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.