Sovereignty Begins Within
To be sovereign unto yourself is to stand on your own authority,
the one your years have built. Turn inward. Listen. Let mixed media
give form to what arises, gathered into a Book of Wisdom
for women in the second half of life.
Sovereignty Begins Within
To be sovereign unto yourself is to stand on your own authority, the one your years have built. Turn inward. Listen. Let mixed media give form to what arises, gathered into a Book of Wisdom for women in the second half of life.
How The Visual Journaler™ Began
I have journaled all my life. But words alone, in my journal, in coaching, even in therapy, weren’t getting to the heart of what I wanted to express. Then, several years ago, I picked up an art journaling magazine, and I felt a missing piece start to fall into place. I began asking myself, “What is the color of this experience? If it were an image, what would it be?” and I could feel it in my body as I put it on paper. By bringing texture, color, and imagery into the words, I started noticing things that arose outside my day-to-day awareness.
As I integrated this practice with my coaching, I wove in active imagination, guided inner journeys, archetypes, and stories from ancient wisdom. The result is a multi-layered practice that can take you deeper than you ever had words for as you chart the second half of life.
No art experience needed.
The Inner Journey of The Visual Journaler™
In the Second Half, the Questions Change
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 still waiting. And the life you have lived asks to be reviewed and not judged. Harvested. Decades of experience, most of it passed too quickly to become meaning, waiting to become wisdom.
And beneath it all, 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.
Why Now?
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 Visual Journaler™ 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 a coach alongside you.
Here, we create in service of something older and deeper: the work of knowing your own life, and what it has made of you.
This second half of life calls for inner work. And it has its own tools.
Real instruments for real work: what you'll actually use in this practice.
Turning Inward
Wisdom Maps + Coaching
Mixed Media Art Supplies
A Layering Methodology
Work Symbolically
A Room of Women Making
What Makes the Work Possible
Your life becomes a coherent story. The decades stop being things that happened to you and become chapters you can read, with threads you can finally see.
Your way forward gets clear. Not from advice. From your own knowing, made visible enough to act on.
The parts you set aside come home. Light and shadow both, integrated instead of managed.
The overwhelm of transition becomes the material of it. What is loosening and what is forming, worked on the page instead of churning in your head.
You stop crossing alone. Women on the same ground, some a few steps ahead, walking it with you.
And underneath it all: the seed. The thing that was you before the roles arrived, uncovered at last, becoming your gift back to the world.
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.
A Unique Journey
Navigating the Second Half of Life
Begin Your Practice
Includes: Excavating Wisdom, T.R.A.C.E., Scattered to Sacred
Deepen Your Practice
Includes: Wisdom Maps, Community
Expand Your Practice
Includes: The Turning Series, Coaching Programs
Meet Terri Altschul
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.
Notes from inside the practice, where the making meets the meaning.
Everything You Have Lived
This is Where the Journey Begins
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.
Stay Close to the Work
Letters from inside the practice, and word when something new opens. Plus 25% off your first Wisdom Map as a welcome.
Terri Altschul is a Mixed Media Depth Coach and the creator of Visual Wisdom Keeping.
A lifelong curiosity about how people think, learn, and create carried her career in leadership & org development into coaching, and then into a coaching practice pairing the inner journey with creativity, for women in the second half of life.
Her work draws on Jungian depth psychology, Celtic tradition, and the mixed media art materials. She is an ICF PCC with more than 4,000 coaching hours. Her gift is holding space for what's emerging and helping you become who you haven't yet been.
