Creativity, Cycles & Stories
An Update from Anya
Hello! Welcome to my very first Substack newsletter…
I’m coming to you live from Kaş, Turkey, a gorgeous little town on the Mediterranean. After three months in Thailand I’m definitely feeling some culture shock, not to mention the shock of this cold, dry weather after so many months spent sweating in the heat and humidity of southeast Asia. However, I’m grateful for new scenery, new cuisine and the chance to eavesdrop on people speaking yet another language I don’t remotely understand.
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If you haven’t already heard from my podcast or on social media, I’ve spent much of the past two months re-evaluating my life from the inside out.
One major change I’ve decided to make is to eliminate my Patreon in exchange for Substack.
I decided I no longer felt comfortable putting this community behind a paywall, and Patreon didn’t offer an option for free subscriptions. Now, through Substack, the Discord server, future book clubs, writing I release, etc., will all be 100% free. Of course, if you do have the means and desire to contribute to this project financially, I greatly appreciate it, as I still plan to keep the podcast ad-free, making your donations the only income generated from the podcast. If you’d like to make a small monthly contribution to the podcast and to the writing I release via Substack, you can do so by clicking the button below.
In other news, I just released a new podcast episode with Lisa Marchiano - writer, Jungian analyst and co-host of one of my favorite podcasts, This Jungian Life.
We recorded this conversation about motherhood back in January while I was still in Thailand, and the topics we discussed have remained extremely potent for me over the course of the last two months.
Creativity, whether expressed in the form of birthing a child, a new idea, or a new iteration of our identity is an unavoidably painful process. It’s messy, heavy with grief, and always preceded by some kind of death. It also forces us to come face to face with the unknown.
Of course, the cyclical process of death and rebirth is essential to life itself. The decomposition of winter is what gives way to the vitality of spring. By embracing periods of decomposition in our own lives, we are also welcoming our own capacity for vitality and creation. When we resist the darkness of the underworld, we rob ourselves of the color, beauty and vibrance of the daylight.
My conversation with Lisa (which you can listen to wherever you listen to podcasts), kicked off several weeks of reckoning with the darkness of my own transformation and evolution. I stopped releasing podcasts, cut way back on social media, and instead, channeled much of my energy into a piece of writing that I posted a few days ago - Ares & Aphrodite: The Unpredictability of Desire & Finding Creativity in Tension.
Lisa’s book, Motherhood: Facing and Finding Yourself is anchored in stories, fairy tales and mythology. As she explains in our conversation, stories contain a warehouse of psychic patterns, and have the capacity to help us articulate things that are notoriously hard to articulate. I couldn’t agree more.
Similarly, my essay explores desire, creativity, and the cyclical nature of life through the Greek myth of Ares & Aphrodite.
Narrative and archetypal psychology provide us with an opportunity to understand ourselves better and to feel less alone. When we can see our lives reflected in mythology we feel more grounded and connected. We realize we are not in fact isolated in our experiences, but intricately woven into stories that have existed throughout the course of human history.
The practice of understanding ourselves and the world around us through story and archetype is also the basis of The Lunar Circle. The Lunar Circle is a month-long workshop I teach that uses the lens of astrology to help you discover and explore your own personal mythology. By the end of the course, you will be able to read and interpret astrology charts on your own, but ultimately, that’s only a very small part of what you will come away with.
More precisely, The Lunar Circle is an opportunity to confront yourself truthfully and without excuses, and offers you an invitation to reimagine the story of your life with greater agency, intention and clarity. I break down all of the astrological archetypes to their mythological roots, and provide guidance for how you can connect to and interpret these stories for yourself. The goal is to invite you into greater meaning and purpose by illuminating the extent to which you are connected to the overall ecology of the cosmos.
I’ve taught this workshop three times over the past couple of years, and I’m excited to gather with a new circle of curious, like-minded humans this April. I won’t be teaching this again for another year (if at all), so if you’re interested in signing up, now’s the time. Enrollment is open now.
If you have any questions about the Lunar Circle, need a more extended payment plan, or have any other concerns that are preventing you from signing up, please respond to this email directly and let me know. I am confident we can come up with something that works for both of us.
That’s all for now.
Thank you for being here, and for supporting A Millennial’s Guide to Saving the World with your time, words of appreciation, insightful feedback, and financial contributions.
Until next time…
