Excavating Wisdom
LIVED EXPERIENCE IN THE SECOND HALF OF LIFE
EXCAVATING WISDOM
WHERE MYTHOLOGY AND ART-MAKING MEET THE STORIES OF YOUR LIVED EXPERIENCE IN THE SECOND HALF OF LIFE
Something is Waiting to Emerge
You’ve spent decades learning how to show up for others. How to hold what needs holding. How to navigate complexity with grace. You’ve been accumulating wisdom with every choice, every challenge, every season you’ve weathered. You’re formidable at it.
And now the instruments that served you so well have begun to reach their limit.
Not because you have failed. Because this territory asks for something they were not designed to reach. The second half does not ask you to direct your strength outward. It asks you to turn it inward, toward your own life, your own becoming.
The threshold you are standing in holds both grief and excitement, grief for the structures that served you but are now too small, excitement for the ever-widening circles calling you forward.
You don’t have to choose one version of yourself anymore. You don’t have to perform consistency.
Why This Work. Why You.
You already save things. Written journals filled and half-filled. Photographs in albums, in boxes, on your phone. Artwork you cannot quite throw away. Empty books you have bound or bought, still waiting. Scraps of paper, ribbon, ephemera you picked up without knowing why.
And not all of it is something you can hold. You have been gathering understanding too, the meaning you have been making of your own life, still taking shape, still looking for somewhere to come together. You have been seeking a way into the second half of your life that is rich, meaningful, and wholly your own.
None of this is random. You have been saving the makings of your own wisdom, even if you could not have called it that.
There are questions about what you have saved, ones you may have already heard. How do I begin to fill the blank pages of this cherished book? Why this photograph and not another? What wants to be remembered, and what is ready to be made visible? These are not questions you can think your way through. They get answered in the doing, in your hands, on the page.
Visual Wisdom Keeping is how you turn lived experience into wisdom. Symbol, image, and metaphor were our first languages, before we ever had spoken ones, and the practice draws on all of them, alongside word, object, and landscape, to bring what you carry into form. You work one layer at a time, let an image settle into the page as it takes shape, and step back to see what you made. This is not saving anymore. This is an excavation.
This is not a project you finish. It is a practice, image by image, spread by spread, season by season. It starts here, and it grows with you.
Welcome to the Studio
Most online programs work one of two ways: video lessons to watch in order, or PDFs to download and print. Visual Wisdom Keeping does something different.
Excavating Wisdom lives on our Studio Platform. Reading, video, audio, reflection, and interactive elements are woven into the page where they belong. You scroll the way you would move through a book. 13 chapters, 34 lessons. Nothing to check off. No sequence to enforce.
It reads the same on your phone, your tablet, your desktop. You can return in the morning, on a break, or in the quiet of an evening. The practice does not ask you to schedule it. It asks you to inhabit it.
This is the home of every Visual Wisdom Keeping program. Learn the rhythm here, and you will move through any of them as if you had always known the way.
Everything You Need to Begin
The practice, the visual language, and your first TRACE spread. 13 chapters, 34 lessons, a complete foundation in your own hands.
Meet the Practice
Build Your Visual Language
Set up Your Book
A Self-Paced Studio
Your First Trace Spread
What You Leave With
This Work is For You If...
- You want to go beneath the surface of your life, not just think about it, but excavate it layer by layer.
- You have been saving things for a long time, photographs, journals, objects, and you sense there is more underneath than memory keeping.
- You have felt the limits of what words alone can hold.
- Something in the second half of your life is asking a question you cannot think your way through.
- You are drawn to image, color, and symbol as ways of knowing, not just as decoration.
- No art experience required. You need only the willingness to make something before you know what it will become.
- You are ready to begin a depth practice, even if you cannot yet name what is calling you.
Hi, I'm Terri Altschul
I am a Mixed Media Depth Coach and the creator of Visual Wisdom Keeping, accompanying women through the sovereignty crossing of the second half of life.
For more than a decade I have been watching what happens when a woman stops trying to think her way through a threshold and starts making it visible instead. Through layered mixed media. Through color and image and symbol. Through the kind of depth practice that works the way the psyche actually works, not through analysis, but through excavation.
This work changed my life first. It gave me a way to move through what words alone could not hold, and it revealed things I did not know I knew.
I created Becoming a Wisdom Keeper because every woman in the second half of life deserves a practice that takes everything she has lived seriously. No artistic skill required. Just willingness to show up and make something before you know what it will become.
Frequently Asked Questions
Scrapbooking preserves memories. This excavates meaning. You're not documenting what happened, you're discovering what it made of you. The images, paint, and mark-making are tools for going inward, not decorating a page.
Yes. This practice has nothing to do with artistic skill. You don't need to know how to draw, paint, or design. You need a willingness to put something on a page and see what it says back to you. That's all.
A mixed media journal, acrylic paint, gesso, matte medium, collage materials, images, and a mark-making tool. A complete supply list is included inside the course. You do not need everything before you begin. Start with what you have.
Yes. This experience is self-paced, and it serves as a reference you can return to whenever you feel stuck.
A Wisdom Map is a self-paced depth experience that guides you through a fully held T.R.A.C.E. journey into a specific theme of your life. Each map draws from the depth psychological tradition of Jungian individuation, the Celtic sovereignty crossing, and the archetypal patterns women have always carried through the second half of life. Each map produces one spread in your Book of Wisdom. Crossing the Threshold is the first map, waiting when you are ready.
Your Book of Wisdom is open and your first spread is complete. Crossing the Threshold — the first Wisdom Map — is waiting when you're ready to continue. Same practice, new territory.
The Wisdom Is Made Here
This Is Where You Begin
Not given to you. Not taught to you. Excavated by you, layer by layer, carried forward in your own hands.
Terri Altschul is a Mixed Media Depth Coach and the creator of Visual Wisdom Keeping, accompanying women through the sovereignty crossing of the second half of life.
She is an ICF PCC with more than 4,000 coaching hours. Jungian depth psychology, Celtic tradition, and the practice of making with your hands.
Her gift is holding space for what's emerging and helping you become who you haven't yet been.
