We are taught to think.
From the moment we begin to speak, we are taught that knowing happens in the head — that answers come through analysis, that if we are confused, the way out is to think harder. By the time we are adults, most of us live almost entirely in the upper reaches of ourselves. We forget there is anywhere else to live.
And then something happens.
A loss we cannot think our way through. A question with no logical answer. A turning that asks for clarity the mind cannot provide. The information is in. The lists are made. And we still do not know.
The wisdom we are seeking, in the deepest moments of our lives, is not in our heads.
It is in our bodies.
Years of practice have shown me that the body holds intelligences the mind cannot reach. There is wisdom in sensation, in tightness and ease, in the catch of breath that arrives before the conscious mind has named what just happened. The symbols rising in dreams, the images that arrive unbidden in stillness, the felt-sense of yes or not yet — these are the body knowing.
The work of my life now is to listen.
"By a symbol I do not mean an allegory or a sign, but an image that describes in the best possible way the dimly discerned nature of the spirit."
Carl Jung called the place where conscious mind meets the deeper material active imagination. Not imagination as pretend — imagination as active engagement with what is rising from the unconscious. Rather than interpreting an image from above, you enter into relationship with it. Receive what it has to say. The conscious mind becomes witness rather than analyst.
Most of us do the opposite. We meet the rising material and immediately translate it into language. This represents X. This means Y. The interpretation is not always wrong, but it is often premature. The image had something to say in its own form, and we cut it off mid-sentence.
When I first began making the work that became Visual Wisdom Keeping, I had no language for any of this. I only knew that the page received something the journal did not. Words clarified, documented, allowed thinking on the page — but there were thresholds where they fell short.
The first time I stopped writing and started layering paint, something different happened. The colors began choosing themselves. An image arrived without my asking. I did not know what the image meant, and that not-knowing was the gift. The image was not a translation of something I already knew. The image was the knowing. It came forward whole.
My hands were doing things my mind had not decided to do. The colors I reached for were not the colors I had planned. The marks emerged from somewhere lower than the cognitive centers — from chest, belly, the place between the shoulder blades. Sometimes my hands knew before my eyes did.
This is the somatic intelligence at work. The body, freed from the requirement to articulate, is allowed to know.
This is the foundation of Visual Wisdom Keeping. Not the technique. Not the methodology. Beneath all of it: the recognition that wisdom is held in the body, and that the page is one of the few places where the body can speak its own language without needing to translate first.
A few years ago, I made a spread in a class — the kind where you don’t know what you’re making until you’ve made it. Two overlapping circles found their way onto the page. One held a pregnant belly. The other held a journey through a woman’s life — maiden, mother, crone. I did not plan this composition. The circles arrived and arranged themselves, and I followed.
A teacher in the class, a woman who studied symbolism, looked at the spread and said: that is the Vesica Piscis. Sacred geometry. Ancient symbol of the meeting between two worlds, the threshold where the inner and outer overlap. Often associated with the feminine, with birth, with the doorway between what is and what is becoming.
I had never heard the term. The page knew what I did not yet know.
What I came to understand was that the body’s wisdom is not only mine. When I followed the body’s instruction, I had not been excavating only my own unconscious. I had touched something more collective — the ancient knowing that has been arriving through human bodies for as long as there have been bodies. The body is a keeper not only of personal memory but of inherited wisdom.
Marion Woodman shaped the lineage I work in. Her insistence that depth work cannot bypass the body — that the soul speaks through soma, that we cannot become the sovereign of our own lives by thinking our way there — is what grounds this practice.
What our culture has lost is the practice itself. We are educated out of body wisdom by the time we are adolescents. The body becomes background — a thing we manage, not a thing we listen to.
The work of returning is slow. It begins with stillness — not as a meditation technique, but as the first condition for hearing. You cannot listen to a quiet voice while talking. You cannot receive what is rising while interpreting.
Stillness is the threshold.
When women come to Visual Wisdom Keeping for the first time, the most common resistance is not artistic. It is somatic. They cannot tolerate the silence. They cannot stay with the not-knowing long enough for the body to speak. The hand wants to do something. The mind wants to plan the spread, decide what it will be about, choose colors that will mean something.
The practice asks: let it be quiet. Long enough for the body to enter. The first mark may come as breath. The first image as a sensation in the chest. The first phrase as a fragment from somewhere not the cortex.
This sequence — stillness, then sensation, then image, then page — is foundational. The head is welcome. The head is honored. But the head is not first.
The body is first.
I have spent nine years learning this. I am still learning it. The practice does not graduate. Every spread asks me to begin again — to remember that the wisdom is not in my analysis, not in my plan. The wisdom is in what wants to come forward when I stop trying to make it.
If you are tired of living in your head — if you sense that the answers you need cannot be reached through more thinking — this is the territory. The body has been carrying what you need to know all along. The page is one place where it can be heard.
The work begins where stillness meets the page.
Hi! I'm Terri Altschul
I’m a Mixed Media Depth Coach and the creator of Visual Wisdom Keeping — a practice for women in the second half of life who are ready to excavate the wisdom of their becoming.
If something here resonated, I’d like to invite you to stay close to the work—a note now and then from inside the practice—and to be the first to know when a new map or offering opens.
Terri altschul, icf, pcc
Terri Altschul is an ICF PCC—a Professional Certified Coach with more than 30 years of experience and thousands of coaching hours.
She works with women in the second half of life, drawing on Jungian depth psychology and Visual Wisdom Keeping to guide women across the threshold into wholeness.
Her gift is holding space for what's emerging—and helping you become who you haven't yet been.
