Handcrafting a Soul-Filled Life

For creatives, artists, and those with the urge to make, who would like to bring ceremony and ritual into their creation process or to deepen sacred living. practices. The Devotional Arts Program is designed to facilitate your medicine ways in three aspects; personal healing, ritual working, and your relationship with your creative process. We do this through month long sessions spent handcrafting sacred living tools while observing and tending to our inner experiences of their creation. The items we make may be used in ceremony, prayer, spellwork, sympathetic magic, divination or other spiritually inclined methods. This immersive program is suitable for heathens, pagans, animists, traditional heritage reclaimers, and earth honouring folks of most belief systems.

With a strong emphasis on personal revelation through a devotional creative process, each attendee is encouraged to:

• work in the mediums of their choice for each project
• tailor their experience to personal belief systems
• work with the elements, deities, archetypes, and spiritual guides familiar or calling to them
• take as long as you need to complete, there is much medicine in slow dedicated crafting
• keep supplies within your means; thrifting, repurposing, thinking-outside-the-box, and simple ease is recommended
• work with your physical and mental wellbeing, not against it
• feel no pressure to show their work, but have opportunity to
• dive as deeply into each opportunity as you are ready for
• shine authentically and unapologetically, no matter your skill level

What is Devotional Art?
To me, devotional art has two aspects. Firstly, it refers to creations made in honour of, service to, or an expression of any personally meaningful spiritual essence. This includes soul level restorative working, energetic medicines, belief systems, gods, goddesses, deities, guides, a muse, the earth, love, peace, a favourite tree, life and death itself.... it makes for a finished piece that when we look at it or touch it we instantly feel a balm on old hurts, a restoration of empowerment, renewed faith and hope, or reminder of other realm support.
Secondly, it is art that requires our dedicated time. It is slow living. It's an avenue to pour our attention and careful cultivation into. It is less about the final piece and more our experience sitting in our creative process. It is showing up to ourselves and the canvas. It is unpicking an hour of work to fix a stitch that feels like a sore spot in our side. It is choosing to stay a little longer and lean in a little more. The more time we spend actively holding an intention, communing with other realm aspects or allies, and bringing our inner working out into this tangible realm, the stronger, more distilled, and potent our work becomes. Ideally, in the end, our unseen healing and tending begins to affect our living experience and our world around us.

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The Program

Each "session" may be undertaken as a stand alone offering, and you are welcome to attend a as many or as few as you like. While the working intention is to spend a month in a devotional creation process for each medicinal project, there is freedom and encouragement to spend as much time as you need. At this time, the Devotional Arts Program will only be offered online, with periodic sacred making events or outdoor creation days potentially possible here at the Sanctuary through the warmer months. 

Each month long devotional session will include:

• Meditation, suggestions for setting sacred space, and ceremonial supports
• Guided personal inquiry, inner self preparation, and thematic inquiry
• Suggested means for refining supportive, medicinal, intention setting for each piece
• A seasonally timed sacred creation project (see list below)
• Potential supplies to consider
• Methods of aftercare and integration of your devotional working
• Group video call to share experiences, ask for assistance, offer ideas, seek technical help, and cultivate community
• Resources for correlating your devotional process to mundane living, working through challenges arising, remedial balancing of temperaments, nervous system support, soul level healing, and spiritual practice cultivation
• Nonfacebook private member's forum
• Inclusion in a growing public Devotional Arts Gallery (submissions optional and open to members)

Creatives are invited to purchase one month sessions at $40 Canadian from the Available Sessions page.
​Arrangements for alternative modes of payment may be made if needed.

What supplies might be needed?
What mediums you work with and supplies you choose are largely up to you. There will be lots of opportunity for revelling in trusted tools, blending skillsets, as well as branching out into new territory. Weavers can weave. Painters can paint. Wordsmiths can write. Photographers can photograph. But we want to take things deeper and further than perhaps you have before and some augmentation to your ol' reliables may be required. Have a look below at the sampling of sacred items we will create over the year for an idea of where you might stretch and where you might stay comfortable.

A sampling of sacred living items
Careful consideration has been given to the timing of each creation being offered as well as to the personal experience during the making process and the practical needs of each piece to create a full, well rounded, immersion into your medicinal art.
Throughout the year, I will be offering ceremonial creation opportunities for:

• Sacred Cloth
• Talismans
• a Stole, Shawl, or Head Covering
• Candle Lantern
• a Wall Hanging or Painting
• a Divination Tool
• an Impermanent Devotional
• a Sigil or Personal Symbol
• a Spirit Doll
• a Medicine Pouch, Crane Bag, or Ceremony Bundle
• a Blessing, Lorica, Caim, Wordsmithed Chant or Invocation
• a Portable Offering Kit, Traveling Altar, or Sacred Item Box

With each devotional endeavour, we will organically be exploring aspects such as:

• Who is my work affecting? What ethics might need to be considered?
• What is informing my creative and ritual practices?
• Am I able to observe or witness change within myself or outwardly in life in ways relating to my creative processes?
• How am I receiving inspiration, messages, or wisdom?
• How will I interact with and integrate the medicine of a piece once complete?
• Is what comes up for me during my devotional relevant to how I engage with mundane living?
• What is brewing for me? What is coming to the surface for careful tending?
• In what ways will I create space and time for my devotional and ritual work?
• Where am I comfortable? Where would I like more experience, information, or instruction?
• Do I feel confident in my medicine ways? Do I know what they are?
• How can I take this deeper? or, How can I make this more manageable?
• Where did I live Life as Art?

Who is this program Not for?

• People looking for "art classes"
• Those who are immobilized by previous art shaming or traumatic experiences 
• Folks with no desire for sacred living or spiritually influenced personal practices
• If you truly don't believe you have time and space for making
• If the thought of trying new ways of doing things feels unsettling to you

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