Defusing Confusion

Locals piece their lives together through collage work

by Jessica L. Lloyd-Rogers and printed in The Good Times, Santa Cruz, CA.
August 9, 2001
Reprinted by permission

In the midst of dying, Pam Gonsalves [See photo at bottom of article] found something to live for.

Two years ago, when the former speech pathologist was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and was told she only had six to eight months to live, death took on a new meaning. And so did life. Suddenly, in the middle of all her soul searching and her struggles to accept the inevitable — the realization that she would have to leave her family behind — something happened. She found herself turning to a unique therapeutic process she learned about eight years beforehand. Through time, some emotional self-discoveries became just a cut and snip away as she grabbed a pair of scissors, a stack of newspapers, and rediscovered the premise of Watsonville author Seena Frost’s new book SoulCollage.

Using Frost’s collage techniques, Gonsalves was able to better cope with her medical forecast. She found a series of images and created what she called a Death Card, an illustration whose images mirrored the thoughts she had about dying at the time. Ironically, she had created a Death Card just a year earlier. But the images on her first Death Card were startling — skulls, dark caves and rocks against a dreary landscape.

Pam's First Death Card

Surprisingly, when death became a reality, Gonsalves found that the images on her new card were filled with brighter images.

“When I made the first Death Card, I saw death as a series of endings,” she says. “(After being diagnosed), I didn’t want death to be an ending, I wanted beginnings.”

Her second Death Card contains an image of an individual she calls the Promise Keeper.

Pam's Second Death Card

“I show the Promise Keeper in the bow of the boat holding the light of unknown promise,” Gonsalves says. “I (now) see that death is not the end of it all, but another realm of reality.”

Gonsalves, who recently celebrated her 30th wedding anniversary, admits that it is extremely challenging to deal with the fact that she has to leave “such a wonderful family” behind.

“I hate to leave,” she says. “I’m selfish — (I want) to stick around to enjoy life, but I also don’t want to leave them. I want death to be beautiful. I want mine to be beautiful – a celebration.”

That’s how Frost’s handiwork came into play. The Executive Director of Family Services in Pajaro Valley has been on a mission. For more than a decade, Frost, through a series of workshops, has assisted people in digging deep within their psyches and emotions to manifest a visual illustration of their perceptions and moods in an effort to heal their souls. She says the soul is the ephemeral part of humans, which makes us who we are, beyond our physical presence.

“Our whole life is a collage,” Frost says. “We all have lives that are composed of many pieces. We gather up the pieces and try to make sense of it all. Sometimes, we find the pieces don’t fit.”

Frost discovered this first hand when she realized that her own life was made up of a myriad of pieces. She was a wife, a mother, a Yale Divinity School student, a trained marriage and family therapist and a prominent member of the community. She saw that somehow these aspects of her life had to make sense in the bigger scheme of things. Moreso, she wanted to know what her relationship was to them and how she really felt about each particular aspect of her life. She wanted to understand what desires, emotions and attitudes were dwelling within her — things that needed to be addressed, looked at or dealt with. Like other therapists before her, most notably Carl Jung, she came to believe that symbols and archetypes allowed people to get in touch with and identify parts of themselves.

The author began the SoulCollage™ process in the ’80s after studying with Jean Houston, an internationally renowned scientist and philosopher and also the director of the Foundation for Mind Research in New York. For her final assignment in a workshop led by Houston, Frost decided that she would create a series of cards that represented how she saw each of her classmates. The students remarked on how perfectly she had captured aspects of each person, Frost says. Suddenly, she was inspired to help people herself and use collage to work with her own prospective clients and workshop participants.

The idea is deceptively simple: collect images that speak to you or you’re attracted to, move the pieces around until you’re satisfied with the final result, and then glue them on a surface. Frost says the secret is to externalize what is felt or intuited but cannot yet be identified. She serves as a guide for workshop participants.

“Once we see it externalized, we can name this part of ourselves,” Frost says. “In the naming, we claim it. This process of rediscovery and reintegration is very healing for our souls.”

Frost believes that a neter (rhymes with better) helps facilitate the process of understanding one’s life. It’s an ancient Egyptian idea of an ally or guide, which she explains in her book.

“It can be an archetype, a person, an animal totem or part of your inner self,” she says. “It is both the one and the many. Every religion has some version of neter.”

While Frost was exploring images and making many cards, she noticed similar themes among several of them and eventually found herself developing four different suits in a deck of her own Soul Collage cards. Like suits one would find in a typical deck of playing cards — hearts, diamonds, clubs and spades – Frost labeled her suits Committee, Community, Companion and Council and gave each a meaning. For example, the Committee suit represents psychological aspects and the images match various creative qualities, such as an artist, mother, friend, lover, child or critic. An additional card, considered the lone “Source” card, was created to represent a figure or figures related to where Frost — or others who used her deck — received their own emotional and mental strength. Frost uses her own Soul Collage deck as a guideline for workshop participants who may choose to eventually assemble their own deck of cards with suits meaningful to them.

Jim Schofield, a Santa Cruz Holotropic Breath Therapist, who professionally uses a process that involves breathing techniques, energy work and art to assist individuals into being put into a non-ordinary state of consciousness to work on healing issues, has been making cards since taking his first workshop three years ago. Although he gives each of his cards some kind of name, he says he doesn’t follow the idea of suits.

“I don’t use the cards as formally as some people might,” he says. “I pull cards out one or two at a time and meditate on them. Every time I go through my cards or make another card, the images tell me more about my psyche.”

But, there is another, more creative, pay-off for Schofield. “The cutting, arranging and pasting of the pictures gave me confidence in my creative ability,” he adds. “I’m not sure I believed that I could have created something as beautiful as the cards if I hadn’t experienced it.”

Schofield says that anyone who wants to explore personal creativity can use the process to simply create “objects of joy and beauty” without having years of artistic training.

“The SoulCollage process is a way to tend soul and explore the psyche at the same time,” Frost says. “Gradually, as you work with your collage cards, the various ways in which your personal life story is woven into the larger divine story become clearer. Patterns unique to you emerge. Unexpected (things) will almost certainly bubble up.”

When she was a speech pathologist, Gonsalves used the process with some of her own clients.

“It’s a wonderful way to work with those who have difficulty with speech or language or have a hard time expressing themselves because the pictures can illustrate what the person cannot, especially emotions,” Gonsalves says.

Even as Frost encourages her clients to flow with the changes and evolutions in their choices of images, she continues to fine-tune her part in the process. During a recent trip to Greece for a sacred theater workshop, she was encouraged to expand the process beyond collage and meditation to journaling on the cards.

“I’ve begun to give assignments for people to write and act out dialogue from the cards,” she says. “During the sacred theatre workshop, I became aware of the importance of having an audience or high witness for who we are — instead of working by ourselves in isolation. We start with the images. The cards represent and honor some part of us. We give it a name and by reading it as, ‘I am one who …’ and speaking it aloud, we proclaim it. Others hear it and that is part of how we know who we are.”

“The process is about healing and discovery,” says Kylea Taylor, owner of Hanford Mead Publishers, Inc. in Santa Cruz. Three years ago, Taylor took Frost’s workshop and was so impressed with the process, she eventually became Frost’s publisher.

“I saw Seena’s photocopied book and even then I thought it reflected the energy and excitement people feel in the process,” Taylor says. “I feel so satisfied when I get the right picture.”

“Often the pictures find you,” says Marcela Tavantizis, Assistant City Manager of Watsonville. Tavantizis turned to SoulCollage in 1998, after she was diagnosed with pancreatitis and cancer and has since been working with a SoulCollage group twice a month. She uses the process to face feelings she has regarding her health and the restrictions it places upon her, especially with food. She says creating and working (meditating and journaling) with cards has allowed her to “always find a way to make (her frustrations) OK.”

And for Tavantizis, the process of locating the proper image can be revolutionary.

“Suddenly, you know, ‘I have to have it,’” she says. “This happens especially when you aren’t looking for a specific image.”

But you don’t have to be dying or have a life-threatening illness to gain from the process.

“It’s about time and the search for perfection,” Tavantizis says. “We are always improving what we know about ourselves. This process is for anyone who wants to get to know his or herself better. I’ve taken many classes to study management and leadership for my job. But, whether it is my reaction to issues in my life, other people, or to a part of me, the Soul Collage process is about studying me.”

Pam Gonsalves and her "Hope" SoulCollage Card

In September, Frost will be adding more pieces to her life collage when she leaves her position at Family Services to concentrate on her private practice and lead workshops.

“I think I’m moving closer to being a spiritual counselor who works with images,” she says.

As for Gonsalves, she has designed a third card in her series. But, she doesn’t refer to it as the third “Death Card.”

“I call it Hope,” she says. “I hope my journey beyond is an exciting one — a rebirth into that other dimension.”

Though it wasn’t a conscious decision, Gonsalves included a falcon in the print. When she later reflected on the falcon she recognized its significance to her.

“I believe we are always tied or tethered to the present in ways we don’t understand, maybe through the memories of others or through something totally mysterious,” Gonsalves says. “The truth is that we cannot love others until we love our self — the cards help us grow so we have more to give.”