Dancing the Stories That Heal

After a near-death experience in 2019, I found myself immersed in myth and movement—sitting with Clarissa Pinkola Estés, dancing archetypes through Movement Medicine, and weaving stories like the Handless Maiden and the Red Shoes into my everyday life. This post shares some of the journey of how myths became embodied allies and an invitation for you too, to remember what lives in your bones.

A Gift of Wild Remembering

In 2007, my friend Jo gave me a book that would literally alter my life. You may have read it too, Women Who Run with the Wolves by Clarissa Pinkola Estés. Over the year that followed, I slowly turned the pages. I recognised something ancestral, raw and real. Estés, a Jungian psychoanalyst and Curandera story-healer, writes to the soul. Her words call forth the wild feminine, the instinctual self, the one who knows through bone and breath. Both dense and lyrical, the book felt like a heartbeat I had long missed. 

Over a decade (and all her books) later, I found myself on a plane to Colorado to meet her in person, for the workshop called Singing Over the Bones. We would dive into Skeleton Woman, a story of death and dismemberment, but also of love, song and the reanimation of life. It was aptly timed, as these experiences of soul-life often are. I was recovering from a brush with death through an ectopic pregnancy. My body was still healing and I had only just been cleared to travel by the university. I remember sitting in that circle, carried by Estés’ voice as she told and unraveled the tale. It wasn’t abstract theory for me, I found myself living the myth. I was the woman being fished from the depths, bones tangled and broken, waiting to be sung to life again.

Embodiment as Practice

By then, I had been immersed in Movement Medicine with Ya’Acov and Susannah Darling Khan for 15 years. This is a conscious dance practice developed from Gabrielle Roth’s 5Rhythms, that weaves shamanic awareness, neuroscience, family constellations and deep somatic listening. It became my embodied apprenticeship into the archetypal world. 

On the dance floor, we moved with a strong trio of Innocent Fool, Dancing Warrior and Wise Elder, who live in all of us. We explored the Drama Triangle, and danced through many sequences of becoming, undoing and remembering, healing the past, being present in the present, and calling in a future that honours all creatures. Conscious dance gave me tools to navigate life’s intensity and beauty with more clarity. I learned to listen to my body’s truth, not as metaphor, but as a sacred and sovereign language. Movement Medicine offered a sacred container to feel deeply, to mark transitions and to ritualise the invisible.

Living the Myths

Certain myths have braided themselves into my life. The Handless Maiden taught me about cutting myself off from my roots and navigating profound vulnerability. Red Shoes reminded me how easy it is to lose the rhythm of the soul when driven by pressure or craving. Skeleton Woman, with her fierce teachings on love, death and resurrection, has been my companion during moments of collapse and re-emergence. And Sealskin Soulskin, the selkie tale, has become my compass back to my soul home, remembering what is essential, what must never be abandoned.

These stories do not sit on a page in black and white. They pulse through my body. I dance them into being and I guide others to do the same. With my life-long movement articulation (way before Movement Medicine I trained to become a professional dancer), I know the nuts and bolts of posture, tempo, density and rhythm, of moving as a group and solo. As a Qi Gong teacher I learned more about the direction of energy and life force. As a shamanic practitioner I bring this movement in connection to the unseen, the ceremonial and liminal spaces that live ‘between’. 

This is the core of my Wild Soul work: deepening our personal journey, healing, transformation and skills for everyday life through movement. Not to be self-centred, but to be ready to face the world and encounter life from a place of fullness rather than lack. So that we can meet the scary boss, the grumpy lady at the till or demands of family from an embodied connection to our life force. So that we know when we are full and need to digest, and when we are empty and need to re-charge. You don’t need to be an expert in myths or archetypes (although you might be!). You already have access to this deep well of wisdom inside you. Movement can be one way of diving in and seeing what is at the depths of our knowing. 

An Invitation to Selkie Shores

I’m delighted to invite you to Sealskin Soulskin, a women’s workshop inspired by the Selkie myth. We’ll meet in Birmingham, UK, from 25–27 July, to combine the threads of conscious dance, story and ceremony (details below).

It’s a space for those who feel called to return to their deeper rhythm that lives beneath the roles, noise and surface tides. By exploring the different characters of the story, Seal Woman, the Lone Hunter, the Spirit Child and the Old Wise Seal, we remember we too are shapeshifters, and if we have experienced soul loss, we chart our way back to wholeness. There is a special discount if you come with a friend. If you can’t make it in person but know someone this might resonate with, please share this post!

As one participant said:

“I participated in Eline’s Sealskin Sealskin workshop in 2018, and I found it to be incredibly powerful. I loved how Eline adapted the Sealskin myth to become the map for the workshop, and I experienced my first soul fragment retrieval. Her holding of the integration process was also refined, with a deep understanding of the how to embody the lessons learned. I highly recommend working with Eline..”

You can read more about the workshop and the themes in my previous post: Do You Hear Seal-Woman Calling? I’d love to dance with you!

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Invitation

Bio

Her book Dancing in the Muddy Temple blends theory and practice in service of land, body, and spirit. Now leading Wild Soul Centre for Embodied Consciousness, she offers coaching and courses to support deep transformation and inner strength through movement and the body. You can also find her on LinkedIn, YouTube, Instagram and Substack.