Sofia Jain-Schlaepfer
Paint Your Soul Portrait -
Weekend Workshop
Be guided through practices to find imagery around your unique gifts and medicine for the world. Paint it into form and let your soul be seen!
Weekend Workshop
What shape is your soul?
When: August 28th - 30th, 1pm on Friday until 4pm Sunday
Location: Private Retreat Space on Salt Spring Island, BC
About the Facilitator:
Sofia Jain
Sofia has guided many through the process of finding imagery around their gifts and has painted many dozens of soul portraits over the last years.
She is a vibrant artist, musician and writer. She has been teaching creativity and nature connection workshops for 8 years, and incorporates her training in many modalities of soul work (Dream Tending, Nature Connection, Coyote Mentoring, Grief Ritual Leadership, Internal Family Systems, and Deep Imagery). She also holds a Masters in Biology.
Her soul path is being an awakener of wild seeds - wild dreams in people and places. Wild as in without exile of the weeds, without taming voice, grief, rivers and without planting in rows. Wild as in lands unowned, but in which we are planted. While she tends to the living seed capsules of plants across the continent, she also tends the seeds of creativity in people, helping tend peoples' creative potential to fruition.
Sofia Jain-Schlaepfer
Tracking Your Soul Medicine
Your Medicine is the gift you bring to the world that is uniquely yours. We all long to have this fully realized and recognized.
Just as the trees give oxygen and homes to the animals, while the birds plant the tree's seeds and fungi redistribute nutrients, we all have different gifts that together can form a thriving ecology.
The soul can be wild and elusive at times. We will explore different practices for tracking it, like you would the foot prints of a wild animal. Some the practices we will dive into:
Journaling - Reflect on your life's path, synchronicities in your life and your values.
Deep Imagery Journeys and Intuitive Seeing Exercises
Dreaming with the Earth - Be guided in time out on the land to open yourself to hear what the Earth has dreamed you to be.
Painting Expression & Beauty-Making
What if beauty is actually important?
Beauty is hardly definable. Perhaps it is something that make tears leap, and washes the film over our eyes. Something that pulls our centre of gravity right back into alignment with life, that drops our energy from our heads into our hearts, filling it until it breaks open to take in the world.
Similarly, our creation of beauty can feed the rest of the world.
In this container we will explore techniques of working with watercolour and gouache paint. Bring beauty into the world through your hands!
Sofia Jain-Schlaepfer
Accessing Natural Creative Flow
Sofia works closely with the cycle of creativity and how it parallels the cycles of nature.
Every cycle around the seasons is a cycle of creativity in nature. If we look at a plant, she begins as a seed in a fruit. She releases from her mother plant, and spends the whole winter dreaming with the earth, before sending out a root. Then she rises up into the seen material world. A vitality sends a rush of growth upward. She flowers her seen beauty to the world. Then she grows strong inside to carry her fruit. And finally she creates seeds, to feed the next dream.
It is in this way that creativity can be in our lives and our projects; first going below the ground, finding vision in the mystery, and then giving that dream voice and expression in embodied reality.
There are different places we can get stuck in this creative cycle, whether it is a trouble leaning into the grief and composting into the ground, or avoiding the stillness required to receive a dream, or cutting off the vitality that lets our vision spring into embodiment. In Western culture there is an ideal to always be flowering, which can keep the creative cycle stuck.
In this container, we will explore the creative cycle that nature teaches us and how to keep it flowing.
Some Approaches
We Will Take
-
Painting and Portraiture Techniques
-
Deep Imagery Journeying
-
Journaling
-
Wanders in Nature
-
Tending grief
-
Deepening Relationship with the Mystery
-
Visionary Art Creation
-
Finding Flow in the Creative Cycle
Open to any level of artistic confidence!
We are all artists! Just as each of our souls is unique, so is each of our artistic expressions.
Includes
Professional Quality Art Supplies Provided
For Use During the Weekend
- Watercolor
- Gouache paint
- Watercolor panel
- Palette
- Paper
- Pencils
- Brushes
Community
We need community to see ourselves.
One-on-one Mentorship
There will be space for one-on-one creativity and painting mentoring if you wish.
Accommodations
2 Group Dinners
Food for two dinners will be provided. We will each participate in cooking one evening.
You will be responsible for your now lunches and breakfasts. Kitchen facilities will be provided.
Retreat Space
We will be gathering at a beautiful private retreat space on Mount Maxwell, surrounded by beautiful forest with ocean and mountain views.
Sleeping Accommodation
There is a group indoor sleeping space available for $50/night if you bring your own bedding and towel.
Private rooms can be arranged for an extra fee. Please reach out for more details.
Cost
$390 - $530 sliding scale
If cost is a barrier there are two partial work-trade positions available. Please reach out (to sofia.jain.schlaepfer@gmail.com) if you are interested.
