Perhaps it is only through my own initiation into motherhood that I have mustered the courage to face this archetype directly. Since giving birth to my daughter, 5 years ago, I have felt a growing urge to glimpse the underworld of motherhood. Something in me longed for a more whole aspect of Mother, more truly human (that is to say, more animal) than the angelic caricature that civilization encourages, worships, and clings to. I am drawn to the multifacetedness of the whole Mother, and the countless ways in which this foundational archetype shapes us all in countless ways.

I see fleeting glimpses of my own psychic materials relating to Mother (the archetype) on a daily basis as I walk the path of motherhood. Daily, I traverse a great arch of feeling that undulates between profound love and impatient frustration in the blink of an eye. Recently, while contemplating the day's challenges during a long walk through the woods, I suddenly saw the entirety of Motherhood contained within the metaphor of a Great Weave. In my mind's eye, feelings of love, anger, joy, grief, pride, inspiration and sadness interwove as strands of yarn, weaving over and under one another, every thread suspended in the warp of my own motherline; taut and bright in some places, sagging and dark in others. There, beneath the weft of my own life, for the first time I clearly witnessed the long line of mothers who came before me: ghosts in the underworld planting potatoes, stirring soups, rocking baby after baby in their arms. Their fierce loves, their unfathomable losses, and their unlived lives are all still there—buried deep beneath the warp of my own life's story.

I would like to invite you to join me in exploring the profound tapestry of the Mother Archetype through a Jungian perspective of myth and fairytale. Together, we will look to the mother figures from the stories (virtuous, evil and everything in between) to lead us into those realms within where the many faces of mother dwell. For as Marion Woodman writes in The Maiden King: “As in the world of dreams, the characters in a fairytale are the personifications of psychic energies bound to the body and arising from it.” 

Together, through the dance practice, we will ask : how are the psychic energies of the Mother Archetype moving through us all? How do they affect our physical and emotional bodies? Where do we feel an absence or excess of Mother in our lives? Have we been affected by Negative Mother? By Too-Good Mother? Are parts of us being destroyed and devoured by Death Mother ? In short, we will meet Mother Goddess figures throughout the mythic tapestry of the world, and find whether we have the courage to look into their many faces—human and animal, angelic and demonic—as we follow them into our own bodies through the dance.

Class 1: Absent Mother

Class 2: Stepmother

Class 3: Too Good Mother

Class 4: Death Mother

Class 5: Crone Mother

Class 6: Natural Mother