I added Painting as a new language for symbolic expression, and I study with Shiloh Sophia McCloud, Visionary Artist.   I am a student of the wisdom traditions of the world, and have a Master’s degree in adult Education,, plus a B.A. and 4 years of graduate study in Theology. I’ve 30+ years’ experience in working with both groups and individuals in the recovery from trauma and violence, and in creative and spiritual growth, including 6 years with the Sexual Assault Centre London (Ontario) as counsellor and Executive Director.  I also mentor others in self-directed education and the development of critical thinking. I’m passionate about writing, dreamwork, and art as creative ways to live a deep and meaningful life, and I actively engage in ongoing learning and reflection, most recently with Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estes (author of Women Who Run with the Wolves) in both her Mysterium and Original Voice series of intensive courses.

*********************************

Please join me in a

Coming of Age Story Circle

An 8-week Contemplative Writing Inquiry for Young Women and their Mothers

Wednesdays, March 19 – May 14, 2014

There will be no meeting during Easter break, April 23. It is held in Lethbridge in my home study, with a maximum of 8 participants.  The format includes opening with a story or poem, then writing in response to prompts, with optional reading of our responses, and then closing with a poem or intention. Mothers would be expected to write also, and hopefully model sharing what they wrote.  Though all will be encouraged to share, no one is obligated to read aloud what they wrote, or even to write on the topic.

The focus is on opening up thinking and discussion about moving into adult womanhood, with also the purpose of creating community and/or to find other adult women as friends or mentors.

The evenings’ topics will be:  Coming of Age; Authority and the Authoring of Our Lives; Media, Comparison, and Never Feeling “Enough”; Power and Its Abuse; Friendship, Support, and Diversity; Values and Intimacy; Stewardship, Consumerism, and Getting Needs Met; and Leading Your Life, Leader of Your Life.

The cost is $160 for the young women, and mothers come at no extra charge. Young women can come on their own (with permission from a parent). If cost is a barrier, I’m committed to make it happen for those who want to be here, and scholarships and/or work exchanges are often available.

For Registration or Information, contact Cat at catcharissage@gmail.com

********************************

As always, I so appreciate your reading my blog and your support.

Blessings to you,

Cat

“Listening”, from cover of art journal, 2013

Dear Friends,

This past weekend I went on a silent retreat at the local retreat center.  It was on Deepening Centering Prayer, and was sensitively facilitated and gently hosted.

It was wonderful:  deep inner rest;  blessed silence;  groundedness;  the silent companionship of the others.

Words don’t work very well in sharing with you what it was like.  Mystery, companioning, the Holy, mystery deepening me. ..  even if I don’t have words to adequately describe this movement of spirit, I am ever more fully convicted that attending (from the Latin, tendare, “to stretch”:  a stretching toward)  —- that attending to an inner live is valuable, meaningful, and compassionate to one’s self and others.

Though there was mostly silence, there was some talk of God.  But the more I hear this word, the more I honestly don’t know what it means.  What does it mean to say, “God told me. . . .”?  Yet after 30 plus years of wrestling with the angel, I do have a glimpse of what “God” can mean for us humans — an opening and unfolding toward a magnitude, a plenitude, a fullness not unlike a womb about to give birth . . .

But “God” is such a loaded word.  Lots of me wants to drop it out of my vocabulary entirely, not only because it’s so confusing and ambiguous, but also because entire indoctrination systems claiming authority based on that word, “God”, have caused such oppression, such suppression of critical thought, so many “oughts” and “shoulds” that have controlled and paralysed free souls.  And because people of “God,” mostly men, but women, too, have abused, tortured, and tormented so many boys and girls.  So many young souls have been internally colonized, soul-raped, lost, many for their entire lives.  “God” has “should” all over this earth, especially over the souls of otherwise conscious, beautiful lights.

I don’t want to be a part of all that; I don’t want to be associated with that.  To say I ardently hate all of that is a profound understatement.  I know that of course, it’s people who have perpetrated the evil, and that I “should” not blame “God” for this. I don’t blame “God”, but I do hold responsible those people who have claimed to be His (“His”?) spokesmen.

Yet, for many centuries, the only home for soul wisdom has been these traditions. In the west, Centering Prayer has carried the tradition of inner mystical growth. And so I mine the “God” traditions for what treasures they do hold.

I want and claim my inner life as a radical and political act, and I want to radiate, as much as I can, the soul virtues of love, light, compassion.

Join me?

With much warmth,

Cat

My “Wall of Honour”  July 2013

Dear Friend,

Today I want to talk about not talking.  About not reading and not listening and not watching.

As someone who has always had a prayer life, even in the midst of greatest doubts about the existence of anything beyond the here and now, I’ve nurtured moments of silence almost every day.  Recently my need for silence has vastly increased, and I have no idea whether this is a deepening of my spiritual life, or a symptom of my easily over-stimulated nervous system as part of the fibromyalgia.   I don’t know, and no one can tell me.  But silence helps one tolerate “not-knowing.”

What about you?  Do you have, or do you take, the opportunity to be in silence?  Turn off the music and the T.V., turn off the cellphone, and the computer?  What happens when you do?  Do the thoughts (“monkey mind” as the Buddhists say) drive you nuts? Or does anxiety drive you crazy?  Do you have musical ear worms?  Throughout the holidays, I has “Sleighride Together with You” driving me bonkers, and a friend to thank for starting it!  How do you get rid of those earworms?  Do you have to always have something to read?

There’s a lot to be said against silence.  The silence of woman abuse, child abuse, sexual assault MUST be broken, as well as the silence of addictions and that insidious epidemic of depression.  I can’t tell you the number of courageous, hard working, compassionate individuals I know who have quietly whispered to me that they are on antidepressants, as though they’re admitting to something shameful and weak, as though they “can’t take it”, as though they’ve “failed” at LIFE 101.  (To break silence:  I’ve been on antidepressants twice in my life.  They can be life savers, literally and figuratively.  There is definitely a place for them in the toolkit of helps and remedies.)

Considering the state of the world and of many of our lives, though, perhaps depression is actually the healthy response, the cry of our selves that something is drastically wrong.  This is another reason to break silence.

Some difficult silences should be respected, of course, when a secret is kept for one’s own protection or the protection of others.  We don’t yet have a world safe enough to reveal all secrets.

Two of my greatest teachers have written about what has remained silent that need not, should not remain so.  Sandra Butler wrote about sexual assault of children in The Conspiracy of Silence, and Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estes has written about the healthy psychological development of women in Women Who Run With the Wolves and in the spoken word series The Dangerous Old Woman.

Dr. Estes’ work reminds us that when silence is opened up about the positive aspects of our lives, it can bring joy and possibility, love, acceptance, and mystery.

I’m talking now, though, about the awareness of unfolding mystery that may only be known through a practice of silence.  Dr. Estes speaks of silence as an instrument to be played, to be used for changing one’s consciousness.  It can be the rest between the notes of everyday life, the rest that helps us understand the meaning, or to create it, from the whole of the day’s sounds.

. . . .

NOTE:  I have had to take a short break from writing this post in order to do a necessary errand at Walmart.  Oh.  My.  Sunday afternoon at Walmart.  Black carts with people attached seemed like oversized ants pouring every which way from a disturbed anthill.  The fluorescent lights flickered.  The “music” irritated.  Talk about changing one’s consciousness!

It reminds me of how our taste buds, flooded with the salty, sweet, and/or fatty tastes of most food not made from scratch, can no longer appreciate the subtle tastes of unprocessed food prepared simply.   I’m also thinking about how I tried to go off caffeine, several times, when I lived in Toronto and used public transportation daily.  When I was caffeine-free, I could barely tolerate being around so many people.  It seemed I became so sensitized to every exhausted, frightened, or grieving face, every unhappy child, and every person dealing with disabilities that I was exhausted before I even started work each day, filled with anguish and helplessness at the state of things.  Perhaps caffeine was keeping me speeded up to the pace of the city, providing a type of numbness that enabled me to function more easily, if a little insensitively.  It has taken a long time to control how open I am in different situations — and not always successfully, as per my experience today at Walmart.

I also had the profound experience of  sensory overload when, at the age of 19, after having lived for several months in a convent without leaving its grounds,  I went to a shopping mall on a few errands.   I could barely walk in a straight line, so overcome with all the bright colors and smells of the department store.  I didn’t dare go into a music store!  (They had music stores back then, selling the new technology of cassette tapes as well as vinyl albums. . . )

And remember what happens when we turn off the bright lights and suddenly find ourselves in the dark?  We can’t see anything at first, but then we adjust and things that were just invisible a moment ago become visible.  Now, though it’s not a direct analogy, it can help us glimpse the idea that there are things we can find within ourselves that we can never find if the noise around us is too loud.  If we can let monkey mind settle, and our nervous systems to calm our incessant compulsions to do, do, do, there are treasures to find there.

I hope to write more about this.  In the meantime, please share your responses and experiences.

With much warmth and many blessings,

Cat