Befriend your body. Rewrite the story of your life.
BodyStory
Your Body is Legendary. It’s time to tell your story.
Welcome to BodyStory, the course on you.
Twice a year, I offer an online guided journey called BodyStory. Each offering is a path to understanding your body, your story. Because when you know how you became you, you can live more authentically in the skin you’re in.
Each six-week journey is a walk through a forest filled with myth, archetype, wisdom teachings from Ayurveda and yoga, intuitive development, embodied expression, and creative journaling. Through this magical combination you’ll explore the narratives that make you, you and write the legend of your life.
BodyStory offers healing techniques and tools that you can use for the rest of your life and experiences that will deepen your relationship with your physical form and offer you a safer way to grow spiritually.
BodyStory: Mother
Enrolling Now: Engage at your own pace with live Q&A Sessions
This winter’s offering is an exploration of your body, your relationships, and the origin of it all – your mother.
The central questions we’ll explore are:
Where – ancestrally speaking – did you come from?
How is your mother’s influence written on your body?
When and how did you differentiate yourself from the one who made you, you?
We’ll explore these questions by exploring the moment that you made yourself different from your mother – in your sexual coming of age.
We’re doing it this way because your mother gave your body. She gave you her DNA. She gave you your ancestral karma. She gave you your eyes, ears, and genitals. She also gave you your hang ups, baggage, emotional (in)security, and the foundational example of your romantic/sexual relationships – for better or worse.
The least you can do to thank her for all this is to write the story of how you are not her.
If you’re a current client, you get an even DEEPER discount, via THIS LINK. Make sure you’re logged in when you try it!
Join BodyStory: Mother
Explore your body as a metaphor for your life. Join BodyStory: Mother
Six-week course starts November 8, 2022. Live Q&A calls weekly Mondays at 2:00 p.m. PT (course content is online and intended to be digested at your own pace)
If you’re a current client, you get an even DEEPER discount, via THIS LINK. Make sure you’re logged in when you try it!
Ancient Stories/Modern Scenes
BodyStory: Mother is set against the backdrop of the ancient Greek myth of Demeter, the goddess of the harvest, and her separation from her beloved daughter, Persephone, who transforms from the virginal goddess of springtime to the queen of the underworld. As we venture through this tale, we’ll explore what your parents taught you about love, your body, and your desire to be at once similar to and different from their experiences.
At the end of this course you will have written a sexual coming of age story, an account of how you came from there and ended up here.
What You’ll Learn
You come from somewhere. And that somewhere affects how you act wherever you are now.
Bad breakups or happy marriages.
Falling in love or keeping your heart off limits.
Feeling safe enough to separate or desperately clinging to what’s known.
All of this has an origin in your body. And your body has an origin in your mother and father.
But – and there’s a big but – just because you were shaped one way doesn’t mean you’ll always be that way. You came from your mother, but you became you. You can honor where you began and where you have ended up.
BodyStory: Mother will guide you through a process of retelling the story of your origin, how it shaped you, and how you changed the course of your story.
Write Your Coming of Age Story
As you absorb wisdom teachings and embodiment practices, you’ll rewrite the tale of the moment when you turned away from who she was and became who you are – your sexual coming of age. But we won’t stop there. Rather than just writing what happened, we’ll heal that story by either locating ways you acted as your own hero or by engaging in fantasy about how you wish your mother would have acted.
The six-week journey is a retreat into honoring where you came from, witnessing how you overcame the odds, and letting the parts that don’t serve you fade into the past.
Heal your present relationships by healing your first relationship.
Week by Week
The backstory of this the story of Demeter, the Greek mother goddess, and her beloved daughter, Persephone, who began as a virginal springtime goddess and ended up as queen of the underworld and wife of Hades. Each week includes a retelling of a part of that story alongside embodiment practices and guided journaling to tell the story of your coming of age.
Week 1: Innocence
- Innocence: Locate your starting point, the place where you were your mother/father and they were you.
- Storytelling: Demeter, the mother of all.
- Embodiment practice: Map the points on your body of similarity and difference to your mother/father.
Week 2: Conflict
- Conflict: Explore one critical turning point in your relationship with your parents. Maybe you did something they didn’t want you to do. Maybe you did it the way they wanted, only to find out that you don’t want to do it like them.
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Storytelling: Persephone finds a Narcissus
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Embodiment practice: Mourning the loss of innocence
Week 3: Confusion
- Confusion: Return to the disruption of the known and learn to embrace it as way you learn your yeses and nos.
- Storytelling: Persephone underground/Demeter’s madness
- Embodiment practice: Blind choice
Week 4: Decision
- Decision: Have a reckoning with what you did, learning that there are no wrong answers.
- Storytelling: Persephone’s seeds/Demeter’s healingRelease attachment to the old and embrace the only constant in life – change.
- Embodiment practice: Self-soothing. Role play to revisit the moment of decision, but this time your way.
Week 5: Reunification
- Reunification: Come home with new eyes.
- Storytelling: The cost of Persephone’s freedom
- Embodiment: Mirror practice – a homecoming. Come back home with fresh eyes. Meet your mother/father with the wisdom you’ve gained.
Week 6: Integration
- Integration: Weave yourself back to the wholeness of you to gain the true wisdom of your coming of age.
- Embodiment practice: Deaths and celebrations
- Storytelling: Persephone and Demeter: In perfect balance
- Embodiment: Sorry/not sorry – a sacred apology for integration
Join BodyStory: Mother
Explore your body as a metaphor for your life. Join BodyStory: Mother
Six-week course starts November 8, 2022. Q&A calls weekly on Mondays at 2:00 p.m. PT (course content is online and intended to be digested at your own pace, with live Q&A sessions to supplement)
If you’re a current client, you get an even DEEPER discount, via THIS LINK. Make sure you’re logged in when you try it!
In Your Words
“I am a changed person because of Sonja and so are my relationships.”
"I was surprised by how well Sonja really listened to me, and not just my words. She is present, and thus can find the deeper expression among all the rambling and 'I don’t knows.'"
"Sonja is a wise, authentic guide teaching deep and mind-blowing truths using a fun, light-hearted approach.
After each session, I feel more in touch with my intuition and filled with optimism."
The Journal
Karma yoga (on the path of motherhood)
I like the skins on sweet potatoes. I enjoy their texture and I like knowing that there are nutrients in them. I also don’t particularly like peeling them. It adds an extra step that is not necessary, which makes a difference in the limited time I have to cook us a meal. But she doesn’t like them. If I leave the skins on anything — sweet potatoes, carrots, grapes, even chickpeas — she sticks out her tongue and spits until the offending characters out of her mouth. Perhaps the texture is too much for her smooth baby tongue. Or maybe she doesn’t have the right technique to adequately grind the skins down with these new teeth of hers. My job is to smooth the rough road ahead of her, so I peel the sweet potatoes before I put them in the food we will share.
This too with love
I lived on Kauai for the past two years. During that time I never seemed to see the news. No one I knew had televisions and I almost never saw a paper. But as we are transitioning our life to Mexico, I have been stationed at my in-laws’ house in a suburban purgatory for a month. This is my vacation to the rest of the world. Here, the news is a part of life.
It’s not that I value being uninformed. Quite the contrary. It is that I value learning what I need to learn without taking a healthy dose of fear alongside it. It is possible to do this, though it does take a bit of work because everyone has a slant, including me.
How I learned to become an Ayurvedic baker (plus a recipe for cookies you can eat for breakfast)
When I was in my early twenties, I woke very, very early and hauled myself into a kitchen of a cafe in Boulder, Colorado. I flipped on the lights at 5:00 a.m., turned on the ovens, and spent my morning hefting gigantic trays of steaming muffins, pies, and cookies from back of house to front.
Baking has been in my DNA since I was born, and it was delicious fun to live out my childhood fantasies as a professional baker. But as much as I loved spreading the perfect cream cheese frosting on a carrot cake, this new direction kept appearing for me. At the same time I was learning to perfect my cheesecake recipe, I was learning about the effects of refined sugar on my body. I was whipping up layer cakes while doing candida cleanses, and suddenly it just fell apart. I left my job as a sugarplum drug dealer and sadly tucked my apron deep into the back of my pantry.