Saturday, January 11th
10 am - 12 pm PST
(a special, 2-hour online workshop)

This will be no ordinary, business-as-usual January setting of goals and objectives.

We will all be facing into a deeply challenging year, both individually and collectively. This gathering will be about creating a welcoming container for us to feel hope and connection so that we are free to dream into the radical unknown.

In this workshop, Melissa and Sara will offer inspiring ideas about the essential roles that neurodivergent people play in times of of struggle and turmoil, and we’ll guide deep reflection on the creative gifts you were born to offer in this moment.

We’ll also offer a process to help you connect to the sources of power and sustenance you will access in the months ahead.

This online workshop is part of the six-month Saltee + West series. To learn more about the series and subscribe to all six workshops, please visit www.salteeacademy.com/salteewest

How do we stay alive in our despair?

As highly sensitive, complex, and intense people, we neurodivergent creators can find ourselves particularly vulnerable to experiencing persistent worry and feelings of hopelessness.

Our acute perceptiveness makes it challenging to tune out the calamities of the world, and our orientation to truth-telling makes it hard for us to fake a sense of false positivity about things that are frankly awful.

In this online workshop, we begin by acknowledging that despair can be an appropriate response to the conditions of the world, and sometimes the conditions of our own lives. But we’ll investigate together how we as creatives can access pathways to aliveness and hope that allow us to work skillfully with despair, and even make something of it.

We’ll explore:

·       What wisdom can we glean from artists, writers, and other creators who have worked with and through times of despair?

·       How can we build the inner and outer resources we need to live with feelings of despair without being taken down by them?

·       How can we intentionally use our creative practice to transmute despair into possibility?

This workshop is part of the six-month Saltee + West series. To learn more about the series and subscribe to all six workshops, please visit www.salteeacademy.com/salteewest

Come get inspired by wildly divergent models of creative freedom, explore the edges of your own freedom, and find new inner permissions to break free!

This 1944 image of Georgia O’Keefe gleefully riding off into the desert in her goggles and dungarees embodies an iconic, inspirational freedom of spirit. Yet, for most of us, exiting the bounds of family and society is not an available or desirable route to the freedom we seek.

In this 90-minute online workshop, we’ll explore what freedom looks and feels like for you and chart ways you can expand the territory in which you are truly free to follow your authentic creative impulses and honor your innate intelligence.

We’ll share some of the wildly divergent strategies that women creators have used to claim the inner and outer space their creative spirits demand.

And, we’ll explore the dynamics that lead us restrict our own freedom in conscious and unconscious ways: the tensions between freedom and belonging, the powerful cultural and familial pressures that work to keep women domesticated and tame, and the subtle ways we may still be waiting for others to grant us permission to follow our creative life force.

Ready to bust some taboos in the messy, awkward space of freedom? This one’s for you!

“How can I create when the world is going to shit?”
“How can I focus when I’m overwhelmed by the chaos around me?”

If you are feeling creatively frozen by the chaos of the world, this is a workshop for you!

High sensitivity is foundational for creativity, yet it comes with both gifts and challenges.  One of the biggest challenges is dealing with both external and internal chaos and a sense of overwhelm. 

Though difficulty managing chaos is often framed as an emotional issue, it is actually a nervous system issue! The tools and strategies that will most help you move back into creative action are those that help you calm your reactive nervous system.

In this workshop, we’ll focus on three key strategies for working with a highly sensitive nervous system in tumultuous times.

• You’ll learn about functional freeze, how to recognize when you are in it, and simple tools for coming out of it,

• we’ll do some on-the-spot coaching to model the Kaizen process for finding a right-sized next step that doesn’t destabilize you,

• and we’ll explore how you can replace black-and-white thinking with a practice of re-calibration.

Don’t let chaos and overwhelm kill your creativity!