Natalie offers The Spiritual Alchemist workshop—as well as five other transformational workshops—in North America and Europe. She is now scheduling her transformational workshops primarily upon request. These workshops often take place in private homes, places of worship, institutions of higher learning, centers for the arts, etc.
If you wish to arrange for Natalie to give a workshop in your area, please visit the Contact page and email Natalie the particulars of your request. She will explain how the process works, including that whoever arranges all the logistics can take the workshop(s) for free.
Natalie’s Transformational Workshops:
The Spiritual Alchemist: Working with the Voice of Your Soul
Class Duration: an evening and a day, two half-days, or one full weekend
The Spiritual Alchemist is an in-depth workshop in learning to listen to, engage with, and create from the voice of one’s own soul—our purest source of wisdom, creativity, and inspiration. It is the voice that can reveal our true purpose for this lifetime, and help us navigate and overcome all obstacles to our emotional and spiritual growth.
Through a series of engaging exercises, participants begin learning spiritual alchemy, a practice involving nonlinear forms of organizing, thinking, writing, and understanding. They discover how to create and work in a profoundly life-changing inner “laboratory” that transforms habitual ways of perceiving time, self, and the world. They ultimately develop a form of listening that bypasses normal channels of perception—conscious and unconscious—and takes them straight to the heart of the divine spark within. What they learn will help them set their life’s compass—as the ancients did—by their soul’s intent.
The Spiritual Alchemist is for all creative, spiritual, or growth-oriented people who wish to deepen their self-knowledge, strengthen their inner connection to the divine, and find the key to the purest source of creativity they have.
“It was as if all my previous work had been to empty myself of everything that wasn’t real, so that I could come to this workshop and be totally filled with what is real and true about myself.”
workshop participant (The Spiritual Alchemist)
From Falsehood to Freedom: Writing Our Way Out of the Masks We Wear
Class Duration: one day, two consecutive evenings, or one evening followed by a half-day
[The Spiritual Alchemist is a prerequisite.]
[often given with The Spiritual Alchemist in one full weekend]
From early childhood, all of us have created various personas—personal masks that bind us to small personal “truths” and keep us from tapping into the larger Truth, the source of wisdom and creativity. In this one-day workshop, we learn to recognize and write our way out of our three major masks: the mask we wear to the world, the mask we wear to our closest friends, and the mask with which we face ourselves.
The Spiritual Alchemist workshop is a prerequisite to From Falsehood to Freedom, because the participants’ primary tool will be one they developed in the earlier workshop. Using this tool, we will face, melt, and transform our masks, thereby freeing ourselves and our creative energy for new, insightful, and exciting writing.
Writing in the Mythological Voice: Elevating the Mundane Into Myth
Class Duration: half-day, one-day, or weekend
While writing fiction or memoir roots us in a particular time and place, elevating our truths into the mythological language of ancient story-telling allows us to reach more people—and more profoundly—with the same message. Writing in the mythological voice takes us out of this time and place—and out of ourselves—into a timeless space of archetypes and magic, a space from which our deepest truths emerge. We will learn how to transform humdrum, boring, and taken-for-granted parts of our daily lives into powerful writing that touches people at all levels of their consciousness.
Firing the Sacred Furnace: Writing from the Center of Your Fears
Class Duration: one-day
Creative people usually find it easy to express emotions such as love and hate. And, being intimate with our pains, we rarely have trouble describing what hurts us. The one emotion that most of us avoid exploring is fear. Because maintaining our fears uses up a huge amount of energy, this experiential workshop helps writers, as well as artists in all other media, to free that energy and convert it into powerful creative work.
Facing our fears in a self-created “fiery furnace” results in dramatic, exciting writing. With guidance from the sacred inner fires of our own truths, we learn to create, fire, and enter the furnace at will, using not only present but past fears as fuel. Above all, we learn that all fears, revisited, still fuel and stoke our greatest creative fires.
Don’t Waste Your Crisis: Reaching for Joy in the Midst of Chaos
Class Duration: half-day or full day
Betrayal, illness, divorce, job loss—any crisis can destroy our illusions of safety and stability. A survivor’s workshop for people stretched beyond their normal coping limits, this workshop teaches anyone whose external or internal support structures are collapsing the remarkable lessons of transforming fear-based living into joy-based living. Participants learn a practical, long-term behavioral practice extrapolated from meditation practice (including but not limited to mindfulness), allowing them to permanently integrate their transformational insights into the rest of their lives.
Writing in the Inspired Voice
Class Duration: half-day or evening
When we approach our creative work, many of us equate inspiration with lightning—as something that strikes at random. But inspiration is around us at all times, and we can learn to tap into it at will. Inspiration, after all, means the act of breathing in that which is outside of us. This workshop will focus on forming the intent to call inspiration in, creating the space in which to receive it, and learning how to “breathe back” what we have been given in a way that honors our intent to receive.
We will discover new techniques for hearing the “voice” of inspiration without interference, and to work with it in a committed way. We will also learn to distinguish that voice from the voices of ego, fear, and the internalized critic.