Drinking from the Stream
Intuitive creativity, SoulCollage®, and three centres of knowing.
The Soul Shed exists whenever and wherever we gather together, but when you imagine it, I’d love you to picture it at the edge of deep woodland, beside a stream fed by underground springs.
The water of this stream is your intuitive creativity. A visit to The Soul Shed might be a time to sit on the bank and contemplate that beautiful water sparkling and dancing around rocks and reeds. You might kneel at the waters edge and have a good long drink from the water from cupped hands, or perhaps you’ll decide to paddle or bathe.
Your mind, heart and body intelligences, may already know about the goodness of this kind of self -connection; that time tending your intuitive creativity is a deep kind of self care worth seeking out.
Or, you may have found your way here quite accidentally.
Since building The Soul Shed, I have been deepening both my own soulcollage® practice, and my facilitation of intuitive spaces. Over time I have come to recognise that it is often through one of these three centres of being that each of us might chose to approach something new.
In the words of John Harper1, the heart perceives through resonance, the head centre perceives through clarity and insight, and the body perceives through immediacy.
When you correspond with an image and simply know it belongs in your collage, that knowing might come as an emotional wave, a spark of inspiration, or an instant gut response.
This post comes from my desire to circle back to SoulCollage® itself, and to remind you that it is a living practice behind this writing, and an experience available to you if you feel pulled explore it.
And if you are a soul shed subscriber joining us later today, SoulCollage® will be at the heart of our time together as we explore archetypes of seasonal change and abundance. Depending on your timezone, there may still be time to book!
Whether you’re moving through Spring or Autumn, you’ll likely be recognising something of this energy of change moving through life on earth at these times. These archetypes we spend time with, and the collages we make, will become ways of us connecting more deeply with ourselves and with one another in our shared human experience.
You may already recognise yourself as gravitating more towards one of these ways of knowing: Heart, head or gut.
I’ve written three earlier pieces, each speaking most deeply to one of our centres; to one of the ways of being with the stream. They offer different thresholds into SoulCollage® and into the deeply human practice of coming home to yourself.
A piece for your heart:
‘You, who let yourself feel’
Exploring SoulCollage® as a human way of roosting
If you enter through your heart, this piece explores SoulCollage® as a way of listening to all the tender, relational, grieving, loving parts of ourselves — the parts shaped by memory, longing, friendship, family, nature, and the aches and joys in being human.
A piece for your head:
Upholding Gentle Mirrors: The illuminating pairing of SoulCollage® and the Enneagram
If you enter through your head, this piece explores imagination, symbolism, the Enneagram, and the deep patterns through which we organise experience. They invite a gentler kind of knowing. This is not about observing or categorising the self from the outside, but rather in listening to it.
And if you’re entering through your body:
Imagination, will make a human of you.
A SoulCollage® journey through the inner realms of the suits
If you enter through your body, this piece is rooted in practice, instinct, image, breath, body, rhythm, and creative ritual. SoulCollage® becomes less of an idea and more of a lived encounter with life moving through you. A bathing in the water, with all its currents and eddies.
If any of this is bringing you an inner yes, I would love to welcome you to SoulCollage® at The Soul Shed !
Paid subscribers here get 15% discount on all one to one offerings.
I look forward to creating with you soon.
John Harper: Why study Personality: ‘The self that didn’t choose itself’. Google books. 2025.