Entering the Wild Image

A glimpse into The Wild Image Practitioner Training

I am launching my inaugural cohort of the Wild Image Practitioner Training and am sharing some person writing about my journey into this work. If you are interested in becoming a embodiment photographer, check out the information through the link at the bottom of this essay.

What does it mean to be a photographer?

This is something that I ask myself often because I fell into this work accidently and never imagined it would consume so much of my life (in the best way possible).

For context, right before I started created images, I had recently finished my graduate degree in political science. 10 years of education had prepared me to step onto a path I thought I really wanted. These were my first self-portraits:

But the part of me that wanted that path was very wounded and I couldn’t see it. Self-portraits allowed me to see what was most true.

I was depressed, isolated, and separate from myself. It turns out that the game that I was playing was a soul sucking one and I didn’t even realize it until it was almost too late. The camera called to me and I listened. I still remember that day in March when I decided to see myself.

I posted these images on Facebook in an album called SEE (Self-expression experiment). I am still living that experiment to this day.

Within 2 years of my first self-expression portraits I had left a nearly 1.5 decades long toxic relationship, quite the soul-sucking job, and moved out of the city and back to the land of my upbringing.

I had at this point entered what I now call the Wild Image. She was the wild terrain of the soul that I had known as a child but had become severed from. The photography ceremonies that I guided myself through was how I re-entered this terrain.

Entering The Wild Image

You open your eyes and see that where once there was a feverish despair, there is now a dark yet somehow luminous door.

A thread of sinewy light snakes across the threshold. Tendrils of young ferns spin in the breeze. The play of light and dark across the forest that is now coming into view, does something to a deeply buried part of you.

A current, a motion, a sensation of something beyond the human language begins to rise up from deep within, like a spring from a deeply burried source beneath the mountain. You sit here and are humbled by the beauty of it all.

The story of who you have always thought you were supposed to be begins to dissolve and that doorway that a moment ago yanked you from your daily routines into some form of altered consciousness, has also dissolved.

You are now within. You have crossed the threshold simply by allowing yourself to feel the aliveness emerging from deep within. You are in the between, the liminal, the void. Your entering of this terrain will change you.

The woman you are becoming will be discovered here. You will walk barefooted and without a compass or a map other than the deep knowing within your wild nature who has already been here countless times before.

To enter the Wild Image is to be laid down on the breast of the earth and to be held there until all false identities return to the soil and the soul is returned.

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The woman in these images is only as fully expressed as she is because of the courage that it took to fully enter the invitation that the experiment of self-expression offered through those first images.

And she is still emerging because this terrain is always expanding (and contracting). There are infinite thresholds to cross in our becoming, infinite depths to meet.

To guide and witness this threshold crossing, for yourself or others, is a great service, one so many of us need. I guided myself and had many witnesses along the way. I have guided many women across this threshold and now I am training others to do the same.

With the growing interest in feminine embodiment photography, I feel called to talk about something that doesn’t get talked about nearly enough.

You cannot guide others any deeper (responsibly) than you have journeyed yourself.

That is why most of my clients are space holders and why they come to me when they are at a threshold in their leadership and need to be held as they descend deeper into their power.

This is why…

Feminine consciousness is a force of transformation. Our embodied expression is the medicine of change. And yet so many of us still have identities and inner images that are hooked into patriarchal conditioning. You are not outside of that conditioning. No one is. We are clearing that out and it will take generations.

The distance between the aesthetics of feminine embodiment and the embodied descent and return from the source of our feminine power with our wild authentic image, is a terrain I will guide you through.

The Wild Image is a form of soul retrieval and reflects our power like a smoke signals of our shared liberation. These images travel beyond the individual and transform the way others see themselves. In order to create imagery that has this power, we need to build the capacity within ourselves to be vessels of that depth of transformation.

Which means you have to also be guided and held in your depths.

You need to be able to take off the mask of the ‘good girl’

You need to be willing to share that expression publicly for others to see and feel.

How do you meet yourself in these ways? What comes up in your body? What outdated patriarchal stories and scripts are still running in the background? Where do you undermine your work?

The Wild Image Methodology is an approach to depth work that brings the image into the realm of the soul, soma, and story and I believe it is an antidote to much of the harm being caused by machine consciousness within the dominant paradigm.

Join The Wild Image Practitioner Training and be supported to enter a deeper terrain of the image work you are here to steward.