Breathing Fire: A Mythic Catskills Adventure

We’re thrilled to announce the second Breathing Fire workshop for women, led by our co-founder Leigh Melander, PhD, Friday, April 17 to Sunday, April 19, 2020.

Are you burning to change your life and the world?

Join us for a weekend celebrating the fire we hold in us, the dragon fire of the Catskills mountains, and the embers of spring fire festivals traditionally celebrated in winter and spring to imagine the power and life of the coming year.

In most cultures, women have been traditionally defined by three roles: maiden, mother, and crone. Each is a powerful metaphor, each has value, but they all live within society’s expectations.  They are often as much about how the world sees women as they are how we see ourselves.

There is another metaphor, one that acknowledges women’s power, our wildness, and how we often stand outside the constructs of society.

And that is dragon. Filled with fire, with possibility, with fortune, and with danger, dragons refuse to be bound by rules.

How do we see and embrace this power in ourselves, even when we aren’t sure we can? How can we learn to ride this fire enough so it doesn’t burn ourselves or the people around us? And at the same time, how can we understand that its very nature resists being tamed? How can we navigate the risks of unleashing this fire in a world that is often terrified by it?

Why Join Us?

If you’re wrestling with your own sense of autonomy and power – whether you feel like it’s being dampened, or you find it roaring out of you in ways that take you off balance (or some combination of the two) – please join us! Women wrestle hard these days with how powerful we are and can be. We get thousands of daily reminders from the world around us that powerful women should be contained. And sometimes we contain ourselves. But the world needs us, maybe now more than ever, to step into a sense of our own power.

This workshop is an exploration into that dance, and how we can learn to breathe into our own power, own it, and understand how and when it owns us. And how we can support other women as they work with their fire as well.

About Leigh

Leigh Melander, PhD has an eclectic background in the arts as well as consulting in strategic planning, outreach and marketing, and event planning for over 20 years. She has performed, and taught and facilitated explorations of imagination and creativity internationally, working with individuals and groups to help them find their way to bringing their wild ideas to life. Her first book, Psyche’s Choice: The Frivolous Revolution, has just been released on Amazon.

Her undergraduate degree is in performance, literature, and history from Penn State, and she studied writing by invitation with Nobel Poet Laureate Derek Walcott at Boston University. She has a doctorate in cultural mythology and psychology from Pacifica Graduate Institute and wrote her dissertation on frivolity as an entry into imagination. She has has appeared in various media outlets, including the History Channel, as a mythology expert, and has published articles in Spring Journal, The Routledge International Handbook of Jungian Film Studies, The Mythology CD-ROM. She hosted Myth America, a weekly radio show about  how myth shapes our sense of identity on an NPR affiliate for three years, and served as the Vice President of the Joseph Campbell Foundation and the editor of their MythBlast series for four years.

Learn more and register here.