Excavating Wisdom
Learn the practice that turns a lived life into visible wisdom:
the visual language, your Book of Wisdom, your first T.R.A.C.E.™ spread.
EXCAVATING WISDOM
The Foundational Course in Visual Wisdom Keeping.
Learn the practice that turns a lived life into visible wisdom: the visual language, your Book of Wisdom, your first T.R.A.C.E.™ spread.
You Are Not Out of Answers.
You Are Out of the Right Instrument.
You have spent decades becoming formidable. Holding what needed holding. Reading every room, weathering every season, accumulating wisdom with each choice and challenge. And the thinking that did all of it has reached the edge of its territory.
Not because you failed. Because the second half of life asks different questions, and they do not answer to thinking. The restlessness. The pull toward something you cannot name. The sense that your own life holds more meaning than you have had a way to reach. That is not confusion. That is unexcavated wisdom, pressing up from underneath.
You do not need more insight about your life. You need a way into it. That is what this course puts in your hands.
The Soul's First Language
Before you had words, you had images. Color, shape, symbol: this is the soul’s first language, and it never stopped speaking. The memory that keeps returning. The image you cannot explain your attachment to. These are not decorations on your inner life. They are your inner life, speaking the only way it can.
You already speak this language. You are a meaning maker; you have spent your whole life reading between the lines of things. What no one ever gave you is a method: a way to work that language deliberately, with your own hands, until it says what it has been trying to say for years.
Visual Wisdom Keeping is that method. Not art. Not journaling. A depth practice: you turn inward, you bring what you find to the page, and you build meaning layer by layer with your hands until you can see it and stand on it. The questions of the second half are not answered by thinking harder. They are answered here.
You Will Excavate, Layer by Layer
Visual Wisdom Keeping is a practice that integrates imaginal thinking with creative expression. We work in mixed media materials, using layering techniques that capture what the unconscious offers one layer at a time: a kind of excavating. The practice is guided by Terri’s proprietary layering methodology, called T.R.A.C.E.™. Each layer is a dance between your inner vision and the art process.
The practice draws on mythology, depth psychology, and the current thinking on what the second half of life asks of a woman. When your own story is hard to reach, or missing its words, the old stories know the way in. Women have been standing where you stand for as long as there have been stories about it, and some of their figures will keep you company here.
Welcome to the Studio
Most online courses hand you videos to watch or PDFs to print. This is neither. Excavating Wisdom was written like a book — a reference guide to the spirit and practices of Visual Wisdom Keeping — and built like a studio: reading, video, audio, and reflection woven into the page, 13 chapters, 34 lessons, moving at whatever pace your life allows. Nothing to check off. No sequence enforced. It reads the same on your phone at midnight as on your desktop in the morning.
Learn the rhythm here and every Visual Wisdom Keeping program that follows will feel like a room you already know.
Everything You Need to Begin
A complete foundation: the practice, the visual language, your Book of Wisdom, and your first finished spread. 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 Visual Wisdom Keeping 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
The Wisdom is Made Here
Not given to you. Not taught to you. Made — excavated by your own hands, layer by layer, from the life only you have lived.
You have spent decades becoming someone worth understanding. This is where you begin.
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.
