Once we awaken to the awareness that we are all on a journey, life becomes much more intriguing. We begin to value knowing our inner depths, learn from our experiences rather than be victimized by them and live consciously in relation to other sentient beings with whom we share the planet.

The Grail Stories-originally written in Germany in 1208-will serve as our guide in the realms of the spirit. The journey of Parsifal, the pure hearted fool, is the story of an evolving soul. It is a story about a journey from unconsciousness, and naivete to finding one's self. On long Parsifal's journey three significant questions emerge: What ails you? How can I help? And whom do I serve? These three questions go to the heart of who we are and who we long to be as we make the earthly pilgrimage.

This six day seminar is designed for those who want to enrich their lives and deepen their spiritual lives to those in service to others: clergy, counselors, spiritual directors, therapists and others.

Chartres Cathedral is built upon an ancient goddess and Druid sacred site, where pilgrims journeyed long before Christianity to quicken the divinity in themselves. We will spend mornings with Jean. Through narratives, meditations and in circles with a sacred center, participants will reflect and remember their own stories. We can travel through our own lives as either pilgrims or tourists. If we are spiritual beings on a human path, then our lives were meant to be meaningful and authentic, our losses and suffering can burnish the soul or diminish it. While there is a linear chronology to our lives, there is usually a labyrinthine quality to following or finding the thread of meaning. A pilgrimage allows us to recollect liminal experiences, moments out of time. The psyche responds as if to a dream or to poetry and synchronicities happen when we seek to go through the mists to metaphoric Avalon.

In her book, Crossing to Avalon, Jean tells how an unexpected invitation to go on a pilgrimage to Chartres, Glastonbury, Iona, Holy Island and other sacred sites that took place during a time of personal crisis was the beginning of an inner journey through midlife archetypal landscapes. Inspired by the novel Mists of Avalon to look at the meaning of the Grail legend from a Goddess perspective, she thought upon the importance of a Christian mystical experience that brought her into medicine, her awakening of the archetypal feminine through the experience of childbirth, and the emergence of feminine divinity into the psyche and culture. To hear of initiations into the realm of the sacred feminine helps us remember our own. Men and women have had experiences of the Goddess and been without words or theology for them because they are felt in the body, through deep connections with another, or in Nature.

Jean has a depth of understanding of the realm of the goddess as pre-patriarchal--when God was a Woman, as the Eleusisinian Mysteries in ancient Greece, as archetypes in the collective unconscious and in contemporary women's spirituality. Goddesses in Everywoman about archetypal psychology unexpectedly became a major influence in women's spirituality.

For more information on Jean Shinoda Bolen, please visit her website, http://www.jeanshinodabolen.com/

Crossing to Avalon

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