“The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek.”
-Joseph Campbell
Entering the Cave
sacred practice for artists
what is the cave?
The cave is your next edge.
As artists and creatives, we face them all the time. Birthing new work into being, dreaming new worlds, opening a channel to something that wants to move through us: this is deep work.
Work like this means we can’t avoid our shadows, our fears, our undigested raw aliveness.
There’s nothing quite like the rush of making work that feels wildly alive.
As many times as we’ve sailed in the dark, though, the voyage can be lonely, and discouraging. It can feel like no one cares. An old inner critic voice might rear up to say, why bother?
Amidst all the obligations of the rest of your life, who needs you to be digging into your raw weird heart and creating art that sometimes even you don’t understand?
YOU DO.
AND WE DO, TOO.
the cave is companionship
When we’re meeting our edges, we need good mirrors.
It’s my firm belief that artists need artists. As much as the work we do is about exploring the solitude of our own souls’ depths, mining a process that may be uniquely our own, it is catalytic to have someone sitting outside the cave mouth, with metaphorical camp fire and warm stew, waiting to hear your fresh ghost stories, feel the glimmers of possibility, see the potential together with you.
We need to be understood.
Especially when we’re meeting edges of uncertainty, we need to be witnessed by those who know how to fan the sparks of our aliveness into full flame. And we need to witness others in their messy, alive process, so we remember we’re not alone.
the cave is a bridge between worlds
Art is a collaboration with the sacred mystery.
When you’re making your art, you sometimes go into this altered state. This inner world. Muck around in your process, wrangle something raw into form. When it’s really flowing, the work is making you. There’s something mystic in it, something deeply intuitive, personal, and meaningful.
Then when you talk about it, or share or show or even try to critique it, sometimes you’re doing so from a very different self. The identity you walk around in might not fully know how to access the very vulnerable inner depths from which you create.
Entering the Cave is a liminal, sacred space that combines silence and mystical practices (guided visualizations, ritual, energy work) with time in playful, authentic discussion, so that you can integrate these two worlds: both your access to the depths with your day-to-day reality.
Entering the Cave:
Sacred Practice for Artists
Discipline/Surrender/Flow series begins January 2026
A new year can bring a fresh energy. The hectic rush of the holidays is past, and there’s a longing to call in more space for your creative practice.
But many of us struggle to find our flow consistently. We’re balancing jobs, family, errands, activism, friendships, so much daily life.
We know everything feels better when our creative practice is thrumming — but it’s still hard.
Maybe you can find the time, but the inspiration disappears. Or maybe you’re plugging away at a steady-ish practice, but still feeling walled off from your depths, like your art’s a little on the surface, like there’s something more wanting to move through you.
Entering the Cave: Sacred Practice for Artists will become your weekly retreat — a steady anchor where you’ll nourish your artist’s soul with inspiration, companionship, and ongoing support for the hard, real questions you’re wrestling about how to make it all work.
Our first series of 2026 will hone in on the crucial relationship between Discipline, Surrender, and Flow.
This isn’t some New Year’s Resolution thing about “forcing” yourself into some new aspirational routine that’s only going to make you harder on yourself when you “fail” (because life keeps being life).
This is a nurturing, supportive container to help you build what yogis call a “sadhana” — a practice that you can devote yourself to, one that holds you as much as you hold it.
Discipline:
Create personal, meaningful intentions for your practice
Design rituals and routines that fit your life and keep you deeply in tune with your art
Strategize with fellow creatives about schedules, work/life balance, befriending neurocomplexity, and more
Surrender:
Learn grounding and mindfulness techniques to support your process
Practice deep meditation, restorative yoga, breath work, and visualization to enter altered states
Explore mystic practices such as divination and ritual to collaborate with the Mystery
Introduce shadow work to meet common experiences of self-doubt, avoidance, resistance, and shame with loving awareness
Experience genuine, transformative healing as you get to see and be seen in your authentic wholeness by fellow creatives who get it
Flow:
Share emerging insights and edgy questions with a supportive group of fellow creatives
Engage in freewriting and other embodied practices to deepen your relationship with flow state
Receive inspirational quotes, poetry, and optional homework prompts to energize your practice
We’ll gather together for a nine-week series this new year, which is roughly the amount of time that research claims it takes to truly forge a new habit.
Over the course of this deeper journey together, you’ll have the chance to
implement new rituals and practices in the laboratory of your real life
bring your questions, struggles, and hopes to the collaborative energy of our group
build ownership and fluency with skills and ideas that will support your practice for years to come
The trust we’ll build as a cohort will enable us to get into more vulnerable material with one another: the parts of us that are afraid of exposure, afraid of success, afraid of our fullest power. You’ll get to truly meet your edges here, with deep support.
By the end of this series, you can expect:
a deeper sense of who you truly are as an artist
more comfort taking risks that now feel out of reach
a stronger trust in your capacity to return to flow state — even when life is chaotic
creative companions who truly care about your artistic path
a path of synchronicities and surprises to open you to possibilities you couldn’t have consciously created
Begins late January 2026. Interested & want to make sure the timing works for you? Take a quick scheduling poll below.
Entering the Cave
Entering the Cave: Sacred Practice for Artists is the support I wish I’d had when I was a blocked writer.
A space to be among fellow artists and feel seen and held at the level of the soul.
So often, writing or art workshops focus mostly on craft, but bypass the heart-soul-shadow work most artists confront (steadily) if we’re really pushing into our rawest material.
We need that shadow work though, because on some level, most of us make art to wrestle with emotion: to channel impermanent beauty, process grief, ritually release trauma.
We make art to feel alive, and to dream better worlds into existence, and to wring the wild inchoate interior world out like a wet sponge into something that can be seen, or held, or heard.
This is a profound gift we offer. And often, it is fucking hard.
No wonder we get stuck sometimes. When you’re making work you truly care about, you rub up against what you truly care about. And that’s edgy, joyful, terrifying, liberating work to be doing.
Sure, you could stay on the surface, and keep making work you don’t truly find challenging. But the art that makes life feel worth living?
It costs something.
Usually your comfort.
What a payoff, though, when you push past safe and into sacred.
In the cave, we make braving the darkness a lot more fun, because you’re not doing any of it alone. Friendly companions, loving heart-felt guidance, and rituals and practices to take you across the thresholds of your day-to-day self into the altered states where soul-transformation opens — then bring you safely back into integration.
Fair warning: more than your art will change. This practice can shift your life.
What people say
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"Entering the Cave sessions have been wonderful in many ways. The three most obvious ways are: 1) They are supportive of my creative development as an artist. 2) They are a mental health salve; the multi-modal approach including guided meditation, body movement, writing/art prompts and the group processing of those experiences go a long way in supporting my mental health. I consider my participation in "Entering the Cave" to be a part of my mental health support system. 3) The friendships I'm developing with you and the participants in the Cave are important to me and make my life richer."
Shai, Entering the Cave participant
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"You struck such a beautiful balance of stories and topics simple enough to be mantras, but complex enough to have great depth. For that reason, I expect I'll carry all of them with me. The yoga was delicious. I felt great during and after--and it was interesting to experience the way in which I felt opened up to creativity in a different way after the yoga. Things came up in the writing exercises that I have never written about before. I love the way you get us into poses differently than any other yoga teacher. It feels inherently creative and full of surprise!"
Monica, Entering the Cave participant
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"This was the most loving practice I think I've ever experienced. It felt like it was less of an object, and more of a vessel."
Ariel, Entering the Cave participant
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"It was such a gift to be held in this space. A deeply nurturing practice, a highly intuitive teacher, a stellar community of creatives/truth-seekers/kind & kindred people. I’m filled up and my body feels amazing."
Kate, Entering the Cave Participant
Contact me
I’d love to hear from you.