Introduction

This workshop will focus on gaining an understanding of the fabric of one’s personal life up to the present. While one’s life to date is whole cloth, it is still being woven on the life loom in one’s own design with layers or stripes of personal events. Participants will come to the workshop with their lives laid out on paper in symbolic color and design. Each one has devoted time at home to creating a personal Life Map or Lifescape.

As recommended in the program Introduction, it is important and rewarding for the leader to create a personal Life Map or Lifescape before the workshop. Creating your own project allows you to deeply understand this interesting and challenging process. It is hard work! Participants’ creative solutions to the challenge of creating a Life Map or Lifescape may hold surprises. Most likely they will not consider their work is finished. A large part of this session is for participants who wish to do so to share parts of their work. Keep the box of tissues nearby. Sharing may bring up meaningful, forgotten events.

Experience has shown that this program works best when each workshop begins with the opportunity for participants to eat lunch together. Shared lunch, whether individual brown bag or something more elaborate, allows time for community building and sets a tone for what follows. A few days before the workshop, remind participants by email or phone to bring their Lifescape or Life Map, their bag lunch, and a mug or tell them about lunch arrangements you have made.

Goals

This workshop will:

  • Invite participants to continue to grow a supportive community
  • Invite participants to consider past negative and positive happenings as meaningful parts of lived experience
  • Offer meditation and stretching exercises as spiritual tools
  • Offer a process for understanding one’s Life Map or Landscape
  • Offer a process for claiming inner wisdom.

Learning Objectives

Participants will:

  • Continue to grow a supportive community
  • Consider past negative and positive happenings as meaningful parts of lived experience
  • Take part in and learn simple stretching exercises
  • Share Life Maps or Lifescapes and claim wisdom from life experience
  • Experience guided meditation as a centering technique
  • Reflect on past hurts and offer forgiveness.