Fairytales have an important role in grounding us into the soil beneath us. They act as refiners of the ego, making it humble, imparting warning and learnings that cannot be taught through words and books but only transmitted by images that belong to the depths of the collective unconscious.

Before Disney took hold of fairytale culture, these stories belonged to our ancestors, human and otherworldly. By reclaiming the old tradition of oral storytelling, we reconnect to these ancient riverbeds and weave it back into this world.

"Fairytales are the purest and simplest expression of collective unconscious processes." - Marie Louise von Franz. 

The Anima Mundi School invites you to her Fairytale Kitchen. Journey with us through a seasonal immersion in fairytales from around the world. This comes in a set of 3 tales over 6 weeks. The recordings will also be available in case you won’t be able to join one of them.

Dates for our Autumn Edition “The Cold Breath of the Crone”: October 31st + November 14th

The Cold Breath of the Crone

"Then she turned to the gate and shouted: "Ho! Ye, my solid locks, unlock! Thou, my stout gate, open!" Instantly the locks unlocked, the gate opened of itself, and the Baba Yaga rode in whistling on her pestle...."

As the colours of the earth turn, the lush green are replaced by rust reds and earth yellows. The chill in the air heralds the arrival of the blue-white snow. The greys of winter. The blossoming and fruiting giving way to a blanket of withering.

With this transition arrive the crones. Fairytale Kitchen opens once again to honour two crones from the Celtic and Russian traditions:

October 31st: Baba Yaga (Russian and Slavic traditions): The wild witch of the East, the ambiguous mother, she whose riders are the morning, the day and the night, the old woman who lives deep in the forest on a house with chicken legs, goat legs or ram horns, the one who rides on a broom and pestle, who is the guardian of dragons. Baba Yaga is all this and much more. Ask her the right question and you begin to walk the initiate’s path; disrespect or ignore her at your peril. She knows the way of the wild and she knows about sparking that memory in those who can walk the path. She knows life and death; the mysteries of the wild and the precarious paths of the human. Just like the paths into the forest, there is no one tale of the Baba Yaga - to glimpse her, we walk through a prism of 3 stories.

November 14: Cailleach (From the Celtic world): The most ancient of the crones in the Celtic worlds, she was a powerful elemental force of death and renewal from the most ancient times. She is The Blue Hag, The Bear Goddess, The Boar Goddess, Owl-faced, Ancient Woman, The Woman of Stones. She is the guardian of the wild deer and cattle. Some say she is both spring and winter. She is the creatrix - creator of the islands, mountains and lochs at the west of Scotland. She is nature. She is not one; not of one place but everywhere. We honour her, not through one but several short stories from the Celtic world.

“Without the Crone, the task of belonging to oneself, of being a whole person, is virtually impossible.”

- Marion Woodman

Your storytellers: Gauri Raje and Faranak Mirjalili.
Special guest: Alexis Durgee from @alchemicaltoil (instagram)


Gauri Raje is a storyteller and anthropologist. She tells stories in different languages including Urdu, Hindi, English and other Indian languages such as Gujarati and Marathi. She is especially interested in the concepts of witnessing in storytelling, translation, multilingualism and embodied nature of creating stories. She has been working and studying with the Anima Mundi School since 2018.

Faranak Mirjalili is a Jungian analyst, founder and teacher at the Anima Mundi School. She has been on a Sufi path since 2017 and is specialising in Persian mysticism in her research studies at the University of Amsterdam. Her current work focuses on the importance of group engagement in myth, story and the imagination during the analytical process.

Alexis Durgee is a depth psychotherapist whose work emphasizes the importance of becoming embodied through soul work and meaning-making. She is currently in her dissertation process at Pacifica Graduate Institute focusing on the concept of Soul rape and the oppressed/repressed images of Soul as they present in dreams. 

WORKSHOP STRUCTURE

• Storytelling: at the Anima Mundi School we practice the ancient art of oral tellings, in this part of the workshop you just sit back and tune your ears to the images that speak to your imagination.

• Weaving the Threads with Alexis Durgee: our special guest will reflect from a Jungian perspective on the theme of our workshop. We will then take this into a discussion from both a Jungian/psychological as well as an anthropological perspective with Gauri and Faranak. This season we focus on the archetype of the Crone and her role in the individuation process.

• Q&A: time to discuss, share and reflect with the entire group.
  

DETAILS

When: Sunday October 31st + Sunday November 14th. Both 7PM Amsterdam time. (CET)
What: 2 part workshop of 2.5 hours each, including the live storytelling. (Recordings will be available for those that have to miss a date)
Fee: 99,- EUR for both workshops. For those that are in financial difficulty we offer a sliding scale 30 - 50 EUR per workshop session (please let us know in the message below and chose the amount according to your income).
How to register: fill in the form below, and after payment you will receive the Zoom link.

limited places available, register asap for a spot.

Fairytales have an important role in grounding us into the soil beneath us. They act as refiners of the ego, making it humble, imparting warning and learnings that cannot be taught through words and books but only transmitted by images that belong to the depths of the collective unconscious.

Before Disney took hold of fairytale culture, these stories belonged to our ancestors, human and otherworldly. By reclaiming the old tradition of oral storytelling, we reconnect to these ancient riverbeds and weave it back into this world.

"Fairytales are the purest and simplest expression of collective unconscious processes." - Marie Louise von Franz. 

The Anima Mundi School invites you to her Fairytale Kitchen. Journey with us through a seasonal immersion in fairytales from around the world. This comes in a set of 3 tales over 6 weeks. The recordings will also be available in case you won’t be able to join one of them.

Dates for our Spring Edition “Fragrances of Longing”: April 9, 23rd + May 7th

Fragrances of Longing

The minute I heard my first love story,
I started looking for you, not knowing
how blind that was.
Lovers don't finally meet somewhere,
they're in each other all along.

— Rumi

According to the Sufi tradition, longing is what draws us nearer to love itself. It is a magnetic and mysterious force that beckons us toward the inner essence of the Soul, into a sweet and maddening desire to unite with our ground of Being, God or what Sufis call the Beloved. 

The West is well familiar with the love poetry of Rumi, but it is easy to forget that these poems of love and unity erupted out of a shattered heart and an annihilating journey into the mystical secrets of love. There is a 'dark side' to love that is only known to the mystic who dares to enter the realm of the heart and is prepared to be broken by it until all that remains is love itself. Sufis have been known as storytellers and these tales of love and longing are widely spread in Persian and Arab regions as well as India. 

Shringara rasa - the rasa associated with erotic love is regarded as the primary rasa in Indian performance traditions. The relationship between the lover and their beloved is the fountain from which many other emotions emerge, and is also a metaphor for the relationship between the human and the divine. Love, in the Indian traditions, has been bound up with earthy eroticism and metaphysical longings, wherein the lover is a mortal, but the Beloved belongs to the realms of the metaphysical or the divine.

A persistent theme in the literature from the gangetic plains or the Sanskritic traditions is of longing depicted through ‘viraha’ rasa or the longings brought on by separation, symbolising the acute pain of the separation of the human from the divine.

Come and journey with us through these ancient traditions rooted in the tumultuous path of the heart. 

You are the earth, the sky,
the air, the day, the night.
You are the grain
the sandalwood paste
the water, flowers, and all else.
What could I possibly bring
as an offering?

- Lal Ded

Your storytellers: Gauri Raje and Faranak Mirjalili.
Special guest: Jungian Psychotherapist Alexis Durgee.


Gauri Raje is a storyteller and anthropologist. She tells stories in different languages including Urdu, Hindi, English and other Indian languages such as Gujarati and Marathi. She is especially interested in the concepts of witnessing in storytelling, translation, multilingualism and embodied nature of creating stories. She has been working and studying with the Anima Mundi School since 2018.

Faranak Mirjalili is a Jungian analyst, founder and teacher at the Anima Mundi School. She has been on a Sufi path since 2017 and is specialising in Persian mysticism in her research studies at the University of Amsterdam. Her current work focuses on the importance of group engagement in myth, story and the imagination during the analytical process.

Alexis Durgee is a depth psychotherapist whose work emphasizes the importance of becoming embodied through soul work and meaning-making. She is currently in her dissertation process at Pacifica Graduate Institute focusing on the concept of Soul rape and the oppressed/repressed images of Soul as they present in dreams. 

WORKSHOP STRUCTURE

• Storytelling: at the Anima Mundi School we practice the ancient art of oral tellings, in this part of the workshop you just sit back and tune your ears to the images that speak to your imagination.

• Weaving the Threads with Alexis Durgee: our special guest will reflect from a Jungian perspective on the theme of our workshop. We will then take this into a discussion from both a Jungian/psychological as well as an anthropological perspective with Gauri and Faranak. In this special edition on love and longing, we will explore the mystical tradition of Sufism woven through these tales.

• Q&A: time to discuss, share and reflect with the entire group.
  

THE TALES

• April 9th: The Flowering Tree - a Indian tale on tending to love (by Gauri Raje)

• April 23rd: Sangeh Saboor [The Stone of Patience] - a Persian tale on heartache (by Faranak Mirjalili & Gauri Raje)

• May 7th: The Robe of Love - a Sufi tale of love and longing (by Gauri Raje & Faranak Mirjalili)

DETAILS

When: Friday April 9th and 23rd + Friday May 7th. All 7PM Amsterdam time.
What: 3 part workshop of 2 hours each, including the live storytelling. (Recordings will be available for those that have to miss a date)
Fee: 150,- EUR for all 3 workshops. For those that are in financial difficulty we offer a sliding scale 30 - 50 EUR per workshop session (please let us know in the message below and chose the amount according to your income).
How to register: fill in the form below, and after payment you will receive the Zoom link.

limited places available, register asap for a spot.

An 8-week online course on Alchemy & the Soul, combined with private sessions. (open to both men and women)

The ancient mysteries of Alchemy have drawn many to the secrets hidden within its cryptic images and texts. To this day there remains an aura of mystery around these extraordinary teachings which originated in Egypt.

Carl Jung was one of the recent thinkers who made alchemy accessible to the man and woman of our time. He discovered in the alchemical tradition the phases of transformation that the deep psyche undergoes as it moves through the process of awakening that he called “individuation”. After his own deep initiatory encounter with the collective unconscious, beginning in 1913, he discovered that the imagery and texts of the alchemists were very similar to the material surfacing in his own dreams and active imaginations as well as in those of his patients. This gave him the foundation for his own work in making the mysteries of the psyche accessible to his contemporaries and to us.

In this course we will explore the tradition of Alchemy from a depth-psychological perspective, being led by the work of Carl Jung, as well as post-Jungian thinkers like James Hillman, Edward Edinger, and Jeffrey Raff. We will explore the different stages and operations in Alchemy in-depth combined with Active Imaginations and creative work with images in every class. During each class, we will explore several dreams and how the ancient images of Alchemy are reflected in the modern man/woman’s psyche.

This unique course is combined with private sessions so that you receive experiential learning that goes further and deeper than theory alone. Alchemy is not about understanding the tradition and methodology, but about the transformation of our living matter, psyche and spirit, and with intimate one-to-one work, each participant will have a taste of this deep work of the Soul.

The course will be given in Amsterdam and consists of 4 group classes and 4 private sessions.

Location: Online via Zoom

Price: 349,- euro. Includes: 4 group classes of 1.5 hours and 4 private sessions of 1 hour.

Dates and time coming soon. Register below to reserve your spot.

COURSE FULL / CLASS SOLD OUT.

Please note: this course is given in-person in Amsterdam at Embassy of the Free Mind as part of their course curriculum.

The mysteries of Alchemy have drawn many to the secrets hidden within its ancient images and texts. To this day there remains an aura of mystery around these extraordinary teachings which originated in Egypt.

One of the profound thinkers in recent history was the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung who made alchemy accessible to the man and woman of our time. He discovered in the alchemical tradition the phases of transformation that the deep psyche undergoes as it moves through the process of awakening that he called “individuation”. After his own deep initiatory encounter with the collective unconscious, beginning in 1913, he discovered that the imagery and texts of the alchemists were very similar to the material surfacing in his own dreams and active imaginations as well as in those of his patients. This gave him the foundation for his own work in making the mysteries of the psyche accessible to his contemporaries and to us.

In this Course we will explore the tradition of Alchemy from a depth-psychological perspective, being led by the work of Anne Baring who has written and reflected expansively on this subject. We will examine the alchemical stages of Nigredo, Albedo and Rubedo in both microcosm as well as macrocosm. What do these stages mean for us individually and how can we view our current collective environmental, social and political crises through this lens? What stage of alchemy are we in collectively and how can this lens help us in this time?

DATES: 16 - 23 - 30 November
TIME: 11.30h - 13.30h
COSTS: €75
Tickets available through Embassy of the Free Mind