GATHERING THE BONES: Through Archetypal Qigong, Primal Gesture, Dreams and inquiry we enter and move with the story of La Loba 

November 21 &22, 2025

AMSTERDAM-IN PERSON

$465-Early Bird by Sept 21

$540 After Sept 21

In this workshop, we will explore the power inherent within Myth and Archetype as a portal into our mutable inner knowing. Softening, Shapeshifting, Tracking. We’ll sense into the birthright of our animal body and into the wild fluid terrain of inner power.

 I might say she lives among the rotten granite slopes in Tarahumara Indian territory. Or that she is buried outside Phoenix near a well. Perhaps she will be seen traveling south to Monte Alban in a bunt-out car with the back window shot out Or maybe she will be spotted standing by the highway near El Paso, or riding shotgun with truckers to Morelia, Mexico, or walking to market above Oaxaca with strangely formed boughs of firewood on her back. She calls herself by many names: La Huesera, Bone Woman; La Trapera, The Gatherer, and La Loba, Wolf Woman.

~ Women Who Run with the Wolves: Contacting the Power of the Wild Woman by Clarissa Pinkola Estes   

 The import and impact of story, archetype, and symbol is a language that cuts through to speak directly in soul-language… with flashes of insight and direct bone-knowing.

~ Sarah Byrden ~

Moving with the ancient story of La Loba, from the book Women Who Run with the Wolves as retold by cuentista Clarissa Pinkola Estes PhD, we work with the wise old woman who lives within each of us and whose sole [soul] task is to gather scattered and lost bones.

The work of gathering our bones asks us to peer between worlds, to listen with a kind of soul-ear — to search the wild earth of ourselves, both past and present, for what has been lost and must be put back in its rightful place so that we can take our truest shape in this world.

Movements and energies carry profound wisdom and transformative power in our lives and in our world. We cannot access these qualities just in our minds. We must remember what they feel like in our gestures.

The deepest parts of us recognize the power of sensation, symbol, and physical gesture.
Somatically through direct perception and creatively through movement and gesture we take a powerful journey of reclamation and return. We entering the deep Wild territory of our lives.

 Myth and movement are of our most indigenous human expressions and capacities.  As such, they allow us to see, live and move beyond social constructs and to live from a kind of bone-knowing and internal power. The timeless and universal mother tongue of archetype and symbol is a language that cuts through and speaks to us at the deepest level- in flashes of insight and bone-knowing, these symbols point us toward true north, wisdom and next steps. They are maps, mirrors and medicine that we need for our inheritance of thriving, evolving and creating. The work we will engage creates real change, coherence, action, agency and forward motion in the right direction. 

There is movement to our personal mythology as well as the myths that guide and are unfolding in our lives. There is a mythology to the innate gestures that rise from our tissue, and can be touched in specific archetypal flows of qigong as well as in returning to the biomorhic movement of our fluid primal body. All contain a unique and brilliant holographic intelligence that contain maps to show us where we are, where we have been and where to go next, mirrors within which to see ourselves and understand our states and conditions, and the medicine to nourish and instruct us in regards to what is really the matter and where to go from here.

Myth and Movement nourish our Soul. With the cycles of rising energy, zenith, entropy, decline and incubation and into rising energy and creation again we find rhythms vital for deepening our relationships to life.

This workshop will be a potent and medicinal somatic exploration through primal and fluid movement, storytelling and archetypal qigong flows that will bring us into a rich and wise wilderness together, right in the heart of Amsterdam.

YOUR INSTRUCTORS:

Liz Koch

Liz Koch is a conceptual artist exploring the deep sensory system and the wild wisdom of core Psoas. An international somatic educator and author with 45 years of experience, she is the creator of Core Awareness™ and the author of The Psoas Book; Core Awareness: Enhancing Yoga, Pilates, Exercise & Dance; Stalking Wild Psoas: Embodying Your Core Intelligence; and her upcoming book Birth Savvy. Liz focuses on kinesthetic intelligence and somatic awareness as a means for unfolding our human potential. Stalking Wild Psoas is her passion and Changing the Language of Body is her mission.

Sarah Byrden

Sarah Byrden is a wilderness guide of 25 years. For her, the realms of movement, art, mythology, becoming and all matters of heart and soul are wildernesses. She is a somatic educator,  storyteller, and writer. a two time TEDx presenter and has dedicated over twenty years and over 5000 hours of formal study to her apprenticeship of nature-based movement and exploratory modalities. Teaching from her own life-long journey, she is the founder of The Elemental Self, which offers pathways for remembering our true self, the web in which we belong, and our innate capacity to move and be moved by a source beyond our conditioning.