The Holy and the Wild
The Holy and the Wild is an eight week intimate and transformative container for women to come into deeper and truer contact with their inner landscape.
Drawing from two deep wells: the Sufi tradition's lineage of mystic women and the vast expression and alchemising power of the feminine in mythology and fairy tale.
This is a space of inquiry, at the heart of it we are asking ourselves "how does the Beloved long to know herself through me?"
About this Course
During the 8 weeks we will drink deeply from two wells of knowledge, the feminine in myth and fairytale taking inspiration from the seminal work Women Who Run with the Wolves by Clarissa Pinkola Estes. And the Sufi traditions profound way of exploring reality, womanhood, and the paradox of being alive.
This course is an invitation to come into contact with the integral psychological processes that a woman moves through as she journeys through her life, as she individuates herself into deeper and clearer relationship with the ground of all being.
What does God long from you in this life? How does God express through the subtlest of experiences in your body? In the Islamic Sufi tradition, one of the foundational reasons for the existence of the world is so that the Beloved can witness and experience herself/himself through us. We are not other than God. We are God experiencing God. God is the dreamer and we are the dream. We are here to remember what we are, each of a single clear note in the glorious cacophony of God's song.
As the poet Rilke beautifully says calling out to the One: 'I will sing you as no-one has'.
What is your song to God? Your very own song, emerging from a landscape that is so deeply your own, so of the true essence and fibre of your being that you can hardly bear it.
The tension is where the aliveness is, the capacity to hold the paradox of life, the dark and the light, this questioning. There is no accident in the situation you find yourself in, nothing is by coincidence. There is deep meaning in the places where you are experiencing the most constriction in your lived experience. Here we turn our loving awareness towards them instead of trying to fix or avoid them.
It is an invitation to meet what is there with honesty and curiosity. To address where energy and patterns may be becoming stagnant, and to bring awareness and inquiry into these spaces within our lives through the wonder and deep power of mythology and sufism. There is nothing to fix, there is only the capacity to reveal more within yourself, more capacity to deal with what is there.
This course requires a commitment to your own journeying, to honesty with yourself and to bringing your experience into the space with presence. This is an intimate container with a limited amount of spaces.
For if a person truly knew the worth of his heart, He would give all he had without hesitation.
And if a person came to know the bliss within his soul He would shed a tear of joy with every breath he took.
He would fly forth from the body that had turned into his cage On wings of meditation to the Lote-Tree of the Boundary.
And would range the expanses of [God's) Pedestal and [His lesser and greater Thrones
Where the galaxies appear as but a tiny ring.
- Sidi Muhammad ibn al-Habib
Book a discovery call with Medina
This 20 minute call is a required step before joining The Holy and the Wild. Please take time to read through the course details first, as most questions are already answered there, which helps us make the most of our time together. If you've read the page and feel called to join, please book your call below. I'm looking forward to connecting.
On Myth
"Fairy tales, myths, and stories provide understandings which sharpen our sight so that we can pick out and pick up the path left by the wildish nature. The instruction found in story reassures us that the path has not run out, but still leads women deeper, and more deeply still, into their own knowing. The tracks we all are following are those of the wild and innate instinctual Self."
Storytelling is the true universal language of the human race. A language we use to engage fully with the glorious and terrifying unfolding of reality. The language we use to dance and feel ourselves move between the golden light of the heavens, the lofty and the high wide sky, into something we can get our teeth into, something pulsating, fecund and of the earth. Something found in a wild moor that has not been disturbed for 800 years. This is the realm that myth lends itself to. It is the lovechild of the human capacity to listen and the trust it takes to move with the images that come.
Martin Shaw says myths want to trouble our souls into communication. They are revelatory, numinous entities that enter our lives and help us become conscious of patterns, themes, symbols and metaphors that may remain unconscious in our beings feelings and sensations that appear to us in our dreams, half forgotten memories. Mythology has a profound capacity to address the deeply individual and the deeply universal experience of reality. It touches the deepest part of the psyche, bypassing the logical mind.
"It is a blessing to have the archeology of the fairy tale to learn from. What can be derived from those deep templates echoes the innate patterns of women's most integral psychological processes. In this sense, fairy tales and mythos are initiators; they are the wise ones who teach those who have come after." Clarissa Pinkola Estes
The stories invite us to become the seal, head bobbing in the frozen winter sea, her skin as our skin, asking the moon for help in the dead of night. To become the old wise one bent over crooked and blind in one eye at the edge of the known world, wandering the forests, all senses alight to every movement. To become the gullible or cunning maiden at the cusp of some great injustice, some great journey. To become also intimate with the frightful thing that pursues her. To become the mountain woman with piercing gaze, encountering bear, wolf, and deer kin, who has said yes to death and allowed it to utterly destroy her, run her ragged and rebirth her.
We are both the storyteller and the story.
"This is the weft and the weave of story for me. The endless lyrical emerging of the earth's tremendous thinking and the humbling required to simply bear witness to it. And the extraordinary day, when for an hour or so you realise that you too are being witnessed." — Martin Shaw
-
TO THE ANCIENT ONE
After I sent you away
I found your bright
thorn growing
in my throat.
Shocked
by the piercing
when I bent
my head to pray,
-
I jumped to hunt
the salve
anywhere possible
outside myself.
But last night
by accident
I prayed so strong
it punctured, penetrating
-
the center, here,
and the holy
serum flowed
from the inside.
Finally, finally,
I know this:
you did not send
the pain to punish
but to beg my head
to bow more deeply
into this flood
of brilliant self-love.
-Brooke McKenna
What you will receive
- Six two-hour live teaching sessions and one integration session on Zoom, Fridays at 7pm UK time
- A small and intimate circle of women who will journey alongside
- Mythopoetic exploration weaving Women Who Run With the Wolves with the Sufi feminine tradition.
- Somatic and embodied practices to integrate the work
- Weekly reflections journaling prompts, practices, and poems to sit with between sessions.
- A living WhatsApp container for sharing voice notes, reflections, and what is moving in you throughout the container.
- Resources and materials throughout the eight weeks.
Schedule
All sessions take place on Fridays at 7pm UK time.
Week One — July 31 Teaching Session 1
Turning the Gaze Inward
Myth: Collecting the Bones- La Loba
To see what has been lost and what still remains.
Week Two — August 7 Teaching Session 2
The Predator in the Psyche
Myth: Bluebeard
Identifying the traps, recognising where we give our power away
Week Three — August 14 Integration and Rest
Week Four — August 21 Teaching Session 3
Daughters of the Moment: Inherent Worthiness in the eyes of the Beloved.
The lives and stories of powerful women in Sufism.
Week Five — August 28 Teaching Session 4
The Creative life
Myth: 'Taking Back The River'
Beauty as an invitation to reverence, devotion, and the creative Life
Week Six — September 4 Integration Call and sharing.
Week Seven — September 11 Teaching Session 5
Finding Your Kin
Myth The Ugly Duckling
On sacred companionship, true belonging and friendship.
Week Eight — September 18 Teaching Session 6
Coming Home to the primordial essence
Myth: Seal Skin, Soul Skin
There is a famous Sufi aphorism: the Sufi is the child of the moment, ibn al-waqt. The true Sufi lives in the constant awareness that her self is nothing but what she is at the present moment. With each breath, a new self arrives from God. Each instant is a renewal. The new self of the moment is God's constant and never-ending renewal of the self's creation. Can you feel what a different place this is from which to stand and engage with the Beloved?
Meet Medina
Medina Trevathan is an interdisciplinary artist and facilitator based in the United Kingdom and Southern Spain. She is a seeker deeply committed to uncovering how the Beloved longs to be known through her life.
She grew up in an international Sufi Muslim community in Andalusia, and her roots span far and wide from North Africa to Pakistan and Cornwall.
Medina teaches courses and facilitates on the themes of womanhood, Sufism, mythopoetic and dreams through a somatic lens. She is currently in training as a Body Mind Maturation Coach working with human ontology and training as a practitioner with the Listening Voice
Investment
Medina Trevathan
The Holy and the Wild
Blessed be the longing that brought you here
and quickens your soul with wonder.
may you have the courage to listen to the voice of desire
that disturbs you when you have settled for something safe.
may you have the wisdom to enter generously into your own unease
to discover the new direction your longing wants you to take.
may the forms of your belonging – in love, creativity, and friendship –
be equal to the grandeur and the call of your soul.
may the one you long for long for you.
may your dreams gradually reveal the destination of your desire.
may a secret providence guide your thought and nurture your feeling.
may your mind inhabit your life with the sureness
with which your body inhabits the world.
may your heart never be haunted by ghost-structures of old damage.
may you come to accept your longing as divine urgency.
may you know the urgency with which God longs for you.
-John O'Donohue