Presence-Centered Psychotherapy · Supervision · Mentorship · Myth & Inner Work
FOREST OF BELONGING:
A mythic storytelling experience for imagination, difference and finding your way home.
Where the River Meets the Rock:
A story about belonging, difference and inner integration
🔥 Come sit by our hearth in the Cretan Heart
The river does not fight the rock to prove it flows, and the rock does not move to prove that it stands. Inner belonging is not something we forge through striving or trying to be other than where we are in the moment. It's the space where both are allowed to exist.
— Where the River Meets the Rock
Maria Kefalogianni
Enter the Forest~land of Your Psyche
Have you ever felt too fast for narrow paths, yet too deep for shallow waters?
There are some ineffable things which cannot be explained.
Sometimes we can only tell a story.
Our world is thirsty to drink from our inner wells. I grew up in Crete and I was fed and lived through the art of story-telling and rhytmical singing. As an expat abroad, I feel the call to Re-create this Deep Heart I grew up with, weaving my ancestral gifts in service for the world.
Where the River Meets the Rock
I created Forest of Belonging during a time when my son was struggling deeply with school and with finding his place in a world that seemed unable to understand him.
He is an AuDHD boy, as am I.
In the story, the two currents of ADHD and autism become two ancient forces:
The River : Arora
Movement. Imagination. Possibility. Flow.
The Rock : Taki
Depth. Stillness. Sensitivity. Knowing.
The boy discovers that he doesn't need to choose between them.
He needs to build a bridge.
Perhaps this is what belonging really is.
The world had tried to make the river into stone.
It had tried to make the stone move like a river — to tame the wilderness of its flow.
But deep down, the boy knew he wasn't broken. His mother , Kalie and father Shivie, entrust him in the embrace of the Ancient Forest Mother- the ultimate Surrender.
The boy ( the little one in us all) was learning something the rest of the world has mostly forgotten:
we can build bridges when we learn to listen to the spirit within and without us. .
The aim was NEVER to become MORE like everyone else. Not at all.
The path revealed to him, he was here to discover how the different parts of ourselves can finally meet. He was revealed to the inner bridge , here, all along. His duty then became to , Build it.
🔥 A Warm Hearth for Listening
I offer Forest of Belonging as a simple storytelling experience.
A place to pause.
To listen.
To enter another world for a while.
The story can be received simply as a story.
Or it can become something more.
A doorway into imagination.
A meeting place between the parts of ourselves we have separated.
A gentle invitation to wonder what might happen when the River and the Rock stop fighting and begin to belong to one another.
🌿 WHY I OFFER THIS AS A GIFT
I wholeheartedly believe some stories need to remain part of the shared humanity o us.
Stories that can travel into places where there isn't always funding. Stories that can reach autistic and AuDHD communities, parents, children, educators, community groups and people who might not otherwise have access to this kind of experience.
So Forest of Belonging is offered through a gift economy.
There is no fixed price to enter.If you have the capacity and feel moved to give something back, you are welcome to contribute.
That might be financial.
It might be sharing the story.
It might be bringing the story to a community that could benefit from it.
It might simply be offering a few words about what the experience opened in you.
And if you come, listen and receive, that is enough too.
This is a small experiment in reciprocity rather than transaction.
A story given freely.
A story allowed to travel.
A story that may belong, in some small way, to all of us.
Come into the forest.
Listen.
Stay for a while.
Forest of Belonging weaves together myth, imagination, ecopsychology, embodied non-duality, feminine wisdom of the body, and the lived experience of neurodivergence. At its heart, though, it is simply a story about belonging and what becomes possible when we stop trying to choose between the different parts of ourselves.
The names were inspired by Maori etymology ,which synchronistically fell on my lap and where in their indigenous wisdom Aroreretini : means attention goes to many things ( ME!) AND Taki comes from Takiwatanga ( autism) meaning my/his/her own time and space.
The terms were created by Māori mental health and language specialist Keri Opai as part of Te Reo Hāpai
