This weekend takes the form of a journey to meet the Dark Goddess within a safe,
sacred environment and to work in integrating the dark feminine into our lives.
The Dark Goddess is all the parts of ourselves as women that have been shamed and denied and hidden. She is the mother of suffering, change and renewal and it is in her realm that the deep mysteries of healing and personal transformation are found.
This workshop is a ritual enactment of the mythical descent into the Underworld to meet, heal and integrate our personal shadow, as well as to acknowledge and empower the long-repressed dark feminine in her own right, and travel some of the paths that lie in her realms.
·Further your understanding of the Dark Goddess in a safe, supportive space
·Allow yourself to connect with the deep feminine, whose face can be Ereshkigal, Lilith, Sekhmet, Kali and Morrigan as well as the Goddess of light and love
·Work with myths and archetypes that teach of this journey
·Create rituals of honouring and integrating the Dark Goddess
Jane Meredith is a Priestess of the Goddess, passionately committed to working with ritual and myth for healing, empowerment and celebration. She has many years of experience of working in magical and goddess-oriented women's groups, support groups and feminist circles. She is familiar with issues around relationships, sexuality, incest, self-image, self-confidence and transformation. She has a special affinity with the Dark Goddess and is excited by the relationship between personal journeys and mythic, seasonal and archetypal journeys. She lives in Australia and presents workshops regularly both in Australia and England.
"...Recently a woman asked me whether I thought it best to approach the Dark Goddess from a place of control or a place of friendship.
Well, you can try either of those, I said, but I shouldn't think they'd get you very far. Not that it really matters, to her, how you approach her; she will go ahead with her work just the same - but it possibly makes a difference for you.
...The Dark Goddess is an intimate goddess. She deals with birth and death, with initiation, change, healing and pain. She is not about ascendancy, not about avoidance, she is not nice. She is about raw truth, about body and feeling and ancient knowledge and the power of blood and the dark, she is about utter choices and powerful confrontations. She is merciless, and yet she is also mercy itself, the mercy of death, of release, of change.
...Have you ever had those moments, of piercing revelation and light in the midst of deep depression or profound mental/emotional/physical agony; or of gentleness and almost irrational reassurance, as if you were wrapped in a warm blanket at the end of a night of despair? That is her, the two faces of the dark Goddess. And it is only through the one, the dark, that she is able to show the other.
...So I said, try honour. Honour Her power, her wisdom, her grief and pain, her inevitability. Honour her as an aspect of your deepest self, honour her as a face of the mysteries, honour her as the transformer."
from an article by J.M., published in the Avalon Magazine 2001
Participant's feedback:
"I thank you from the bottom of my battered heart for a truly liberating time and space. Thank you for the beauty and the structure and the knowledge and the power. Thank you for the space to say the unsayable and to loose control and feel so loved and held....I have never done what I did this weekend..."
- Sandra
"I love your lack of pretentiousness, I am amazed and inspired by your wisdom, your awareness and your perception. I also like your ability to guide us into the corners of our psyche where we'd rather not be or even look into, your ability to present challenge in a compassionate manner..."
- Robin
Venue:CAER, Lamorna, nr. Penzance, Cornwall,UK; www.caer.co.uk
CAER is a residentialcentre located in the Celtic heart of Cornwall. The old manor house is secluded in seven acres of woods, gardens and streams, near the sea, on the site of an Iron Age fort. In its grounds is a two thousand year old, underground passage-way temple, the Fogou, used in a sacred/ritual way until this day.
Cost: £175 (fully residential)
Further information and booking:
CharisCave, 16b Stackpool Road, Southville, Bristol, BS3 1NQ, UK
