Workshop: How Fairytales Can Show Us the Way Home

Building upon the Friday talk, this immersive and experiential workshop invites participants deeper into the symbolic landscape of the fairytale as a living map of the psyche. If the Friday talk opened the forest path, Saturday enters the woods.

Together, we will explore why fairytales endure—not as sentimental relics of childhood, but as profound psychological and spiritual containers capable of guiding the soul through periods of uncertainty, grief, transition, initiation, aging, collapse, and renewal.

Drawing from Jungian psychology, archetypal theory, dreams, myth, and lived experience, Muriel McMahon will guide us into the imaginal and transformative world of traditional tales, where witches guard thresholds, forests disorient the ego, impossible tasks refine the soul, and hidden helpers emerge precisely when all seems lost.

Throughout the day, we will explore questions such as:

• What happens psychologically when we lose the path home to ourselves?
• Why do fairytales so often begin in famine, exile, abandonment, or enchantment?
• What is the symbolic function of Baba Yaga, the wolf, the dark forest, the bone house, or the impossible task?
• Why does modern culture often pathologize experiences that older symbolic traditions understood as initiation?
• How do fairytales help restore instinct, imagination, meaning, and relationship to the deeper Self?
• What does it mean to become an elder capable of carrying fire through dark times?

Particular attention will be given to tales such as “Vasilisa the Beautiful,” “The Hunter and Fox Woman,” and other stories that illuminate the soul’s journey through fear, fragmentation, and transformation toward wholeness.

Participants need not have prior Jungian training—only curiosity, openness, and a willingness to enter the forest.

This workshop is especially suited for people of all genders, including therapists, seekers, artists, caregivers, elders, educators, clergy, and anyone standing at the threshold of change.

Fairytales remind us that the path is rarely straight. That wisdom often arrives disguised. That the soul speaks symbolically long before the ego understands.

And perhaps most importantly: what appears lost may not be gone.

It may simply be waiting in the woods for us to find it differently.