SoulCollage®

A Brief Description of SoulCollage®

SoulCollage® was created by Seena Frost, a psychotherapist, who developed the idea of creating collaged cards for use in therapy as well as for people who want to explore their lives, personalities, community, and archetypal stories to increase self understanding. Making collages for various aspects of your identity, support system, animals you feel an affinity to, and the larger stories found in all cultures throughout history, SoulCollage® helps you explore your personal identity and use this to make sense of your life.

The basic suits or categories Seena originally suggested include the "committee" (personality traits), "community" (people and pets in our lives), "companions" (animals), and "council" (archetypes). Since the origination of SoulCollage, people have created additional suits such as fairy tales (which may be sub-categories of the council suit) and dreams (creating collaged cards for significant dreams) as examples.

The collages that make up SoulCollage cards are typically created on 5x8 mat board (beacuse a large sheet of this material is most efficiently cut into 5x8 "cards" with as little waste as possible) yet can be created on any size substrate (the art term for what supports artwork such as collage) from simple index cards or cut up cereal boxes to archival mat boards. Some people choose to purchase clear packaging (like you find on a packet of stickers) to protect cards once they're complete while others use Modge Podge or other finishes for the finishing/protection of a collage card.

Cards can be made intuitively where you combine various images from different sources into a final image of your choosing without a purpose in mind. They can also be made purposefully, such as using actual photographs of your sister to make a SoulCollage card that honors her. We may make a card for the organizer part of ourselves or put together images and in looking at the whole created in the end, decide that the card represents our inner artist self because we see we included paints and painted skies and views of landscapes, as an example. Cards can include a single image or multiple images.

While the making of cards to represent archetypes, the engergy of various animals and our feelings of connection to them, family members and friends, or aspects of self identity and of our personality is a major part of SoulCollage, there is also using the cards and "reading" them that is integral to the process overall. It is one thing to make a collage to honor our sister or our "depressed self" and quite another to seek wisdom from the image and allow it to "talk" to us. This process is begun using the "I am the one who..." statement suggested by Seena. We "work" with our cards by asking the image or aspects of the image to speak to us. This usually begins withe the statement, "I am the one who..." and we let untuition take over from here. If the card is for your sister, it is possible that the "I am the one who..." statement takes various directions at various times of your life. When seeking some support, maybe the sister card says, "I am the one who...knows you best and for the longest. I am the one who supports you and is a friend. I am the one who..." (and so on). If you are in a struggle in your relationship with your sister, the card might read quite differently on another day.

Cards are viewed as having positive and negative potential and intent. Even our darkest parts may have positive potential and intent while it is possible our most positive traits can have negative potential and intent. For example, a "joyful one" card about your naturally happy state may represent the potential you have for a rosy outlook even in tough times. It could also remind you that you can sometimes overlook a shadow aspect of a situation that could improve communication. Likewise, your "inner critic" can seem harsh yet represent also a potential for quality control for work product or that critic helps you realistically view your latest attempt a complex recipe.

This is a very basic description of SoulCollage and its process, which is something that has been studied in graduate research in addition to being the topic of multiple books! Read more here or follow these links away from this site to these resources: soulcollage.com/ and kaleidosoul.com/ Contact Kate for more information about how to learn this process or to incorporate it into therapy or coaching.