Do You Hear Seal-Woman Calling?

Stories of seal-women drift across the sea from the windswept coasts of Scotland to the icy shores of the Arctic. In the Scottish and Irish Highlands, Seal-women are known as selkies—shapeshifters who live as seals in the ocean, and who, when they shed their skins, walk as women on land. These selkie women dance beneath the moonlight, their laughter echoing across the waves as they rejoin their sisters in joyful reunion with the earth.

But these tales rarely end in freedom.

Too often, a hunter watches from the shadows and hides the selkie’s skin while she dances. Powerless to return to the sea, she is bound to life on land, far from her soul-home. She might bear him a child and tend his hearth, but too often her eyes turn to the wide horizon. Slowly, her hair begins to fall out. Her body aches with the strain of staying. Her skin dries and her soul dims.

And then—often with the help of her child—she finds her hidden skin. Though her heart is torn, she wraps herself in her pelt and returns to the sea. To herself. To vitality. To her original rhythm.

Stories like these carry the same deep current: a soulful creature exiled from her instinctive life, forced to adapt to a world that cannot perceive her wildness. She does what she must to survive. Until something shifts. She remembers and begins the journey back.

Reclaiming What Was Yours All Along

I believe this story resonates so widely because it captures something many of us have felt, whether quietly or fiercely. There are times in a woman’s life when something essential seems to fall away, become buried, traded or taken—by circumstance, culture, relationship, motherhood, illness or career. We carry on. We hold things together. But a part of us is withering inside as we slowly lose touch with our inner currents.

Maybe you have experienced that too. A season of dryness. A sense of spiritual or creative exhaustion. A loss you can’t quite name. An ancient longing that tugs at your bones and won’t be reasoned away.

This story offers both a mirror and a path.

A Moment to Reflect

Imagine you’re at the seashore, the waves gently lapping on the sand. You can let yourself rest for a moment and reflect on the tides of your life. Let these questions rise and fall through your body with your breath. You don’t need to answer right away, but if you have a moment, why not grab your notebook and let your thoughts and images flow onto paper?

• What have you had to leave behind to survive? If you didn’t have your soul-skin, what next best solution did you work with?
• What did this give you – like the spirit child from this unexpected union?
• Where did you lose your vitality and health?
• What needs to be remembered in your life?

These questions are not meant to stir guilt or self-judgement. They encourage a compassionate listening to the deep currents inside yourself. Perhaps a small memory surfaces—a song you used to sing, a way you used to move, a longing for silence, for the sea, for sacredness. Perhaps your body softens as you realise how much you’ve held. Perhaps there is grief. Give it to the ocean, she can hold all and more.

This is where the dance begins, with remembrance.

My Own Sealskin

This story has literally wrapped itself around me like a second skin. I was born in the Dutch polder—land that was sea until just decades before my birth. I often say I’m a mermaid pulled from the clay. That proud feature of engineering, of reclaiming land from the sea, has always made me feel somewhat rootless, in-between.

In concrete ways, having moved between countries, cultures and many homes, I’ve often felt like an outsider. But more than that, I’ve felt the disorientation of living in a world that moves too fast for soul. Where the sacred feels sidelined. Where intuition is drowned out by information. Where the body is ignored unless it performs well…

Stories of Selkies and Seal-Women remind me that I, too, am a shapeshifter. That I can live between worlds. That my skin, like the wrapping of my soul, is never truly lost, only veiled or hidden. I know that the path back to it is not linear. It loops and curls, like tides and eddies. And dance, always, brings me home.

These myths do not live only in books. They live in our bones. In the way we walk through the world. In the dreams that won’t leave us alone.

The Invitation

This July, I’ll be guiding a Sealskin Soulskin weekend in Birmingham, UK (25–27 July 2025). This is where Conscious Dance meets Women who Run with the Wolves (Pinkola Estés).

It’s not a storytelling circle or a workshop to talk about the feminine. It’s embodied ritual, a weekend to reawaken your inner dancer (even if you didn’t know you had one!), to enter sacred ceremony and to remember an essential quality you lost or that never had a change to fully emerge.

We will:

• Move through the myth’s four stages: arrival, loss, exile and return
• Retrieve your symbolic sealskin in ceremony—your vitality, creativity, sensuality and unique voice
• Create practices and rhythms to bring these insights home, so your return is not just symbolic, but lives with you from that moment on

This is a space where women return to themselves. Together. You don’t need to be a dancer. You don’t need to ‘believe’ anything. You just need a body and a longing to come home to it.

As one participant said:

“I felt something reawaken in me that has been needing a little time and attention… I’ve returned to my life with a renewed sense of myself and what matters to me.”

And another:

“The ceremony with four places literally transformed my life. The integration continues years after, and I still harvest insights from it.”

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Join Me if You Hear the Call!

The sea remembers you. Your sealskin is waiting. Let’s return to vitality together.

📅 25–27 July 2025
📍 Birmingham, UK (B19 area)
👯 Women only, non-residential
💰 €230 / or 2 x €115
🌿 Early Bird until 15 May: €200
🌊 Bring a Friend (book by 18 July): €190 each

Read more and sign up here

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Invitation

Bio

She completed her PhD in dance anthropology at Roehampton University, trained in depth with the Scandinavian Centre for Shamanic Studies and the School of Movement Medicine. Eline worked at the Centre for Dance Research (C-DaRE) at Coventry University for five years, where she created a Somatics Toolkit for Ethnographers, and pioneered soulful academic pedagogy. Her recent book Dancing in the Muddy Temple: A Moving Spirituality of Land and Body was well received as a unique blend of theory and practice and a medicine for our times. 

She is now a full-time change-maker and facilitates deep transformation through coaching and courses both online and in person. Wild Soul Centre offers a set of embodied, creative, and spiritual tools to re-connect with inner strength and navigate life’s challenges with confidence. 

Website: https://www.elinekieft.com Also on Facebook | Instagram | Twitter | LinkedIn