The Art of Transformation

Tuesday, 28 April | Online | 18h00-20h30

Has your thinking grown a bit dull, despite your many glittering experiences?

We live in a time that worships the body. And rightly so - the body is sacred, intelligent, and long neglected. We are learning to feel more, sense more, inhabit ourselves more fully.

And yet. The alchemists understood that mind and body are not opposites but reflections of each other. That words too can be embodied. That ideas can be tasted. That the imagination itself is a felt experience - not an escape from the body, but its deepest expression.

All this work with the body is essential. And now, the mind asks for equal care.  Not the analysing, managing, optimising mind - but the wild, dreaming, image-making mind the alchemists knew as the seat of transformation.

Join us for The Velvet Monkey - an evening of lectures to arouse your imagination and invite new ways of thinking about, and feeling into, the substance of your life. Alchemy teaches how to read the meaning already alive inside your experiences.

Come let your mind be sensualised.

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SESSION 1 | 18h00 – 19h00 | An Introduction to Alchemy: What Matters - With Mordechai Brodie

What is alchemy, really? Not the stuff of chemical laboratories, nor the numerous modern adaptations, but a living symbolic system for understanding how things, and people, transform. An accessible and enlivening introduction to the ideas of Hillman, Jung and Von Franz.

SESSION 2 | 19h30 – 20h30 | The Alchemy of Relationship: The Death Marriage - With Siobhan Brodie

The central issue in relationship is intimacy, rather than happiness. It is the willingness to enter a process of undoing where desire binds, identity dissolves, and something other reveals itself.

The Alchemic Mermaid: What the Mirror Reflects - With Anthea Henry

The mermaid enchants - but below the surface beauty, lives something cold, ungraspable, and primal. In a culture that wants the warmth without the depths, alchemy asks us to embrace both.

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Cost ZAR500. (USD35 for overseas). To book: tygress@tamboo.co.za.

Artwork on Pinterest: A Wild Savanna Velvet Monkey, by Patricia Traub.