Turn inward. Listen. Let mixed media give form to what arises.
A visual journaling practice for women in the second half of life,
gathered into a Book of Wisdom to hold the stories, colors,
and shapes of your life.
Turn inward. Listen. Let mixed media give form to what arises. A visual journaling practice for women in the second half of life, gathered into a Book of Wisdom to hold the stories, colors, and shapes of your life.
Learn to excavate the wisdom of your lived experience, one layer at a time, and let it take form on the page. Create a Book of Wisdom: spreads, named and dated, each one a page you can return to and build on.
Activities include quieting what the day has asked of you and setting an intention for the page; meeting what arises through active imagination and guided inner journeys; following the felt sense of the body’s knowing; noticing the images you can’t shake; working with symbol, archetype, and the old stories; drawing on memory and on what was handed down to you; and asking the questions that help you read what has surfaced.
You’ll work with acrylic paint and mediums, collage, stencils, markers, found elements, and even three-dimensional pieces: laying down color before your mind decides what it means, building texture with sponges and stamps, layering drawing, painting, and collage, and crowning the spread with symbols, words, and personal icons.
No art experience needed.
The culture never told you the second half of life has a purpose. Instead, it handed you suggestions: slow down, step aside, rest. All three are wrong. This season is not a decline to be managed. It has its own work, and it is not small work.
The roles begin to loosen: the parts that defined you, how you showed up in the world, no longer fit the way they did. The shadow asks to be integrated: the parts of yourself that were set aside, sometimes unknowingly, are asking to be integrated. And the life you have lived asks to be reviewed and not judged. Harvested. Decades of experience, most of it passed through too quickly to be made into meaning, waiting to be made into wisdom.
And beneath all of it, something that was there before the roles ever arrived: the essential seed of who you are, waiting for this season to finally give it room. This is the work of becoming sovereign, not through more talking about it, but through what your hands can show you that words alone cannot.
You have spent decades mastering the instruments of the first half: clarity, planning, organizing, purpose expressed outward. Those instruments served you. They may not be the right ones for what this stage is asking.
What this stage is asking lives below language, below the thinking mind that has carried you this far. It is reached more easily through image than through reasoning, through what your hands make before your mind has decided what it means.
The Inner Journey of Visual Journaling works imaginally with what is forming in you, then gives it form through mixed-media art, so that what is emerging in the second half of your life comes onto the page, where you can finally see it. You can practice it on your own or with one-to-one coaching.
Here, we create in service of something older and deeper: the work of knowing your own life, and what it has made of you.
Real instruments for real work: what you'll actually use in this practice.
There is a silent language within all of us that reveals the truth of our thoughts, feelings, and emotions far more fluently than words. The language of the unconscious. This language speaks in metaphor, imagery, and symbols.
Navigating the Second Half of Life
Hi, I’m Terri Altschul. I’m an ICF PCC, Mixed Media Depth Coach, and the creator of The Visual Journaler™.
My deepest curiosity has always been how people think, learn, and create, and how those qualities can be cultivated. It carried me through thirty years of leadership development and into coaching. Then, amid a season of loss, the creativity that had been my refuge as a child came back, and art journaling found me. From that fire, The Visual Journaler™ was born.
I work with women who realize that the second half of life asks different questions. Questions that only become accessible once you arrive here. Not because anything is wrong. Because these questions could only be reached from this side of everything you have lived.
I look forward to making alongside you.
Your Book of Wisdom is entirely your own: made from everything you have lived, and from what has been waiting in you to be found.
No art experience needed.
Therapy, coaching, journaling, decades of building. The second half of life asks different questions, and they don’t yield to more of the same. The T.R.A.C.E. Method™ is a first way in: a free, guided look at how the inner journey comes onto the page, one layer at a time.
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