Helping Women Embody Courageous Change through the Shapeshifting Woman Archetype

Saturday January 30, 1-4 pm
Held via Zoom
Liza Hyatt, ATR-BC, LMHC
$65, CEUs: 3

In many myths and folk-tales, women heal and escape oppression by transforming into wild animals and plants. Shapeshifting transformations also occur in our dreams. The shapeshifting woman archetype helps us bear our grief for self and world, access feminine leadership, heal from trauma, reconnect with our bodies, and awaken courage to change personally. In our complex time of societal conflict, many women are turning to shapeshifting stories for guidance and strength.

This workshop will explore how the shapeshifter archetype connects to core Jungian concepts like the anima/animus, the trickster which is tied to the shadow, and our journey toward psychological wholeness (individuation). Shapeshifters empower us to become boundary crossers within our own psyches, disrupt rigid structures and challenge the conscious ego’s rules. This empowering enables us to live in new ways, more authentically aligned with the Sacred Feminine.

Through active imagination and expressive arts engagement, we will engage with three selected tales from Greek and Celtic mythology through storytelling, visual art-making, movement, and voice practices. These practices are designed to help women activate personal agency and shift out of nervous system overwhelm toward greater freedom. These practices also help women imagine new depths of healing and reclaim their natural soulfulness, something that is so needed in our times. Finally, we will honor how the shapeshifting woman archetype nourishes and sustains therapists, activists, and artists serving individual and collective psycho-spiritual maturation during the challenges of our current era.

Recommended Reading:
Foxfire, Wolkskin and Other Stories of Shapeshifting Women, Sharon Blackie
She Shape Shifts: A Healing Woman’s Bond with the Animate World, Liza Hyatt

About the Instructor
Liza Hyatt, ATR-BC, LMHC is an art therapist with 40 years experience serving women healing from complex trauma. She practices at IU Health Charis Center for Eating Disorders, is faculty in art therapy graduate programs at Saint-Mary-of-the-Woods College and Edgewood University, and is a dreamwork practitioner affiliated with the Natural Dreamwork international community. Her published work includes 5 books of poetry and an eco-art therapy workbook. She is the author of a new book that is a genre-blending writing, storytelling and visual art project celebrating the shapeshifting woman archetype.