Schedule

Myths that Guide us through Grief and Loss workshop

8:00am Gather at Star Haven Ridge for  daily opening

9:00am-11:30am Lecture with Lynn Bell

11:30pm-1:00pm Lunch Break (Lunch Included)

1:00pm-3:00pm Interactive group work with Lynn Bell

Dinner in Town & Stargazing

Myths that Guide us through Grief and Loss

When love, or home, or honour, is lost,  great myths and stories  give us a way through. Eros and Psyche is one of the myths that moves through many stages of disconnection and despair all in the quest to reunite with love. Other stories of separation, wandering and exile, from many of the great goddess traditions, remind us of the greater narratives in individual experience and the power of loss in  our the lives, or in the experience  of our ancestors. How do our  own charts reflect these stories?

Sometimes we lose what we love because we cannot see others as they are. Who do we listen to? Where do we turn? Often this is the beginning of the soul’s journey. Psyche becomes contaminated by the negativity of others, and love flies away. She is determined to find it again, but often cannot discriminate between helpful and harmful advice. Her  impossible tasks are often solved by outside help, but often in ways she barely understands. Her tale is one of awakening. 

Sometimes we are part of an unbearable situation. An entrapment.  Our closest relationships have frightening, claustrophobic, even dangerous  elements. Dealing with the monster, even at the cost of personal betrayal, is a at the core of Ariadne’s story. She risks everything to  break a destructive cycle. She chooses love above all. But the outcome is not what she imagines. She is asked to face the pain of loss and abandonment. And yet another path awaits her.

Sometimes outside  fate intervenes, and we follow a dark path where what we have lost never returns.  We are forever changed . The world changes with us. It goes into mourning and loses its brightness, its greenness.  In a hidden place, the path of those we loved continues without us. Our fates are no longer entwined.  The deep mourning of the mother, the sister, the beloved, for those who will not return is part of Demeter’s story.

Each of these losses changes the way we love. The way we truly know love.

Schedule

The Dark Side of Venus workshop

8:00am Gather at Star Haven Ridge for  daily opening

9:00am-11:30am Lecture with Lynn Bell

11:30pm-1:00pm Lunch Break (Lunch Included)

1:00pm-3:00pm Interactive group work with Lynn Bell

Dinner in Town

7:00pm-8:00pm New Moon Ceremony 

The Dark Side of Venus

Our experience of the feminine ranges from empathy to purifying rage, reflected by the exaltation of  Venus in Pisces  and  its ‘detriment’ in Virgo, while Scorpio, in many minds,  also holds a place of dark initiation. It would be more accurate to say that every planetary placement has a light and dark side, if we look deeply enough. In our culture, Venus has for too long been raised up in cotton candy images of the ingenue. While she can be delightful. she is much more than sweet. Venus, at her best ( or is it her worst?)  can talk us into anything.

Which face of the goddess is revealed in our own charts? Does love have a lion heart, a penetrating sting, or a limitless empathy?  Does she hold a weapon in her hand or touch us with a soft caress? The feminine, like the masculine, is not “one size fits all.” Beyond gender, beyond cultural expectation, a particular face of the human experience  is expressed with Venus. Her particular magic can draw us in, can fascinate and seduce. She can drag us down or raise us up.  The power of Venus, especially in a culture that  is ambivalent about women,  becomes evident when power is equated with the same look, the same hair, or type of lips. Is Venus then  functioning as the planet of love and beauty or does she signify something else?

In many mythologies Venus had a peaceful side, but also came as a herald of war, reflections of the Evening and Morning Star positions. Explore her phase and expression in your own chart!