ritual / imagination / creativity / nature / community / beauty / purpose

Finding Your Deep Story

mentoring the soul’s life

Soul work, that process of becoming one’s essential self, is filled with paradox and contradictions. To faithfully observe the way the soul lives means often being at odds with the conditioned experience of culture. It frequently requires standing apart from consensus reality in order to attend to the needs of the soul. In its deepest experience, it is the process of bringing soul into the world.

We are in need of a deeper story, one that opens us to the “beautiful and strange otherness” of spirit, nature, and our own interior mystery to offset the counterfeit images given to us by a culture disconnected from the life of the soul. Speaking through dreams, images, illness, grief, longings and symptoms, the soul is calling for a more complete experience of being who we are and for rooting ourselves more deeply to the places we live.

Mentoring is one way of receiving guidance in our movement towards an authentic life. The process is distinct from therapy in that there are no defined goals or outcomes, nothing to be fixed or resolved, rather there is a movement towards recognizing what has been there all along, often unseen, obscured by the intensity of modernity.

“…the path to heaven doesn’t lie down
in flat miles. It’s in the imagination with
which you perceive the world and the
gestures with which you honor it.” -Mary Oliver

Finding Your Deep Story is a process that assists you or your group, in listening to hear what the soul is calling you to. It may be a more elegant story that places your life in the context of the sacred. It may be a call to experience the sorrow for what has been neglected, forgotten or unlived in your life. It may be to remember your affection for the wider community to which you belong; the wind, the fox in the woods, the streams and moon. Our time together will offer avenues into a greater intimacy with your life and world, with the terrain indigenous to the soul. Our explorations will lead us into….

Recovering the ritual of everyday life

Exploring the dreamtime and the life of the fertile imagination

Reclaiming the indigenous soul and its connection with nature and community

The roots of our belonging in the world

Nurturing creativity and purpose

Facing the fierce edge of grief and sorrow

The Mentoring sessions are designed to offer sufficient time to explore the issues we are working with in depth. For individuals, the meetings last from one to two hours in length. We will usually meet or talk once a month. Additional times can be arranged. Recommendations for integrating these sessions will be given to assist in drawing meaning from our time together.

For groups, we will contract for a series of meetings and then negotiate further work. Through ritual, dreamwork, imaginal exercises, development of personal practices and dialogue, we will reach for the unseen world, offering our gestures of welcome. Reclaiming our Deep Story moves us closer to the soul’s rhythms, which invites us to bring our unique gifts into the world, gifts essential for our shared future together.

To arrange a consultation for yourself or your group, please call Francis at 707-568-5803.

Francis Weller MA, MFT, has been working with the emotional, creative and spiritual life of men and women for over twenty-five years. He is a community builder, writer, teacher and psychotherapist in Sonoma County. He draws from an extensive background in depth psychology, mythology, group work and indigenous traditions. His work embodies his love of soul, the arts, ritual and his devotion to bringing these into living and sustainable community. He is the founder/director of WisdomBridge and author of the forthcoming A Trail on the Ground: Tracking the Ways of Our Indigenous Soul.