Through my workshops, circles, and retreats, I take participants into the world of plants, mythologies, and ancestry, using different ways of learning to see our stories in new ways. By cultivating relationships with plants, archetypes, elements, ancestors, and our bodies, we can discover alternative pathways to seeing our world. I guide these sessions using writing, movement, and contemplation with gentleness and care for the needs of each person.
Participants will be inspired to rewrite their own individual and collective narratives in a more inclusive way that integrates the many layers and nuances of our human experiences. This can help create a better self / worldly -connection and assist in processing an emotion through embodied movement or the experience of writing a story or screenplay. In addition, I have mentored groups of youth, and journalists, by making a film from A to Z, using straightforward equipment like a smartphone, to make storytelling accessible to all.
If you are interested in hiring me to facilitate a workshop or retreat for a group of people or an organization, please be in touch with deema@yansoon.ink.
We are storytelling creatures, our minds constantly working to give meaning and make sense of our lives and the world around us. Stories are built on emotions, and both exist in our bodies. As a filmmaker, I learned from Walter Murchs’ “6 Rules of Editing” that feeling comes before the story. If we are not emotionally engaged, our attention will wander, no matter how well the story is put together.
We live in an age where older kinds of intelligence are coming back, emotional, somatic (body), and earth intelligence, to name a few. Indigenous societies everywhere knew so and used this intelligence to understand the world, themselves, and their relationships. Yet we live profoundly disconnected, validating scholarly ways of knowledge above all else.
Mind is necessary, too, yet when we dismiss all the other forms of knowing, we see the world in black and white and use this distorted thinking to create divisive stories about ourselves and our world.
One thing I love about mythologies is how they would shift and transform over time and place. They are meant to be this way, yet somehow we live in a world where our mythologies have been set in stone and haven’t changed for a few thousand years.
Because stories are alive, and we are story beings, we must work to unlearn these limitations and relearn the art of allowing our narratives to grow as we do. Thus we can reclaim our portrayals. When we reconnect to the wisdom that lives in our bodies, our lineages, comes through our dreams, life themes, desires, and relationship with the earth, we bring deep healing to ourselves and our world.
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Below is my workshops CV that outlines my previous experience as workshop facilitator, film instructor and story consultant. Please reach out if you would like to discuss opportunities to collaborate.
Below are a series of images from various workshops, retreats, circles I have facilitated (and co facilitated) over the years. I am currently co facilitating online circles with 3 other facilitators, you can find out more, and learn about upcoming events here.
Yansoon.ink: Stories From the Levant 