Warning: contains potentially triggering imagery and descriptions.
I have been practicing SoulCollage® since 2015.
“Originated by Seena Frost, SoulCollage® is a process for accessing your intuition and creating an incredible deck of cards with deep personal meaning that will help you with life’s questions and transitions.”
I was first introduced to SoulCollage® when I took a local workshop with an trained facilitator and artist. She did a program that incorporated SoulCollage® with other art expressions and activities.
I fell in love with it immediately! As a photographer, working with images was fantastic. And it was like playing – finding images in magazines, cutting and pasting them together. What fun!
I loved it so much, an artist friend and I took the Facilitator training in CA in 2016.
I have not conducted any formal workshops, but I have held gatherings for people interested in learning about the process where we would make cards together.
SoulCollage® cards can be made by “discovering” images in magazines and books and working intuitively with the images you cut out from those sources. Then the meaning of the card is revealed as you “dialogue” with the card using Seena Frost’s I Am The One Who process.
Or you might start off with an idea for a card you want to make, say a card to represent someone in your family: a parent, grandparent, or sibling.
SoulCollage® work includes things that uplift you, inspire you, and make you happy. And it also gives you a chance to work with darker, harder, and even scary things: the Shadow.
“The Shadow (a term from Jungian psychology) is a concept that is referred to often in SoulCollage work. It has to do with balance. Any form whether visible or invisible has the potential to lose its balance, to show its Shadow. When a form’s energy becomes exaggerated or too much, we say it is manifesting Shadow. On the other hand, when a form’s energy is absent when needed, this is also Shadow. W are trying to come to balance with any particular quality or part of us, finding that place where there is not too much or too little of a quality.”
Quote from www.soulcollage.com.
I have been meeting with a group of church friends every Monday to do SoulCollage® together.
It started before the lockdown with us meeting at one lady’s house once a month. Then we switched to Zoom with intention of continuing to meet once a month.
But after our first session we decided to meet every Monday people were free!
We had decided to work on cards for our Community Suite, one of the four Suites that Seena Frost included in her SoulCollage® process.
I started flipping through magazines I had on hand at the house and came across an image of clownfish inside an anemone’s tentacles.
With all the work I have been doing recently on social media and my blogging about my story of abuse and my transformation from survivor to thriver, this image immediately touched a dark, scared part of me. The tentacles reminded me of fingers and the fish looked trapped inside all these creepy fingers! And that led me to think of my grandfather.
I realized at that moment I did not have a SoulCollage® card for my grandfather. I had made cards for my mom, my dad, my sister, my husband, and my mother-in-law. But not my abuser.
I grabbed that picture out of the magazine. But in thinking about the image, I realized that the clownfish is actually the only thing safe from the anemone’s poison. So that wasn’t going to work as it was.
I kept flipping through magazines and then I found an image of a little girl with a balloon, a look of pure joy on her face. Perfect to replace the clownfish!
The image of the anemone did not cover the entire 8×5 card that is the standard size for SoulCollage® cards. So I went hunting for one more image for the card to use as a background. Then I came across a picture of the bomb craters in the landscape of Normandy, still present after all these years, just covered with grass. Perfect.
So I started to glue down the three images together on a card. The little girl was a fairly small image and hard to put glue on the back. I ended up tearing the top of her head when adding the glue. She looked like her head had been cracked open.
In SoulCollage® we often see things happening in seeming coincidence that aren’t accidents.
I thought the image was even better with the split head.
So what did the imagery mean to me?
The tentacles of the anemone were the grasping hands of my grandfather, and I was that trapped little girl so full of life and joy, who was traumatized (spit head) by what he did. And the craters represented the holes in his soul that would let him do what he did.
The original card was made from magazine images, so I found copyright-free images today to make a card I could share online (without the split head).
Here are the results of the I Am The One Who process with the card.
This is the voice of the card speaking to me.
Community Suite
Grandpa Child Predator
IATOW:
I am the one who couldn’t keep my needy fingers from your young soft flesh.
I am the one who needed to control and dominate you.
I am the one who had holes in my soul that allowed me to hurt you.
What do you have to give me? I want you to know that you were an innocent child. What I did to you was not your fault. I was broken and I wanted to fill the empty spaces in my being with your radiance.
What do you want from me ?
To remember that sweet fragile child is still a part of you. Go find her, love her, and bring her along with you on your journey of healing, together.
Side note: when looking up the definition of the anemone’s fingers on Google, the first thing to show up on the search results page was this:
It made me cry to think how different my anemone tentacles image above was from the flower’s meaning.
I also stumbled across a mention of an “Inner Healer” card right after putting together the copyright-free version of my Grandpa card.
Talk about coming at a time I needed to see it!
Another card not in my deck, boy what a miss!
I have an “Inner Artist” card, and “Wise Women” cards, but not an “Inner Healer”.
It made me cry, but I knew that I had to make an “Inner Healer” Card that included an anemone flower.
Here it is. Healing hands!
