A Mandorla Sharing by Loraine
What a beautiful shining light this work has been in allowing me to connect and find my way home, not just to the beautiful land I am so in love with but also to myself and my own ‘body of land’ I am now able to call home and gently begin to/have begun to fall in love with.
It was Feb 2014 a year since I had begun to explore shaminism with the Sacred Trust in London. I was living in Stourbridge working as a freelance art therapist traveling between various West Midland cities. I had recently started attending 5 Rhythms and between dance and shamanic workshops I responded to an advert for Carolines Magic Of Mandorla workshop through Annemieke in Amsterdam. I stayed at the venue and met beautiful artistic Lies Van Hee, her beautiful soul left a deep impression with me.
The workshop was a profound and deep experience for me. Its raw power both, as having my Mandorla danced for me and dancing and being asked to represent aspects of others Mandorla’s was so deep I can close my eyes and feel it, see it and rejoice it as if I was there.
My own Mandorla was the deep struggle I was in within myself, of desperately wanting to return to South Africa, my homeland and the home of my two grown up children, two of my grandchildren on the one side and the fear to let go of the work and life I had built up in the UK since 2001. When I had gone to the UK to study Art Therapy and had journeyed into incredible places of self discovery and freedom and I guess I had no idea how to marry the two parts of myself, that were pulling in opposite directions.
Making the Mandorla through collage allowed me to connect to the deep polarity I was living with and had been living with for a few years, it took courage to finally allow my Mandorla to be danced and I think I was one of the last few in the process. I remember how excrutiating it was for me to be the focus and I think I even excarnated a bit as I have some blanks and the dancers represented and mirrored back to me my own stuckness and the almost stagnant stalemate I was in, it was deep and painful and very profound and while the solutions and resolutions were not immediately outwardly visible to me, that workshop, that first meeting with movement medicine, with Carolines unique way of holding Sacred space through dance and artistic expression, was the catalyst that broke open my stagnant stalemate and set in motion, my active journey home.
In April 2014 only a month after attending the workshop I handed in my notices at my various places of work, handed in my notice on my bedsit, and went for an interview to do live in care to save the money I would need to return and set up home in Cape Town. In July/August 2014 I drove to Wales with my car as a home, attended an 11 day Vision Quest and by end of August recieved my first Live in Care placement in my new transition life.
When I saw the advertisement for CapeTown Hollow Bone (Carolines ongoing course) I saw it as the bridge that would help me to cross back over, and it was indeed the beautiful rainbow bridge that helped me walk and dance my way home.
In March 2016 exactly 2years after My Mandorla workshop I paid the deposit to lease my little flat beside the sea here in Fish Hoek.
The journey has been deep and initiatory, I was naive to have thought it could have been any other way and still continues to be. I am so grateful to be here, in this land, my ancestral land feeling the deepest pain and the most exquisite joy that I am here.
So when sharing words on a Mandorla experience I respond from a place of such deep gratitude to Caroline and the deep impact her work has had and hopefully will continue to have on my life.
Namaste, blessings, love and gratitude.
Loraine
