We can’t grow if we stay where we are, either metaphorically or literally. Of Lithuanian origin I was raised in Adelaide, Australia and first moved overseas in 1999. I spent 13 years based between London, New York and Tokyo while traveling the world gaining insight into emerging social, cultural and consumer trends. I returned to Australia in 2012 for a couple of years before again leaving for Europe as the urge to dance, move, write and explore the forests was calling. I also got tired of certainty and of control.
We need to create safe containers for experimentation. We have to be willing to blow stuff up in a laboratory! And to intimately know destruction as the right hand of creation. For something new to be born, something must – metaphorically – die. It’s why I’ve spent the past few years delving deep into underworld mythology.
Our unrealised potential will always ask us to go into the unknown of our lives. We’re invited to align with a timing that doesn’t solely come from the mind: a mixture of chronos (quantitative, linear time as years, hours, seconds), kairos (qualitative, numinous time as moments) and cosmos (the movement of the planets and the timing and character of historical and future events) must all figure.
It takes energy, space, stamina and the courage of the soul to explore what’s uncertain, unchartered and unrevealed. I got sick of moral and ethical weakness masked as bullying in the corporate world. Of incongruency. Of living in a shame-based western work culture that inflates wounded egos and tells the soul to stay outside the boardroom door. That nature’s voice isn’t voiced.
Patterns
I’ve always been fascinated by patterns for we are patterned beings in a patterned universe.
As a regular presenter at the Jung Society I explore the patterns in mythology. As a constellation facilitator the process is about exploring what’s been excluded from the system, which unconscious patterns are repeated and what the underlying cause of the present situation is. And as an archetypal consultant I perceive the patterns in the collective unconscious and those within our own psyches.
At university I studied history, social anthropology and indigenous cosmology, finding the patterns in the stars and in culture. As a trend forecaster I tracked the patterns on the streets and in the marketplace. As the author of Grace and the Wind, I wrote about the patterning of seasonal, tidal, lunar and circadian rhythms.
But for all the explorations of cosmos and psyche, one must return. I’ve always loved the last few stanzas of C. P. Cavafy’s ‘Ithaka.’
Keep Ithaka always in your mind.
Arriving there is what you’re destined for.
But don’t hurry the journey at all.
Better if it lasts for years,
so you’re old by the time you reach the island,
wealthy with all you’ve gained on the way,
not expecting Ithaka to make you rich.
Ithaka gave you the marvelous journey.
Without her you wouldn't have set out.
She has nothing left to give you now.
And if you find her poor, Ithaka won’t have fooled you.
Wise as you will have become, so full of experience,
you’ll have understood by then what these Ithakas mean.
My Purpose
We all need encouragement and support to bring new life into form: whether that’s bringing ideas into the material, making what’s invisible visible, or requiring accompaniment as we develop our fledgling relationship with the unknown.
My calling is as a guide serving other people in engagement, interaction and inter-relationship. I offer individuals insights into their human journey as well as supporting organisations on their creative path.
My joy is working with people, giving them archetypal co-ordinates and processes to activate and engage their destiny. Having my Mercury in Aquarius I’m more of a lightning fast, intuitive, symbolic thinker and so needed a vessel that allowed that to flourish, which has been archetypal consulting.
I love working with symbolic systems, with metaphors, with archetypal and mythic narratives and doing this through the counselling arts. I am your companion to guide you to your own wisdom. I feel grateful that I’ve been able to bring my love of archetypes, mythology and my inner mystical artist to be in relationship to the service of other people . . . to you. To assist you in self-reflection to find what is of meaning and value to yourself and to life.
So, what inspires me? Well, it’s really only in the grit of our experience – not in our heads – that transformation occurs. It’s why I love the 5Rhythms dance practice. And it is a practice. It gets me out of my head and into my body as Gabrielle Roth wrote in an article for Conscious Dancer in 2008:
“What I have learned so far is that to answer the question, ‘What does it mean to be a human being?’ we need to defer to our feet and move back to our roots. These roots are made of light that connects us to 75,000 years of ecstatic dance tradition, to all who have danced to transport themselves out of their heads into the wilderness of their own psyches to experience, in poetic patterns, the shape of their souls.”
I’ve had the most absolute fun dancing with Kate Shela and Amber Ryan in the Joshua Tree, Tim Booth in Sacramento, Adam Barley in Sydney and Alain Allard and Sarah Pitchford in Rotterdam.
And of course I deeply appreciate the power of image as expressed in art and film, especially in Pre-Raphaelite paintings. My favourites are the ones by John William Waterhouse that depict scenes from Alfred Tennyson’s poem The Lady of Shalott.
Waterhouse painted three different versions of this character: The Lady of Shalott, The Lady of Shalott Looking at Lancelot and I Am Half-Sick of Shadows, Said the Lady of Shalott. I also love his Circe Invidiosa painting.
The films Groundhog Day, The Adjustment Bureau, The Matrix Trilogy, Cloud Atlas, Sliding Doors, Mr Nobody, Predestination and the TV series Sense8 have notably influenced how I perceive the world. Like great plays, the images continue to still live within me . . . within us.
Please look through my site to find out the many ways in which I work with people. When we wake up to our power, inter-connection and how what we create inter-relates with all things, in stillness we whisper to ourselves – "How will I walk this earth?" – and live the answer.
With you on the path – Kristina X
© 2020 Kristina Dryza