Humor and Your SoulCollage® Cards!

by Seena Frost (January 2007)

Welcome to the SoulCollage website if you are browsing and just discovering us. I trust you found your reading, as you entered the site, intriguing! Now I invite you to browse the gallery of cards, read some of my earlier columns, and perhaps get the book, SoulCollage: An Intuitive Collage Process for Individuals and Groups. There is a vital and widening community of people working with this process of SoulCollage, and we would welcome you if you want to join us!

It’s the beginning of a new year, and as usual I have gathered my Committee members (the inner parts of myself) for a serious talk: OK, guys and gals, you need to shape up! Less chocolate, more exercise, less spending time and money on unneeded things, more generosity of time and money to good causes. Right? Of course, right! Actually I think this prodding and persistent energy must be my Warrior archetype because he keeps on and keeps on: Come on now, wake up. This is serious business! Get you head out of the sand. The world is in a mess and you need to be out there making a difference. Are you in some state of denial??? And with that I sit up and check my list, tighten my belt, get busy, …but … I don’t know whether to cry, plead insanity, or … or just burst out laughing! Another archetype, the Fool, now reaches over and hands me Anne Marie Bennett’s card, Intelligent. I hear him whisper: Could you be taking yourself too seriously, my dear?

MY INTELLIGENT SELF

In this month’s column I’m going to suggest that we all include humorous images in our SoulCollage deck, at least once in a while. Humor is probably the one critical seasoning that is, like a fine herb, so memorable that it will startle us into awareness. It could be the unexpected perspective that jars us awake so we can better do our unique, creative work in the world, whatever that may be.

Julia Field, one of several SoulCollage facilitators in the Seattle area, sent me these words about humor in her cards:

I find that humor can sometimes be an invitation into a deeper place … humor softens me up, and helps me look at myself with curiosity and compassion. I think it also helps other people relate – to me, to SoulCollage, to themselves – and builds community in a group.

Absolutely, Julia. Well said.

MY IGNORING SELF

So, what makes a card funny?

Often it can be the juxtaposition of two images that seem to contradict,
like Anne Marie Bennett’s My Intelligent Self above.

Sometimes it is exaggeration like the two cards, Sally Hudson’s My Ignoring Self, and Gretchen Sentry’s My Fat Self.

MY FAT SELF

EARL

Or the one called Earl by Diana Meier, who speaks from the woman photographer in this card saying: I Am One Who is intrigued by the world and the continuity below the contradictions …”





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