Girls Identity and Empowerment Workshop
Offered by Dicki Johnson Macy, PhD, LMHC, BC-DMT
Coming-of-age teenagers, and even young adults in college, are bombarded with changes that they perceive as out of their control. The onset of puberty and the shift from the security of the one elementary classroom to the many periods, teachers, subjects, and physical rooms of high school, represent changes that are both internal and external. This time is ripe for identity confusion. This workshop provides a safe arts-based platform where girls might explore feeling associated with this coming of age, normalizing, and validating them all. It includes exploring and participating in established (but forsaken in western culture) rites of passage as well as rituals from traditional cultures. I know that teens are hungry for such rituals. I have heard, increasingly, that high school students, limited to virtual interaction, have chosen to create their own rituals and ceremonies. Some teachers have listened to their voices and have validated their wishes. The need to have these young voices heard and responded to shapes my recommendation for creating the space for their art and rituals, both individual and collective to emerge. These sessions offer multi-modal experiences. Included are gesture, movement, visual art, guided imagery, all of which encourage the development or enhancement of individual and collective empowerment. I have piloted this program in a New Hampshire public Middle School and in a High School. I will offer one session to adolescent girls and one to mothers and/or teachers. Each session will be limited to 6 participants.
Nature Based themes. Include:
Grounding/Stability Earth Element Symbology
Wisdom/Spirit Air Element Symbology
Emotion/Expression/Vocalize Water Element Symbology
Strength/Energy/Resilience Fire Element Symbology
Wise Women Rites of Passage Workshop
Offered by Dicki Johnson Macy, PhD, LMHC, BC-DMT
This workshop offers to participants the opportunity for transforming the perceptual distinction of aging from “elderly” to “elder”. The former implies degradation and decay, the latter acknowledges the wisdom gained through life experience. Personal and collective rites of passage are explored and developed. Borrowing tools from earth-based cultures, this workshop empowers women to reclaim their voices which continue to be truncated in patriarchal cultures. This workshop is arts based with explorations inclusive of: Movement, guided imagery, music, story and elder fairy tales, and journaling. Limited to 6 participants.
Explorations and Tasks:
1) Balance and Safety. In youth, the hero fears falling which equates with fear of failure. The ego and the development of identity and validation by the social and external environment is central as the youth projects forward momentum into the future. For the elder, fear of falling becomes the fear of lost balance, of losing mobility, of breaking the physical body. This beginning ritual will encourage practicing physical and emotional balancing.
2) Exploration of three phases of female development: maiden-mother-elder. The images of the Beech tree in varied stages of development are offered as symbols for embodiment. The collected stories and memoirs that are gifts of having lived so many years and accrued memoirs, are represented by the Elder Beech tree.
3) Integrating Conscious and Unconscious as symbolized by the images, respectively, of land and sea: Reflecting upon the essential theme in elder tales, the confrontation of neglected
aspects of the self which are hidden in the unconscious.
4) Reclamation of wonder and delight in life.
5) Generativity (paying it forward).