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
“BodyStory was a truly transformative experience. Sonja beautifully weaves Ayurvedic wisdom with her own intuition in a way that creates profound connection to the ancient teachings.”
“Taking part in Sonja’s BodyStory class and sharing with her and others allowed my body and heart to have a more clear voice about its wants, needs and desires. Sonja created a sacred safe container for us to share openly and spontaneously.”
“I have participated in several SevaMama online courses and each has enriched my life in a different way. With each course, I gain new insights and build my Ayurvedic toolbox.”
The Journal
Love Bombs
“I love you” used to be a compliment, now it’s more of a curse. See it in the way we settle for the mechanics. How we take juiceless walks through songs we should slow dance to. Why we tap a thirst trap and still stay thirsty. Our shields are raised. Our arms are...
Love in the blue lights
Love is on the screen again. I swipe away the men like flies who share the secrets of the not-so-fair sex. My eyes linger on the sad poetry that falls from the mouths of the women who have loved and lived to tell the tale. And when someone is brave enough to offer...
Naive
He called me naive, but he didn’t realize that I was simply rooting for him. I know that the path where words align with action is built on uneven ground. I was perched on a high branch above him hoping he would find his footing. He called me naive, but he didn’t...