Shapeshifting
A seasonal community exploring archetype, symbolism and cyclical becoming.
Shapeshifting is a living body of work that unfolds through seasonal participation, reflective practice, symbolic exploration and communal learning.
Begin with the pathway most alive in your life when seasonal enrolments open, then continue through the wider cycle as it unfolds.
Perhaps you recognise yourself here...
꩜ You can feel that something in your life is changing, even if you do not yet have clear language for what it is.
꩜ You have never fully found yourself within rigid archetypal or life-stage models and long for ways of understanding women’s lives that feel more layered, cyclical and true to lived experience.
꩜ You are looking for spaces where contradiction, uncertainty, creativity and emotional complexity can exist together without needing to be resolved.
꩜ You want reflection to become something you live through making, conversation, creativity, ritual and shared experience.
꩜ You are drawn to learning alongside other women through a shared seasonal rhythm, rather than working through another self-paced online course.
Ways to Enter Shapeshifting
Shapeshifting can be entered through reading, reflection or lived participation.
Begin with the hardcover book or photographic oracle, or join the seasonal community when enrolments open.
The Book
A hardcover book exploring archetypal pathways, cyclical becoming, symbolism and recurring emotional patterns across women’s lives.
The Oracle
A visual and symbolic oracle deck for reflection, journalling and symbolic exploration through image, archetypal voice and invocation.
Seasonal Community
A seasonal community exploring archetype through psychology, symbolic practice and shared experience. New pathways open four times each year.
What Lives Inside the Seasonal Community...
The online pathways offer seasonal, communal participation through symbolic practice, archetypal exploration and lived experience.
Archetypal Exploration
Ways of understanding recurring patterns of change, relationship, creativity, grief, desire and becoming across women’s lives.
Ritual, Making and Practice
Seasonal ritual, weaving, doll making, movement and reflective practices that bring symbolic exploration into lived and tangible experience.
Creativity and Symbol
Story, image, crafting and imaginative exploration used to engage longing, instinct, emotional patterning and transformation.
Psychological Reflection
Affect, relational dynamics and emotional patterning explored through psychologically grounded teaching and communal conversation.
Story, Book Club and Gathering
Seasonal reading, mythic exploration and live discussion woven through reflection, conversation and shared participation.
The curriculum grows over time, while the community moves together through the seasons.
Why We Gather Seasonally...
Life doesn’t unfold all at once, and neither does Shapeshifting.
Rather than remaining permanently open, the Seasonal Community welcomes new women four times each year. Each opening coincides with the beginning of a new archetypal pathway, allowing everyone to begin together before the community settles into the work of that season.
Each seasonal opening remains available for approximately two weeks before closing again. This shared rhythm creates continuity, deeper conversation and a stronger sense of travelling alongside one another, rather than continually entering and leaving an ongoing course.
You can begin with whichever archetype is opening when you arrive, or choose the complete annual journey and move through the full cycle over time.
Through this work women often experience…
✨ reflection becoming part of ordinary life rather than something separate from it
✨ creativity and reflective practices returning to everyday life in meaningful ways
✨ relating to archetypes less as identities and more as movements within a life
✨ feeling less alone in contradiction, uncertainty, grief, exhaustion and change
✨ practices, images and reflections that continue unfolding long after first encountering the work
What women say…
I feel like I’m accompanied by the archetypes at different times which can support me and give me strength to walk through things. This work is with me daily. I like being part of a small group also diving into these topics and sharing with them. That helps to share and hear their reflections too…
“What I love about this work is it makes it inclusive. We move through the archetypes not as specific life stages but throughout daily life, projects, months and breaths etc, etc. It helps me understand dive deep into the learning not just in a head way, but a heart, spirit, body way…
This is a way to dive deeper into the rhythm work that is also very psychologically. transformative. It’s unique in its centering of women's experience and bodies but moving it away from focusing solely on blood rites/birth.”
~ Julia
Inside the Seasonal Community
Each seasonal pathway brings together psychology, symbolic practice, creativity and shared reflection. Rather than moving through information alone, you’ll gradually build a relationship with each archetype through multiple ways of knowing.
The work is designed to be lived with gradually and returned to across seasons, rather than consumed all at once.
• live online seasonal gatherings and discussions (on the second Monday of the month)
• archetypal book club conversations
• ritual, embodiment and reflective practices
• weaving, doll making and symbolic crafting explorations
• mythic, emotional and psychologically grounded teachings
• seasonal and elemental practices
• access to live calls and community discussion spaces during your participation period
Seasonal Participation
The Shapeshifting community opens four times each year, with a new seasonal pathway beginning alongside each changing season.
Each pathway opens for a two-week enrolment period before closing and moving through its shared rhythm together.
If enrolments are currently closed, you can join the waitlist and receive an invitation, along with a special introductory offer, when the next seasonal gateway opens.
Rather than remaining permanently open, the community follows the same rhythm as the work itself… returning, resting and opening again with each new season.
A Different Way of Understanding Becoming
❌ treating personal growth as constant optimisation or reinvention
❌ rigid archetypal systems that flatten women into fixed roles or life stages
❌ pressure to appear endlessly resilient, polished or certain
❌ collecting insight without finding ways to live alongside it
Instead it invites...
✅ cyclical ways of understanding change, creativity, grief, responsibility and renewal
✅ symbolic and archetypal exploration grounded in lived experience and psychological reflection
✅ practices involving making, ritual, reflection, creativity and participation
✅ communal spaces where contradiction, complexity and uncertainty can exist together
✅ more inclusive ways of understanding the many different lives women live
Meet Your Guide
I’m hollie wildëthorn, a psychotherapist, educator and maker whose work sits in the intersections of trauma, symbolism, ecology, creativity and women’s lives.
For more than twenty years, I’ve worked with women in circles, therapy rooms, retreats and educational spaces, listening closely to the ways women move through change, responsibility, grief, longing, creativity and reinvention across a life.
Again and again, i met women who could not fully find themselves in the archetypal systems they had inherited. I heard women say the frameworks they were offered for feminine living (eg.Maiden-Mother-Maga-Crone) didn’t feel true. Too tied to age or biology, it missed the complexity of their becoming. The realities of women’s lives felt more layered, contradictory and cyclical than the frameworks available to them.
Shapeshifting emerged slowly through those years of listening, alongside my own practices of weaving, doll making, storytelling, seasonal living and symbolic exploration.
Alongside this lived work, I’m PACFA registered and trained in trauma-informed counselling, body-based psychotherapy, affect theory and self-psychology. These foundations shape the way the work is approached; thoughtfully, relationally and grounded in the realities women are actually living.
Entering the Work
Shapeshifting is a seasonal community combining archetypal exploration, symbolic practice, creativity, reflective practice and live participation.
The community opens for new enrolments four times each year.
Each seasonal gateway remains open for two weeks before the community closes and begins moving through that archetypal pathway together.
If you’d like to join outside an enrolment period, you can join the waitlist and receive an invitation when the next seasonal gateway opens.
Individual Seasonal Pathways
AU $189 · one-off payment
Enter Shapeshifting through one complete seasonal pathway, with two months to explore the teachings and practices alongside the live circle and Book Club cycle.
Includes two live gatherings, two months’ access to the complete seasonal practice library, and participation in the current Book Club journey.
At the end of your pathway, you’ll be invited to continue as a Shapeshifting member and journey into future seasons, or simply conclude your time with us there.
Shapeshifting moves through recurring archetypal patterns connected to season, emotion, relationship, creativity, responsibility and change.
Rather than fixed identities or rigid life stages, these archetypes are approached as movements women may encounter repeatedly across a life.
At the centre sits the Turning Woman; representing the ongoing movement between seasons of becoming, change and return.
Archetypal Pathways
Questions?
-
No.
The online pathways can be entered on their own.
The book and oracle offer companion ways into the wider Shapeshifting landscape, but each seasonal pathway contains its own teachings, practices, reflections and live gatherings.
Women discover the work in many different ways; through the book, the oracle, a particular archetype, the book club or the seasonal community.
-
The book and oracle introduce the wider symbolic and psychological landscape of Shapeshifting.
The seasonal community expands that work into lived practice through creativity, ritual, making, embodiment, seasonal reflection, mythic exploration and shared conversation.
While the themes belong to the same body of work, the online pathways contain substantial practices, teachings and communal experiences that are not included in the book or oracle.
-
The Shapeshifting community opens four times each year.
Each seasonal opening welcomes women into the archetypal pathway active during that part of the year. Participation includes the complete three-month pathway, live gatherings, book club discussions and the seasonal community.
If you would like to continue beyond your first season, you can choose to remain with the community as the next pathway begins.
Between seasonal openings, you are welcome to join the waitlist and will receive early access when enrolments return.
-
Live gather-ins occur once each month most commonly on the second Monday of the month 6.30pm (Sydney time) and include archetypal exploration, seasonal reflection and book club discussion connected to the active pathway.
Book Clubs will be recorded :
14 September 2026 ~ Daughter Ceremonial Circle
12 October 2026 ~ Daughter Book Club
2 November 2026 ~ Enchantress Ceremonial Circle
14 December 2026 ~ Enchantress Book Club
8 February 2027 ~ Queen Ceremonial Circle
8 March 2027 ~ Queen Book Club
12 April 2027 ~ Wise Woman Ceremonial Circle
10 May 2027 ~ Wise Woman Book Club
14 June 2027 ~ Witch Ceremonial Circle & Book Club
12 July 2027 ~ Warrior Ceremonial Circle and Book Club
9 August 2027 ~ Turning Woman Ceremonial Circle
-
Live participation is warmly invited but never required.
Live Book Clubs are recorded, but the Ceremonial Circles are not due to the personal nature of these sessions.
Book Clubs will be recorded :
12 October
14 December
8 March
10 May
parts of 14 June, 12 July)
Ceremonial Circles not recorded:
14 September
2 November
8 February
12 April
parts of 14 June, 12 July
9 August
You can participate in the program without live sessions by working with the online content in your own time, and indeed some women prefer this to the gather-ins.
-
The work is designed to be engaged gradually rather than rushed through.
Practices, reflections and resources are intentionally structured in ways that can sit alongside ordinary life rather than requiring large amounts of daily time.
Some women engage deeply each week. Others return more slowly across seasons of life.
There is no expectation to complete everything.
-
Not at all.
The pathways are designed to be approachable whether this is your first experience with archetypal and symbolic work or something you have explored for many years.
Creative and symbolic practices are always invitations rather than requirements.
-
No. While the program is created and held by a PACFA-registered clinical counsellor and supervisor, Shapeshifting is not therapy. It is an educational, archetypal and communal body of work.. If you’re seeking clinical support for acute issues, therapy may be a better place to begin.
-
At the end of your first seasonal pathway, you can choose whether you would like to continue into the next season or conclude your journey there.
Women who continue remain part of the ongoing seasonal rhythm as each new archetypal pathway opens throughout the year.
Information about continuing participation is shared with community members before each season concludes.
-
Because access to the digital materials and community space is provided immediately upon enrolment, purchases are non-refundable for change of mind.
This does not replace your rights under Australian Consumer Law.
If you are unsure whether the work is the right fit for your current season of life, you are encouraged to read through the information carefully or reach out with questions before joining.
-
Seasonal pathways open four times each year.
Each opening remains available for approximately two weeks before the community closes and begins moving through the season together.
If enrolments are currently closed, you can join the waitlist and will receive early access to the next seasonal opening.