Fairytales have an important role in grounding us into the soil beneath us. They act as refiners of the ego, making it humble, imparting warning and learnings that cannot be taught through words and books but only transmitted by images that belong to the depths of the collective unconscious.
Before Disney took hold of fairytale culture, these stories belonged to our ancestors, human and otherworldly. By reclaiming the old tradition of oral storytelling, we reconnect to these ancient riverbeds and weave it back into this world.
“Fairytales are the purest and simplest expression of collective unconscious processes.”
The Anima Mundi School invites you to her Fairytale Kitchen. Journey with us through a seasonal immersion in fairytales from around the world. This Autumn our Kitchen opens for a two-part storytelling journey. The recordings will also be available in case you won’t be able to join one of them.
Dates for our Spring Edition “Soaring Serpents”: April 17th, May 1 + 15th
Soaring Serpents
“The serpent is the earthly essence of man of which he is not conscious. Its character changes according to peoples and lands, since it is the mystery that flows to him from the nourishing earth-mother. The earthly (numen loci) separates forethinking and pleasure in man, but not in itself. The serpent has the weight of the earth in itself but also its changeability and germination from which everything that becomes emerges.”
Snakes and serpents evoke connotations and images from deep within our psyche. From worms to dragons, the clan of serpents is a ubiquitously universal archetype. Kin or ‘other’; within us or an-other, a serpent rising brings its own energy and emotion. Join us to dwell with the dramas and revelations from serpent stories from Persian-Kurdish, Indian and Slavic lands.
April 17th: from the Indian soil: What would you do for the love of a serpent? FInd out from this folktale from western India.
May 1st: Shahmaran (From the Persian-Kurdish lands): What does it mean to betray the Queen of Serpents? Mighty and powerful as she is, her compassionate nature is still vulnerable to human betrayal.
May 15th: from the Slavic lands: to be announced soon
“Repressed or coiled in a circle, she can be poisonous both to the body and the psyche, but once risen and standing upright, she is beneficent. The power of the serpent, rightly understood, is one of the ways the Goddess overcomes duality.”
Your storytellers: Gauri Raje and Faranak Mirjalili.
Jungian story-analysis with Alexis Durgee.
Gauri Raje is a storyteller and anthropologist. She tells stories in different languages including Urdu, Hindi, English and other Indian languages such as Gujarati and Marathi. She is especially interested in the concepts of witnessing in storytelling, translation, multilingualism and embodied nature of creating stories. She has been working and studying with the Anima Mundi School since 2018.
Faranak Mirjalili is a Jungian analyst, founder and teacher at the Anima Mundi School. She works with women around the world to help regenerate the feminine principle through weaving a personal experience of psyche in analysis with group-work in the imaginal realm. Her current work focuses on the importance of group engagement in myth, story and the imagination during the analytical process.
Alexis Durgee is a depth psychotherapist whose work emphasizes the importance of becoming embodied through soul work and meaning-making. She is currently in her dissertation process at Pacifica Graduate Institute focusing on the concept of Soul rape and the oppressed/repressed images of Soul as they present in dreams.
WORKSHOP STRUCTURE
Storytelling: at the Anima Mundi School we practice the ancient art of oral tellings, in this part of the workshop you just sit back and tune your ears to the images that speak to your imagination.
Weaving the Threads with Alexis Durgee: our special guest will reflect from a Jungian perspective on the theme of our workshop. We will then take this into a discussion from both a Jungian/psychological as well as an anthropological perspective with Gauri and Faranak. This season we focus on the great universal symbol and archetype of the serpent.
Q&A: time to discuss, share and reflect with the entire group.
DETAILS
When: Sunday April 17th + Sunday May 1 and 15th. All 8PM Amsterdam time (CET) / 2PM EST / 11AM PST
What: 3 part workshop of 2.5 hours each, including the live storytelling. (Recordings will be available for those that have to miss a date)
Fee: 149 EUR for all 3 workshops. For those that are in financial difficulty we offer a sliding scale 30 - 50 EUR per workshop session (please let us know in the message below and chose the amount according to your income). You can also attend 2 workshops instead of 3.