Alchemist’s Golden Cup, Cat Charissage, (c) 2015

Dear Friends,

I am delighted to announce this in person series of Story Circles, Red Thread Sessions, a 13-Step Painting Adventure, and a Study Group on Bluebeard: Predators Within and Around Us.

If you live anywhere near Lethbridge, please consider joining me in some of these offerings.  And of course, contact me for more details.

With much love,

Cat

Cat Charissage:  Offerings for Fall 2015

catcharissage@gmail.com     

Sheltering Soul: Monthly Story Circle based on Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estes’ groundbreaking, bestselling Women Who Run With the Wolves

We will read one or two of these archetypal stories per month, come together to write in response to several prompts, and discuss the book’s themes and our writing.

Meeting the 2nd Wednesdays of the month, 7 – 9:30,

October 14 through June 8.

A second group may be formed on the 4th Wednesdays of the month, October through June.      There is NO CHARGE for this Story Circle.

Soulful Story Cards:  Transforming the Critic’s Voice through Color and Language

A Red Thread Session

Saturday, September 26, 1:30 – 4:30 p.m.

$80 for 3 hours of Intentional Creativity based on your personal stories, challenges, and recurring thoughts.

What’s in Your Medicine Basket?

A Red Thread Session

Saturday, October 24, 1:30 – 4:30 p.m.

$80 for 3 hours of Intentional Creativity based on claiming our particular gifts and talents for service and abundantly creative living.

Sophia:  Wisdom Within, A One-day Painting Adventure

13-Step Painting and Writing Inquiry using Intentional Creativity

Saturday, November 21, 11 – 5 p.m.

plus, optional Sunday, November 22, 2-5 p.m.

$150 for 9 hours of painting and writing

                 NO PREVIOUS PAINTING EXPERIENCE NEEDED

Also, on Nov. 19 & 26, Dec. 3 & 10 :  a 4 week Study Group on “BLUEBEARD: the Predators around us and within us”

ABOUT Cat:

How do you really live a deeply meaningful life, living gracefully within the paradoxes and challenges life hands you?  Where are the depths of soul?  And how do you get to those depths?  What is a soul, anyway?  How do you let what’s within you be expressed in ways that are helpful and contribute to positive change?  Do you ever fully heal from the traumas you survived?  How can life be more colorful and creative?

These are the questions I live out of, every day.  I do soul work.  I’m a contemplative educator, counsellor, and artist, and I help women and men navigate the Depth Dimensions of their lives through image, word, silence, and dream. I believe that the most important work each of us can do is to live out our gifted self fully, creatively, and freely, in an overculture which too often wounds our bodies and souls and colonizes our minds with distractions, commercialization, and other people’s agendas.  

I’m a master of the labyrinth, the way of experiencing life’s twists and turns as pilgrimage — through having lived it.  I believe that there’s always the unexpected — I first became a mother at 40, and an artist at 56.  I work in the ways of women’s wisdom — and gotten skilled at unravelling the knots of internalized oppression.  I live expansively and joyfully — and also with serious chronic pain.

I invite you to join me in Intentional Creativity afternoon sessions, in Story Circles, Study Groups, and Painting Workshops, and in customized individual sessions where you explore and express your own lived wisdom and beauty in watercolor, acrylic, and journaling.   Each season I respond to the needs of my beloveds with new offerings based on the themes I discern as immediately relevant.

Professionally, I’m a student of the wisdom traditions of the world, with a Masters in Education, 4 years’ graduate study and a B.A. in Theology, plus more than 30 years’ experience in service and education, including as counsellor and Executive Director of a sexual assault center.  I am trained in post-trauma counselling and as an Intentional Creativity Coach. I have taught in university, in high school, in professional development, and in my own workshops and classes. I also home educated my son to the college level.  I live creatively with the limitations of chronic illness and engage actively in ongoing learning and reflection, most recently with Shiloh Sophia McCloud, visionary artist, and Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estes (author of the groundbreaking bestselling Women Who Run with the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype) in 7 of her summer training intensives.  To see some of my art and writing visit my blog at http://www.catcharissage.com.