Waking the Well

(v) an Old English phrase for the practice of holding vigil by a well to receive guidance from the waters, often practiced by women in the night.

The Work of Brielle Elise, MA

mythopoetic imagination ✹ postfeminism & eros-reclamation ✹ emergent feminine leadership

This body of work is devoted to returning women to the wells (of the female body and of the earth) and to the wellspring within.

“There is a fund of ancient knowledge in our very bloodstream, if we but knew it. The secrets of the runes, the megalithic stones, the mysterious process we call language— our ancient foremothers understood them – are there in the flowing blood, witnessed to by such oracles as myth, symbol, tradition, parable, fairy tale, ritual and legend. I am not talking here of what is known as the supernatural or of extra-sensory perception. No, I speak of the substantial bloodstream and the body that contains it, microcosm of the macrocosmic planet and all its running rivers. In every tradition, every religion, the body is the essential alchemical vessel in which everything happens..."
~ P.L. Travers, What the Bee Knows

When shown the model of the Heroine's Journey by his student Maureen Murdock, mythologist Joseph Campbell said: “Women don’t need to make the [Hero’s] journey. In the whole mythological journey, the woman is [already] there. All she has to do is realize that she’s the place that people are trying to get to...”

Welcome, I'm Brielle.

Transformational Coach for women (PCC, ICF), Scholar of Myth (MA Poetics of Imagination), Storyteller, Writer

My work is a whole-bodied prayer for women's re-membering of the wellspring within and of the female body. Weaving storytelling with transformational coaching, I midwife women along their archetypal "Heroine's Journey" — their initiatory return to wholeness by healing the extractive masculine within and reclaiming the creational power, undefended love, and fierce wisdom of the world's long-repressed feminine ground.

With the light of stories and sacred witness, I help you descend into the mysteries of your true nature, let go of what is no longer aligned, and heal the over-compensatory, over-functioning patterns in work and love (and the shame beneath) that have been constricting your vital life-force energy and protecting you from the love and creative life you truly want. Women who work with me unlock their life-force, return to love, and remember the radical sufficiency, subversive power and aliveness of simply being woman.

I draw from 8+ years in private practice, thousands of hrs of 1:1 and group work, post-graduate study in the mythopoetic imagination under the supervision of mythologist Dr. Martin Shaw, and the salt and grit of my own Heroine’s Quest into the paradoxical mysteries of the deep feminine.

Work with Me

My Approach
My work is woven of 3 core components:

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Mythopoetic Imagination

Stories, symbols & archetypal images to hear the language and guidance of your soul. Bypass the limitations of your rational mind by opening to the numinous power and brilliance of the Unconscious to illuminate the next steps in your journey.

art by Harmonia Rosales

Postfeminism & Eros-Reclamation

Advancing women's collective consciousness from the 2nd stage of independence (feminism) and its shadow of disembodied over-functioning to the third stage of sacred inter-dependence and reclaiming Eros — vital life-force energy — in your body, imagination & heart.

Emergent Feminine Leadership

Feminine leadership as receptivity, as deep listening to the Mystery. This is the Aquarian Age, the symbol of the water-bearer, of carrying water from the wellspring: Apprenticing what the world behind the world is speaking through the emergent present and responding through the whole-bodied prayer of our creative love.

The Heroine's Journey

My signature program. A 9-month journey of storytelling, postfeminist transmissions, and transformative coaching for helping women unlearn over-functioning in work, hyper-independence in love; and re-membering the ease, bliss and radical sufficiency of being woman.

Coming 2025: Get on the Waitlist

The Wellspring: Storytelling Apothecary

A mythopoetic re-membering through the oldest medicines of myth and story. Join for a single storytelling or longer 6-week to 6+ month storytelling journeys. Available live and as pre-recorded self-study.

Listen to a tale...

Postfeminism: Return to Eros & Love

Postfeminism is not anti-feminism. It is feminism in its truest form. What if the ways we are responding to patriarchy are actually perpetuating internalized patriarchy? Acknowledge and heal from the unintentional tradeoffs and silent self-contempt of liberal feminism. Remember the distinct value, creational power, bliss of being woman.

Unlearn & Remember

Substack: Waking the Well

Words for returning woman to her body, her tongue, her place, and her old ways of knowing. Waking the primordial well through the re-membering of woman. Writing from tannin rivers of the Deep South.

Read & Subscribe

“There are many kinds of power, used and unused, acknowledged or otherwise. The erotic is a resource within each of us that lies in a deeply female and spiritual plane, firmly rooted in the power of our unexpressed or unrecognized feeling... As women, we have come to distrust that power which rises from our deepest and non-rational knowledge... [but] the erotic offers a well of replenishing and provocative force to the woman who does not fear its revelation, nor succumb to the belief that sensation is enough.” — Audre Lorde

art by Gabrielle Rabinowitz

"If we can rediscover in ourselves the hidden beauty of this receptive devotion, if we can learn how to be still without inaction, how to “further life” without willed purpose, how to serve without demanding prestige, and how to nourish without domination: then we shall be women again out of whose earth the light may shine." ~ Helen Luke

✨ The Madness of Mis: a women’s live storytelling experience. Dec 14th (In person - Gainesville, FL) // Dec 15th (Online)

In this 3-hr gathering we will work with the medicines of myth, image, and movement to bypass the rational mind, breath life into calcified heartspaces, and re-member innocence and power in the female body.

This gathering might be particularly meaningful for women who:

- want to step out of the ordinary through the depth of myth, image and movement
- want to gather with women around the oldest medicine of story
- want to learn how to work with a story for healing and re-membering lost or damaged parts of you
- have hardened at some point in response to pain, and want to soften and open to receive again
- wants to break free of the cycle of repressed grief/anger towards the masculine that unconsciously attracts and recreates more of the same disappointing experiences with the masculine

✨ Comment “Mis” to join.

Next storytelling gathering: The Madness of Mis: De-Armoring & Opening to Receive ✨ Dec. 14th (in person - Gainesville, FL) // Dec. 15th (online)

Comment “Mis” to learn more or register.

With a full, warm heart, I welcome you to the fireside of story this season. Join me either in-person (Gainesville, FL) or online for this 3-hr medicinal weaving of myth, image and movement.

An old Irish folktale from the neighboring county of my maternal line, the tale of Mis is a story has been close to my heart for many years but has been loudly knocking on my door for a few months now, I believe because it is deep medicine for modern women today.

This is a story about how grief can harden in a woman’s body, and how it can open to receive love again. Whether by trigger or exhale, the story will pull at your heart-strings, undoing knots and tying new ones in the silent, mysterious way that stories do.

For the woman weary of heart and hungry for an old depth that is rarely found online or in-person these days, this gathering will be a balm to the soul... healing for body, imagination, and heart.

Let’s breathe life onto this ancientness within us, that re-members through the oldest medicines of women and story.

Comment “Mis” to join. I hope to see you there ✨

“When the Bone Mother Comes” ~ brief excerpt from my Substack: “Waking the Well.” 🌙

The Bone Mother as Life Mother: Embracing and {{listening}} to breakdown, illness, and descent to give birth to new life.

Hear the rest on my Substack
🕯️ (l!nk you know where)

#Bonemother #descent #heroinesjourney

May it be so 🙏🏼
Happy Hallow's Eve 🌙
Happy Samhain 🕯

'Postfeminism', aka 'radical feminism' is a swelling movement-response to the ways many women have and are suffering from liberal feminism's unintentional tradeoffs.

It's the acknowledgment that our liberal feminist foremothers perhaps made a big 'oops' in pursuing liberation through a self-imploding abnegation of the feminine by striving to work, f*ck, and function like men.

Now we have contorted ourselves to masculine standards in achievement, in the bedroom, in day-to-day functioning and we are finding: we are not fulfilled.

Many women in my field feel burnt out, worn down, and tired of "independence", and yearn for real shelter.

The sexual revolution has psychologically and literally harmed many of us.

And many don't feel fulfilled in love.

We are finding that the hard shells we had to put on to survive/succeed in the workplace don't work in our love lives — that we are attracting men or creating relationships where our surrender cannot flow, and we feel disappointed.

One thing our foremothers did not consider when they began this movement: how much it emerged from a bottomless pool of grief, rage, fear, and control, and how this might come back to bite us later.

We are finding that remaining in control is not actually our deepest bliss, and that while we are "safe" because we can provide for ourselves, actually many of us yearn for a deeper freedom. A freedom *of the heart* to love, to let go, and to receive.... ways in which many of us are deeply unfree.

One thing that Postfeminism means for me is radical personal responsibility. Liberal feminism points the finger "out there". Postfeminism or 'radical feminism' recognizes that the silent contempt for the feminine lives "in here", and that if we want this to heal in the world, we must heal from the inside-out.

Join me for this emergent discussion where we will share our stories and ideas in sisterhood, and see what we can collectively learn from what emerges in the space together.

Type 'postfeminism' in the comments to join — it's free ✨👇🏼

Some of you know that I recently got back from 3-month storytelling school in England. One of the stories I deepened into while there was a feminist retelling of Adam and Eve, a version that I synthesized from the Upanishads, original Hebrew translations, and a Gnostic interpretation of the story. The version I told reflected, for me, the true meaning and depth of the first woman — her wisdom of eating the "forbidden" fruit, and how it was sanctioned not by the devil but rather by the serpentine-eros-wisdom of Sophia, the Goddess of Wisdom herself who knew that separation, a descent into the grit of earth, was required for us to come to know real love. For if we do not have freedom, can love really exist?

In the paved-over patriarchal version of her story, I see the story of all women. We are embarrassed for our nakedness. We are guilty and ashamed. We have cut off from our serpentine energy, attributing blame and shame to it, misunderstanding it's power — our power. We have made ourselves less than the men we are with again and again, not understanding the creational power and *gift* of our self-generating female energy.

For many of us, Eve is our first mother, our creation-story. If she is ashamed, how can we not be?

One thing I have learned from studying myth over the years is that stories are not in the past, they in the ever-present. Myths like Adam & Eve are always happening, currently being lived through our personal life mythologies.

What would it mean to rewrite that story through our lives? To reclaim the "forbidden" fruit? To enjoy the fig juice dripping down our chin? To stop apologizing for our nakedness, for our desire? To deeply trust the current of our emotion and desire as gateways to truth? To take responsibility, in the face of blame and hatred, for the most unappreciated thing — love.

In Eve's story I see themes that are deeply relevant for women today. So I decided to create a free writing salon and new 6-week series inspired by mythopoetry about her. If you are inspired, I've love to write with you.

Link in bio or comment 'EVE' to receive the recording.

(Women-centered, men welcome by personal request)

Postfeminism 🐍

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#postfeminism #eros #femininespirituality #feminineembodiment #feminineenergetics #eve #kundalini #shakti

"The events in fairy tales portray a vital psychological reality. If we understand them, we gain a new understanding of ourselves. If we cut ourselves off from this world of images, we are separated from one of the main sources of our own life energy." ~ Sibylle Birkhauser-Oeri
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#fairytales #womenwhorunwiththewolves #folktales #storytelling #myth #mythology #wildwoman

[[UPDATE: Coming Early 2025]] The Heroine’s Journey describes the distinctly feminine wound of women who follow the external pursuit of worldly success at the expense of their creative, embodied and instinctual soul-life.

At some point a woman realizes the spiritual incompleteness of the hero’s path, and feels an urgent yearning to slow down, rest, tend to her soul and find her true creative calling.

Usually this process begins with a “descent,” the messy unraveling of everything she once knew — often in the form of burn out, sickness, depression, writer’s block, the sudden reemergence of old trauma, or losing/letting go of a job that was not truly aligned for her.

This can feel scary at first, like something is “wrong,” but actually this “descent” can and must be trusted. It is life’s way of asking her to slow down and begin a deeply meaningful “unlearning” process — unlearning the ways of the wounded hero that are not helpful for her anymore...

Once a woman learns to trust this descent & lean into it rather than away from it, something beautiful begins to happen: she starts to feel the nourishment of (finally) listening to her own soul again. And as she continues following the trail of her heart’s long-repressed desires, opportunities begin to open up to her in work & love that she could not have imagined before. Slowly she learns to trust her instincts, open to joy, soften the defenses around her heart, and trust her intuitive, feeling-body again.

With time she rebuilds a life that is truly aligned with who she is. The breakdown of the messy descent paved the way for a healing breakthrough.

This is the Heroine’s Journey: leaving the hero’s path in order to dig deep down into your soul and re-member and reclaim your own way. But first we have to 𝑡𝑟𝑢𝑠𝑡 𝑎𝑛𝑑 𝑙𝑖𝑠𝑡𝑒𝑛.

✨ Sneak peak: I am in the midst of designing my next offering, The Heroine’s Journey — a mythopoetic journey of storytelling & feminine embodiment in community. For women who want to dive deep into their soul-life and liberate the creative power and magnetic bliss of your female way. I’m still in deep creation mode, but comment ‘HER’ to receive an invite to join the waitlist 🍯

On the difference between male and female creation.

Women are creators.
Men are do-ers.

Women create through their energy, their shakti. Men create through their doing, through their male physical energy — their impetus to construct, build, and forge.

A woman who is doing will not know her real influential power, which is her energy —
a force of nature similar to the magnetism of a flower or the gravitaitonal pull of the moon.

The moon pulls through an invisible energy. Similarly, a flower doesn’t do anything except exist wonderfully, beautifully in the brilliance of its own energy, which magnetizes pollinators and nourishes the cycle of life.

A woman who is living in her energy will attract a partner who will want to do, construct, and forge for her, so she can continue to do what she does best: nourish life with the gift of her creative, regenerative, life-giving energy.

A woman doesn’t need to do anything except live from the bliss of her own energy. This is her creative power.

This doesn’t mean that women don’t do anything or pursue dreams, but that if we do it’s an act of creative play, an unforced expression of our natural energy, rather than an over-endeavor to construct, build, and forge.

A woman is nourished by her own energy, by her creative being-ness, which just is — the regenerative rippling of her essence into the world. A man is nourished by his doing, his purposeful action. Both are supported to be and do best through the gift of each other’s energy.

dear woman,
you don’t need to do anything.
your energy is your super power.
your energy is your gift to the world.
your energy is enough.
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#postfeminism #eros #femalecreativity #femininecreativity #femininepower #yonipower #shakti #yoni

“I, too, overflow; my desires have invented new desires, my body has heard unheard-of songs. Time and again I, too have felt so full of luminous torrents that I could burst…. And I, too, said nothing, showed nothing; I didn't open my mouth, I didn't repaint my half of the world. I was ashamed. I was afraid, and I swallowed my shame and my fear. I said to myself: You are mad! What's the meaning of these waves, these floods, these outbursts? Where is the ebullient, infinite woman who, immersed as she was in her naivete, kept in the dark about herself, led into self-disdain by the great arm of parental-conjugal phallocentrism, hasn't been ashamed of her strength? Who, surprised and horrified by the fantastic tumult of her drives (for she was made to believe that a well-adjusted normal woman has a divine composure), hasn’t accused herself of being a monster? Who, feeling a funny desire stirring inside her (to sing, to write, to dare to speak, in short, to bring out something new), hasn't thought she was sick?” - Helene Cixous, The Laugh of the Medusa

There is a deep anxiety that swims at the bottom of a woman’s being when she exists in a culture that has no house for her to live in; a culture of one sex — the male.

The unconscious psychic experience is as if living in a dark pit full of dread, her existence non-existent except as it relates to the male values that justify her very breathing. What remains is a void — the void of her own female-sexual-spiritual energy that she has unconsciously abandoned — which she anxiously seeks to fill by filling herself with Him. Existentially, she seeks to become Him: speak his tongue, take his dress, walk his pace, adopt his work and way. This is what Jung called “animus-possession,” a woman possessed by Logos at the expense of Eros. Such a woman discards her Eros, her lifeforce, into the abandoned recesses of her being, the absence of which leaves an unconscious yearning that nothing but her own true nature can actually fill.

In trading her own nature for the male, the free “feminist” perpetuates what the French feminist Luce Irigaray calls a cultural death through sameness — a culture of one (one sex: the male) rather than a culture between two...

The Jungian therapist Helen Luke says, “One of the most frightening characteristics of our present Zeitgeist is the urge to destroy difference, to reduce everything to a horrible sameness in the cause of ‘equality’”.

If a society can only envision equality through sameness then there is no real basis for equality, for it is only through difference that the notion of equality (amongst different others) is even possible. Difference is the fecund ground of being, the fertility of Life.

A culture of one — the untempered masculine principle — is withering the world (and a woman’s soul) in a dried up desert of logic, reason, and progress without end. This is not equality. This is colonization of the female body, psyche and tongue in the name of equality....

Excerpts from "Resurrecting Eve's Serpent: What Do I Mean by Postfeminism?": brielleelise.substack.com

#postfeminism #feminism #eros #eroticphilosophy #womensempowerment #womensstudies

Poem: The Autobiography of Eve, by Ansel Elkins

Postfeminism as I refer to it is the resuscitation of what has been unintentionally suppressed and oppressed by a patriarchal feminism — Eros, the life-force of women; the deepest, non-rational power of sexual-spiritual energy that women have severed themselves from in the name of progress, success, and achievement in a male culture.

This Eros is our true power as women, which isn’t as much a “power” (as this is fundamentally a male word) as much as it’s a force of nature, a serpentine current pushing up into this world from below through our bodies, our sex, and our love.

There is an entire subculture of women who are resurrecting the subterranean dragon once slayed by the male and female heroes of patriarchy. That dragon is Eros, one could say Eve’s serpent, our mytho-eroto-poetic lifestream — the coiled snake that lives at the base of our spines. We are liberating her from the invisible chains of a feminist freedom that is free to work, but not free to rest, play, imagine, and live from our deepest pleasure, joy, and undefended love.

Many of us women are aware by now that while feminism was a pivotal and necessary first step in our liberation, the movement was fundamentally confused in that it was based on the notion of equality-through-sameness (“women are equal if we can work like men”). The male domain — of thought and action — was upheld to the level of the gods, while the female domain — of the body and being, of birth, the ability to bring up the waters of life from below — was unconsciously held as less than. Under the new freedoms of feminism, the symbol of the phallus, the spear, the line of progress still reigned while the yoni, the womb gestating in quiet darkness was held with silent contempt.

Feminism essentially became the new handless maiden of the capitalist patriarchy, silently instilling male images of power and progress into the psyches of modern women under the guise of freedom, thus forging a wedge (or could we say, a phallus?) between herself and her own female nature...

Excerpts from "Resurrecting Eve's Serpent: What Do I Mean by Postfeminism?" brielleelise.substack.com

#postfeminism #feminism #eve #womensempowerment #eros

The reason many women feel insecure in work, life, and relationships is because we are unconsciously trying to be men and compete with men. When women stop trying to be male, as in stop orienting towards ambition and instead orient to and from the primal pulse of life-energy flowing through them, then women will feel the confidence, creativity, and bliss of being in our own skin again.

As long as we are unconsciously trying to be male, no matter how much we achieve, we will still be pervasively haunted by this fundamental existential insecurity that comes from living out of alignment with our nature. Our ontological nature as women is bliss, Eros, life-energy. Not ambition, intellect, and force.

It doesn’t mean we don’t have those qualities, too. Actually many of us are incredibly skilled with those abilities. But ultimately there is nothing that will truly fulfill and satiate our soul as much as living from the self-fulfilling reservoir of our female s3xual (lifeforce) energy. This is true bliss for women.

When we live from this infinite current within us, we become far more creative, magnetic, and generous, feeding our communities with that much needed current of Eros (life-energy or soul-force) that the world is thirsty for.

Woman, you are not an arrow. You are the wellspring. Create, speak, teach, love, build a business, write, make art from this fountain within you, and you will feel deliciously secure, confident, and alive in the bliss of your own energy again.

#womensempowerment #eros #femininesexuality #ontology #femalepower #shakti

When shown the model of the
Heroine’s Journey, Joseph Campbell said: "Women don’t need to make the [Hero’s] Journey. In the whole mythological journey, the woman is [already] there. All she has to do is realize that she’s the place that people are trying to get to.”

I’m not for a feminism that puts one gender above another, but what if women were distinctly capable of opening to bliss, pleasure, life-energy, Eros — the primal pulse of life — in a way that most men — goal-oriented, polarized in the rational mind and intellect — struggle with?

From a Vedic perspective women are shakti — life-energy personified. As women our gift to the world is not our doing, but our being: our natural ability to feel and embody the primal pulse of life-energy flowing through us as play, pleasure & love.

We only need to stop trying to be male and realize the radical sufficiency and subversive power of the female erotic ground of being.

Woman, you are the wellspring.
You are the eruption, the outpour, the numinous torrent, the land of milk and honey, the rain. You are the light and delight that the world is reaching toward, but only if you live not as an arrow, but as the wellspring that you are.

#eros #womensempowerment #heroinesjourney #josephcambpell #femininesexuality#femalesexualpower

“The flower of reality I’m committed to tending is ripe with nectar. Unfurling wildly. Bursting open with juice and scent.” — Virginia Rosenberg

Art by Kris Waldherr, from her book Persephone and the Pomegranate
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#persephone #eros #feminineenergy #femininespirituality #femininesexuality #feminineleadership

“Her libido is cosmic, just as her unconscious is worldwide. Her writing can only keep going, without ever inscribing or discerning contours… She alone dares and wishes to know from within, where she, the outcast, has never ceased to hear the resonance of fore-language... She lets the other language speak — the language of 1,000 tongues which knows neither enclosure nor death. To life she refuses nothing. Her language does not contain, it carries; it does not hold back, it makes possible...” — Helene Cixous, The Laugh of the Medusa
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#libido #femalesexuality #femininespirituality #eros #feminineembodiment #creativewriting

Fresh out the womb of 3-month storytelling school
Feeling deeply nourished
Some new babies coming through ✨
Thanks for being here with me 🌹

“The flower of reality I’m committed to tending is ripe with nectar. Unfurling wildly. Bursting open with juice and scent.” ~ Virginia Rosenberg

Eros is the creative lifeforce energy that we all came from... the underground river eternally flowing into us. In a word, Eros is Eruption. Generosity. Life.

At some point in our lives, most of us severed from this primal pulse in one way or another, losing access to our full range of expression including our pleasure, creativity and joy. Our bodies became stiff. We went into our minds. And we began living unconsciously from fear rather than our joy.

Unlocking and living from this lifeforce is key to shifting our experience in our work, relationships, and the everyday to one of abundance, creativity, courage, confidence and bliss.

After being serious and striving for a long time, returning to this distinctly female energy through movement and creative expression has been (and still is) a profoundly liberating experience for me, unlocking generosity, creativity, and unexpectedly, so much joy.

Inspired by this I want to bring others into the fountain with me:

FOUNTAIN: a 6-week Gateless Writing salon for unlocking your Eros (lifeforce) through movement, poetry & creative expression.

In this series we will use movement-meditation and the powerful poetry of female writers to touch into the fountain of our Eros (lifeforce energy) and write about the raw & real of our everyday lives

You will feel deeply nourished by this salon if you:

✹ want to liberate your primal pulse through movement and creative writing

✹ have a story, a pain, an ache, an unspeakable feeling that wants to be given form and voice through the art of writing

✹ want to quiet your inner critic and feel encouraged by having your writing gifts reflected back to you in a community of peers

✹ love to write but struggle to create the space for it or are new to writing and want to begin a regular writing practice

✹ want to liberate and discover your authentic voice

✹ are inspired to use writing as a tool for coming home to yourself in deeper, more delicious ways

✹ want to learn through experience how to drop into your depths and write from there

Limited to 8 participants. Link in bio.

I was free to work and achieve, but was I free to rest, to play, to feel good in my own skin? to delight in myself? to receive, receive, receive?… to let the world move towards me rather than me strive for the world? 🕯️

A peak into the stories we’ll be journeying with across the next 3 months ✨

learn more: bit.ly/bearmagic (link you know where)

bedtime stories ✨

An Innuit tale from Angela Carter’s Book of Fairy Tales
Illustrated by Corinna Sargood

Sound: Innuit berceuse (lullaby) from album on Ocora record label “Chants et tambours Inuit, de Thule au Détroit de Béring”, 1988

Some years ago in the campesino hills of Colombia where half of my ancestors are from (while living in a cabin that had a bee-hive in the roof!), I began to enter a world of myth, listening to stories from one of my favorite storytellers.

In the day time I would wander the rolling hills with the local dogs or sit in this beautiful windowed room listening to these mythical stories, and in the evening I’d sit by the hearth and read stories by fire-light. It was a pretty magical time.

Over the weeks, I began to feel a felt-sense presence of an "otherworld" in the natural world, like the hills were coming alive, and my imagination was coming alive too…

I began intentional journeys into my imagination, where I often received very specific guidance for my life. In one of those visions, Mother Mary appeared and said, “bring my daughters back to me”…

While I didn’t fully understand what that meant at the time, over the years that directive would unfurl itself into an incredibly meaningful (albeit sometimes confusing) journey of returning to her in body, mind, language, and spirit…

“Unlearning" an overly developed rational mind and achievement-complex, and returning to a slower, less striving, more natural and relational way of moving through the world…

With time I developed a very personal relationship with the land where I live & the natural world began to open up to me: I began to feel known (by the river, by the forest) in ways I had always wanted to feel. And walking with one particular story, I began to experience some semblance of “indigenous mind”, a consciousness of my participation with (not separation from) the natural world.

Boundaries between me and the other-than-human life around me felt less separate, and I began to hear thoughts that I believe were not my own but were spoken into me.

This is the "normal reality" that I want to help women re-enter. We have forgotten how to communicate with the otherworld in nature and imagination, but a sacred conversation is always happening if we cultivate the senses to perceive it. Myth was a central catalyst of my opening to this “otherworld”, and I pray the stories I tell will do the same for you.

Behind this topside world of our everyday activity there is another world…

A world behind the world which speaks to us through dreams, through stories, through the natural world, through the slow silent pulse of the soul that can be felt when we are quiet and still enough to feel it…

It's our connection to this invisible pulse of Life that we so often forget in the busyness of things which gives our lives substance and meaning.

And it's when we go astray from this soul-force that we become listless and susceptible to endless scrolling, endless consuming, endless wandering — searching for something we can't quite name…

Myths and stories are bridges into that otherworld of the soul. Especially the oldest myths like this woman who married a bear folktale which have literally travelled across time, across continents, and some would say across species to bring their medicine to people of many cultures around the world.

When a story has walked on all fours around the world, it usually means there is something Living in the story, something alive, and something ever-present — just as needed today as it was thousands of years ago.

In this online gathering, we will spend two hours stepping into this otherworld together with the help of a woman who married a bear story, poetry, shamanic bear folklore, and imagination practice. You are warmly invited, and I hope to see you there. (The call will be recorded for those who cannot attend live).

Hi friends, I want to re-introduce myself and my work as we have shape-shifted into a creature a bit more furry & wild over the years…

My name is Brielle. I live near tannin rivers & Spanish moss hammocks of Timucuan lands/North Florida. I’m a scholar of myth (MA), writer & transformative coach in private practice for 8 years. My post-graduate study was in the “Poetics of Imagination” with storyteller Dr. Martin Shaw, which was a sacred tracking of the human imagination via storytelling across time.

Inspired by my journey of sinking into a slower, richer life through the magic of myth & the land, I practice something we can call “eco-mythology”, where I weave storytelling, the natural world & imagination to help women heal/decolonize from pseudo-masculine agendas & return to a slower, deeper, more relational way of being in the world…

Most modern women suffer from the loss of their soul life from trying to prove ourselves in an achievement-obsessed culture. Eventually a woman wakes up from this trance & longs for the earth, and the sky, and deep rest, and her own slower, truer way.

It’s at this junction that I help women ride on the furry backs of myths to their soul life through meaningful 1:1 work & storytelling journeys where for a few hours we enter the "dreamtime" to hear how spirit is guiding us in our personal & collective lives. My aspiration is to help women re-enter this sacred conversation of Life that is always happening but we’ve lost the sensitivity to hear-sense-see.

I also facilitate writing salons to help women unlock their creative voice & use writing as a tool for healing & reclamation.

I have been in a deep grief process with the state of the world for some years and I now believe that the revolution lies in people inhabiting this slower, relational way of being that directly contrasts the fast-paced, isolated, progress-culture that is tearing the world apart. Feeding this medicine-culture is my inspiration.

Besides all that, I have a cat named Bear 🐻 and I play the fiddle 🎻 Thanks for being here & I hope to feed your soul in some way.

ps. If you'd like to hear a story, my next free storytelling is on Jan 17 ✨

Meet Baubo, the goddess of laughter, your friend when you’ve been a too-serious, too-striving woman for too long in your life 🤭 Today in a 1:1 session with a client I told her the story of Baubo…

How Demeter, the queen of fertility, is frantically wandering the land searching for her daughter Persephone who is lost. No matter who hard she searches, she cannot find her, and in her despair, everything across the land, all the wheat and olive trees and crocuses, die, and no inspiration, no ideas of where her daughter could be come to her… she gets stuck.

It is a phenomenon of modernity that many women unconsciously cut off from our joy and play in an attempt to be “good enough”, to prove ourselves through our accomplishments in a world obsessed with progress… While that works for a while, at some point our inner life becomes a wasteland of too-much seriousness, too-much striving, too-much hard work, and no Life can grow there… we lose access to our creativity, our creative voice, our muse, because quite simply: we forget how to play. How to be silly and weird and ridiculous. And creativity is born of play ✨

This is where Baubo comes in — a strange goddess who has eyes as breasts and dances around flashing Demeter with her yoni. Demeter falls to the ground laughing hysterically at the site of her, and in her fit of laughter, the idea comes in like a stream of light: to ask the Sun, who sees everything, what happened to her daughter.

This turned out to be the medicine for my client today, who has been in a stuck situation for a very long time. It’s not always the case that a story flies into the room asking to be told in a 1:1 session, but when it does happen it gives me goosebumps and brings such a medicine into the space.

Play was also the medicine of my own journey, something I unexpectedly discovered during a wilderness fast… I was all ready to have a hard-core experience, and the surprising medicine was healing from a lifetime of seriousness and learning how to play again. I love it!

May we women of modernity put down our serious masks and embrace the great goddess of laughter and joy in our lives… may we allow play to show us the way ✨✨✨

In Siberian cosmology, the universe is understood to be made of three worlds — the upper world of sky gods, middle world of humans, animals, and spirits, and the lower world of the ancestors – all connected by a world tree (Norse mythology has a similar worldview). Shamans assist the disharmonies of the middle realm by acting as emissaries between the worlds, traveling up and down the world tree via altered states of consciousness. The word “shaman” originates from the Evenki-Siberian word ‘saman’ which means “one who knows”.

Permian animal style bronze casts (pictured) with their anthropomorphic figures of humans whirling in a cacophony of birds, snakes, spiders, horses, and elks reflect an animistic, shamanic relationship with the Sacred — an understanding of an inter-dependent relationship with the non-human world.

The repeating motif of a healthy and strong female figure also reflects the belief in a life-generating goddess central to the cycle of life, our existence housed within the womb of the life-death-life cycle of that great cosmic mother.

Repeating themes are of birds, particularly the water-bird, of which the Permian peoples understood themselves to be descendants of. In Marija Gimbutas’ archeological research a water-bird-goddess is also a repeating image, along with the ancient bear-goddess. Around the 2nd millennium the goddess depicted in Permian casts became a male god.

How might our culture be different if we looked at the world through lenses like these? If we grew up with artwork like this and saw our elders proudly dawning whirling animal emblems on their belts and chests? If we were raised within a cosmology of the she-bear or bird-goddess as the great cosmic mother?

Pictured: Permian and Western Siberian animal style bronze casts from 3rd - 12th centuries CE.

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