Session 1: The Dark Moon
Sculpting the Sacred
March 15th: 1pm-4pm (New Paltz, NY)
This first gathering marks the opening of the Body as Moon series.
We will introduce the first phase of the menstrual cycle, often associated with the dark moon: a time of inwardness, release, and return to the root. While this phase is most visible through bleeding, it represents a universal energetic moment when life turns inward, when old layers are shed and when new cycles begin. Every body moves through this phase, regardless of whether one menstruates or not.
Participants are invited to sculpt their own goddess or yoni-inspired form for the altar: the first offering in a living altar practice that will unfold across the series. The sculpture you create is a devotional act, offering a way to enter into a relationship with the Great Mother as an ancestral, cyclical intelligence that lives within our body and the Earth.
Working with clay as a primordial material, we shape a form that holds what is quiet, dark, and essential. Clay remembers pressure and responds to touch. It asks us to slow down and listen—making it an ideal medium for this first phase of the cycle.
Ancient Goddess traditions understood this dark phase not as a loss of capacity, but as a time of heightened sensitivity and inner attunement, when the body’s perceptual and intuitive capacities were more pronounced. In Mysteries of the Dark Moon, Demetra George describes menstruation as a natural call toward retreat, rest, and inward renewal, a need that modern culture rarely makes space for.
The sculpture you create in this gathering becomes a physical anchor for the dark phase and as a reminder that this is where the cycle begins.
Sign up for this session here.