About the Event
On Monday, November 16th, IDHA is hosting an online workshop that aims to familiarize participants with the mythic mental health healing modality of creative recontextualization, via Audrey Dimola’s "Live Your Legend" framework. The evening will include an exploration of Joseph Campbell's The Hero’s Journey and Audrey's own personal adventures in myth, including reframing her Bipolar II diagnosis with the Legend of the Two Wolves, which emerged spontaneously from her in 2016. The workshop will also feature discussions on the honest challenges and profound rewards of pursuing alternative frameworks to traditional mental illness narratives, several generative journeying and visualization exercises (no experience or prep necessary, no overthinking required!), and open invitations to experimenting with thinking and seeing metaphorically and symbolically. As storied poet and mythteller Robert Bly wrote: "We are receiving a request to move on still further, from the psychological to the mythological stage […] that understanding is not behind us, but ahead of us." The workshop and Q&A will be co-facilitated and moderated by fellow mythic explorer, Noah Phillips -- IDHA organizer, working peer specialist, and LMSW.
Register in advance via Zoom to join. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about how to join.
There is a suggested $10 donation for this event, but no one will be turned away. This event is open to all people, including people with lived experience, family members, activists, allies, and psychiatrists or other mental health providers -- people who are interested in exploring creative recontextualization and working with myth/legend in their own lives or with their clients.
Background
Audrey Dimola was initiated into the sacred aliveness in Story as a matter of life and death. After struggling mentally, emotionally, and behaviorally for many years with unchecked trauma and destructive patterning, she was given a Bipolar II diagnosis and a prescription in 2018 -- a path she knew deep in her Soul she could not follow. What grew from the wound was a deep dedication to converting her life into Legend by creatively recontextualizing her experience of "mental illness" via co-creating in tandem with her personal mythology: journeying into -- and back out of -- a mythical internal wilderness and its Under- and Over-worlds, with two wolves as her guides. This practice and framework is based on the "monomyth" ideology of The Hero's Journey as presented by one of her personal heroes: prolific writer, mythologist, and professor Joseph Campbell; as well as the acknowledgment of archetypal presences and a collective unconscious we all share, inhabited by fearsome and fantastical creatures, quests, landscapes, and meanings that are accessible to us at any moment. The Hero's Journey is a pattern identified by Campbell that is apparent in myths and stories from different cultures throughout our history. In it, the Hero -- which could be any of us -- heeds a Call to Adventure which leads them to cross a threshold down into the Underworld on a thrilling and dangerous journey with the specific purpose of returning back home to their community with the treasure, wisdom, or boon from the quest. It is a revelatory and positive framework to apply to mental illness experiences, with-- as in Audrey's case-- radically life-changing (and saving) results.
Organizers
Audrey Dimola is a Bearer of Legend exploring myth, mental health, and the ecologies of spirit through earth-based healing modalities, multidisciplinary art, radical vulnerability, and deep (re)connection to land, fellow beings, and more-than-human kin. She is a lifelong artist, writer/poet, and performer; youth mentor and public speaker; and has nearly a decade of experience as a NYC-based event curator and sacred space-holder working creatively in diverse communities. Past offerings include: Church of the Sacred Body, How We Create & How We Cope: Intersections of Art & Mental Illness, and countless happenings at world-renowned art-space Socrates Sculpture Park in Queens, where she has served as Director of Public Programs since 2016. Her latest article, "Validating Psychosis: The Missing Narrative" was published in Mad in America this past August, her most recent books of poetry and prose are "WILDLIGHT" and "THE BOOK OF LEGEND," and she is currently pursuing a Certificate in Ecotherapy from The Earthbody Institute.
Noah Phillips is a Peer Specialist at Community Access as well as a Licensed Master of Social Work and IDHA Organizer.