The Heart Behind the Work

My story, my practice, and why I believe everything you've lived is ready to be seen.

KEEP READING

The Heart Behind the Work

My story, my practice, and why I believe everything you’ve lived is ready to be seen.

KEEP READING

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.

Our Vision

A world where women in the second half of life stop being seen only through what they’ve given, and begin to see themselves through what they’ve become, and what they are still becoming.

Where the wisdom of decades is recognized not as the residue of a life, but as the source of her becoming: the seed of a potential still waiting to be realized, and the sovereignty to live from it.

Our Mission

We believe that everything a woman has lived (the roles, the losses, the crossings, the survival) holds something still waiting to be expressed: the seed of who she is, and the gift only she can bring.

We help her find it through an inner journey, working imaginally with what is forming within and giving that inner vision form in a Book of Wisdom that bears witness to her becoming. Through the practice of Visual Wisdom Keeping, through coaching, and through circle.

This is not hobby craft, and it is not journaling as she may have known it. It is the work of fully becoming, made accessible, made affordable, made available to every woman who senses that something in her is ready to be seen. We do this work together. That is the practice. That is the mission.

Our Core Values

  • Sovereignty Over Diminishment. The second half of life is not when a woman's story ends. It is when she finally becomes the author of it.
  • Excavation Over Explanation. We don't analyze the life. We make it visible. The image reaches what words cannot.
  • Wholeness Over Perfection. We embrace all aspects of the self — the beautiful and the difficult — rather than striving for an impossible ideal.
  • Process Over Product. The excavation happens in the making. Not in producing perfect pages — in the marks, the layers, the act of making something visible.
  • Depth Over Surface. We engage with the profound questions of identity, meaning, and purpose that arise in the second half of life — not superficial solutions.
  • Accessibility Over Exclusivity. We make this work available to everyone, regardless of artistic background or previous experience.

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 life has been full of pivots, but the throughline, my deepest curiosity, has never changed: how do people think, learn, and create, and how can those qualities be cultivated? It began when I was a child growing up in a chaotic household, trying to understand the people and dynamics in my young life, and creativity became my refuge.

That curiosity led to a thirty-year career in corporate leadership and organizational development, where I worked with top leaders and teams to help them be their most effective and impactful. At one point, I managed a $10 million budget and brought in best-in-class leadership development organizations.

But I became disillusioned that all this investment didn’t lead to lasting change. It increased what leaders knew, but not how they evolved.

I was just beginning to study Robert Kegan’s adult-development work, which brought me closer to the root of human change, when my corporate position was eliminated at 55, and I began to experience ageism in the workplace as I looked for a new job. I went on to complete three years of work with Kegan and Lahey and to train in integral coaching. Then, deep in Gestalt training, I lost my mom. She became ill and was gone in just three short months.

Amid those losses, and after years of working to understand how people think and learn, the creativity of my teen years began to re-emerge. My roots in sewing grew into an interest in collage and mixed media, and eventually art journaling found me. Images reached beyond cognitive approaches, and the stories I’d been living inside became something I could look at. My Gestalt therapist opened the door to the imaginal and to archetypes. Carl Jung, whom I’d loved since my twenties, came back as I discovered how central creativity was to his own inner work. From this fire, The Visual Journaler was born.

Only recently have I recognized that this thread through my life is what I’ve come to call my seed work: the essential gift we are born with and are destined to share with the world. It reminds me of Martha Graham’s words: “…there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and will be lost.”

Today, I work with women who have begun to sense that everything they’ve lived (the changing roles, the losses, the many thresholds, the accumulated decades) is pointing toward something yet to be discovered and expressed. Something not yet visible. Something ready to be excavated.

The second half of life is not when a woman’s story ends. It is when her potential can finally be realized.

I look forward to working beside you.

We make one promise. Not to fix you. Not to reinvent you. Not to hand you tools and send you on your way. 

To witness you in your becoming.

To offer you a practice that goes as deep as your life has gone. And to walk with you toward the sovereignty that has been gathering itself in you — through every crossing, every loss, every threshold you’ve survived. It takes profound courage to become who you’ve always been. We know. We’re doing it too.

The Inner Journey of Visual Journaling™

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Visual Story Finding

we transform lived experience into wisdom through image, word, symbol, metaphor, object, and landscape. This practice helps us recognize profound patterns across our stories, history, and intuitive knowing.

Symbolism

our first language was symbols, imagery, and metaphors. For many of us, this ability fades as language emerges. Through Visual Wisdom Keeping we reconnect with this deeper form of knowing.

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authenticity

Giving Voice

we draw on the combined energy of your strengths and your shadow, inviting you toward the edges of what you know. Practice deepens your capacity to give form to inner knowing through both verbal and non-verbal exploration, making visible what has been waiting beneath the surface.

Illumination

unlike enlightenment, Visual Wisdom Keeping offers small glimpses of light, grace, insight, and perspective. These tiny sparks are just enough to shift how you see — and sometimes that is everything.

tears are never wasted

Presence

is our connection to the moment, our willingness to gaze and let go of negative judgments. It allows inner vision to break through, unfolding deeper meanings and transforming them into wisdom.

Seeing

not just looking. It is created with compassion while visually listening to the inner knowing revealed in your journal spreads. In practice, you discover meaning and beauty within yourself and in the world around you.

My Official Creds...

From Terri's First Journal in 2015

(click the images to enlarge them)

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