Welcome to Weaving a Life!

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What Exactly Is Weaving A Life?

The fact is, people are seeking meaning in their lives, spiritual growth, and a deeper connection to their communities. If you are one of these, you want more than ideas and concepts to help you understand how to live a more fulfilled life. You’re hungry for a way to connect with your hands, with materials that enrich life, like those that come from the earth. You want to live a life that transcends the virtual world in which we seem to exist, dominated by technology and its shallow electronic relationships, with little connection to the earth on which we all live.

The Weaving a Life process connects you with nature: the wooden loom and fiber art materials are portable, allowing you to bring your work into the woods, to the sea, to the hearth, or any place that inspires you.

We long to bring together the spiritual, emotional and physical aspects of ourselves — what if we could manifest that integrative process in a tangible way? Weaving a Life gives you a conscious process of integrating yourself – your beliefs, your values, and your way of living in the world, in forms you can touch.

The intangible, yet profound, value of Weaving a Life is that it helps you to integrate yourself in a complete way, with simple handwork that is pursued with a goal of understanding yourself. That’s the whole of Weaving a Life, but what does it mean? How can handwork help you understand yourself?

Weaving a Life’s handwork, through the seven keyforms – elemental forms you create yourself – is beyond being mindful. It helps you become fully aware of the wholeness of your life – hands, heart, psyche, spirit – through this simple, humble process of handwork done with a conscious purpose.

What are keyforms?

Keyforms are elemental forms – Amulet, Bowl, Doll, Belt of Power, Mask, sacred Bundle, Shawl – that are woven from simple patterns, and build sequentially to move students through the journey of Weaving a Life. Each has a special meaning and function. The Amulet calls into your life what you wish to do and to become. The Bowl is the keyform of self-acceptance and self-love. The Doll reveals the wisdom that lives inside you. The Belt of Power helps you advocate for yourself, to define your sacred space. The Mask is an exploration of identity. The Bundle is a toolbox for the journey of your life. The Shawl represents your practice of this process throughout your life. It consists of a collection of woven pieces representing golden moments from your life, recording your inner beauty and strength in a tangible way.

A neurologist who studied the hand and its role in the development of the mind, said, in his book The Hand,

“When personal discovery and desire prompt anyone to learn to do something well with the hands, a highly complicated process is initiated that endows work with a powerful emotional charge. People are changed, significantly and irreversibly, it seems, when movement, thought and feeling fuse during the active, long term pursuit of goals.”

— Frank O. Wilson, M.D., The Hand

So this is more than Weaving a Life’s opinion of what happens: it has a strong scientific basis. You really understand this when you can internalize the physical experience of your hands, and externalize your new awareness of yourself in your interactions with family, friends, and community.

Warp and Weft

Weaving a Life takes the vertical threads, in weaving terms the warp, to represent your innermost beliefs and core understandings. The weft represents your actions in the world: the horizontal threads you weave through the vertical threads of your beliefs, making the fabric of your life. Through the Weaving a Life process, you internalize these relationships, and it gives you new insight into what you are doing, and how you are feeling about it. Weaving a Life gives you a structure to understand your life, and it’s a liberating structure, one that frees you from unconscious actions, bring your choices into a sphere of consciousness of yourself and your goals, and helps you weave a fabric of life that will serve you in all ways.

One Weaving Circle Leadership student described it like this:

“It was amazing: I could touch what I was thinking! When I took my weaving off the loom, I lost part of the warp, which represented my values, and I realized this is like my life. When my values are loose and floppy, my actions won't make a fabric that works for me.”

What do we mean by “values?”

We talk about values as your innermost beliefs about how you live and how you want to live. Honesty, respect for the earth, creativity – these are examples of values. The warp threads do not just represent your values. Through weaving the keyforms, they become imbued with your values, as you internalize the external process of weaving, and see it become a clear structure for designing your life. When you can touch your values, feel them, see their color, you begin to know what your values really mean in your life. You get acquainted with yourself in ways you never have before.

We often enter into personal or business relationships believing we share values with our partner or our colleague, only to find later that their values in some ways may be antithetical to ours. We’re disappointed, frustrated, angry. What’s really happening is that we thought they had our values, and are disappointed when they turn out to be their own person. If we stick with the relationship, and come to know our own values, in other words, to know ourselves and respect ourselves for who we are, we can come to respect and admire others for their own individuality and for how true they are to their values.

This is how we create peace in the world

Many of us see people from another culture and unconsciously think they should have our values. When they don’t, we become confused and fearful. When we respect another’s values – and that respect can only come out of knowing and respecting our own values – then we can truly understand them. When we respect and understand each other’s individuality, we can get along. This is the real meaning of “peace begins at home.”

What is Weaving Circle Leadership Training?

Weaving Circle Leadership Training is our certification course for leading workshops, or circles, in weaving the seven Weaving a Life keyforms. This intensive course provided through distance learning, over twelve weeks, so you can learn from anywhere in the world. In addition to students throughout the United States, we have students in Australia, Canada, and the United Kingdom. Most of our work is done over the phone, so an understanding of technology is not required.

Many people attend Weaving Circles and then want to become leaders themselves. Many of our students are not weavers when they begin the course. The woven pieces are designed to be very simple – no experience is necessary. After all, it’s not so much about the weaving as the experience. Often professionals want to use Weaving a Life in their practice. Nurses, therapists, and phychiatrists, as well as teachers, find Weaving a Life to be extremely valuable with their clients and patients.

What happens in Weaving Circle Leadership training?

From the very first, beginning with a life review, teacher and student connect in a deep and powerful way. Everyone wants to tell their life story, but who will listen? The Weaving a Life teacher not only listens, but reflects back the values and life patterns that are revealed in the student’s story.

Moving to the keyforms, with reflection, journaling and discussion, and guided by the teacher, you as a student call into your life what you need and how you want to live in the next chapter of your life.

Many of us are missing something in our lives, but we don’t know what it is. We can spend our whole lives searching for that missing something. Weaving a Life contends that it already lives inside you, and that you only need to reveal it to yourself to live a more whole life, a more fulfilled and rewarding life. What you call in with the amulet, the very first keyform, will become the golden thread that goes through all the work you will do throughout your training, and beyond your training into your life. The amulet is the foundation of your new vision and your new path for yourself, whatever it may be. The sequence of keyforms confirms and expands that vision, and brings it fully into your life in both tangible outer ways in the work you do, and in inner ways in deeper connection with your spiritual core, and in your rejuvenated energy and zest for life.

Learn More About Weaving Circle Leadership Training