About the cabinet
The cabinet of curiosities is a metaphor for what we are and what we contain within us. We use it as a tool for remembering our personal stories and for considering the relationship of these stories to our personal narratives. It starts from the assumption that we already have everything we need within us. That our stories are our wealth and hold the key to experiencing a more complete version of ourselves. By remembering and curating our stories we re-member ourselves and we allow our stories to work on us. It is a process, that like our consciousness is ever-changing and infinite, steadily bringing us closer to that home within ourselves.
What it offers
Time Machine
The cabinet of curiosities acts as a time machine, bending time around it. When we look at our past stories, it changes our relationship with the present moment and as a result it can open a new set of possibilities for how we perceive our future and our selves within it.
Life mission
It connects us to our life mission. When we collect a number of stories and we step away from them, we can see patterns in our life stories, patterns that give us clues to what our heart truly desires, to what Joseph Campbell called ‘our Bliss’. This can become a powerful starting point for everything we do in life, allowing us to have a constant centre point in our lives, providing us with a powerful inner locus in times and situations of change.
Soul Collection
It can also act as a tool for what I call ‘soul collection’. Because of the way our brains are wired, we have a tendency to remember painful events in our lives more vividly. This colours our perception of the past and we write our personal narratives based on these memories. The cabinet allows us to collect different stories. When these are remembered and told they change the relationship of these dominant stories to our internal library and they allow us to collect those parts of ourselves that went wandering, the parts of ourselves we had forgotten.
Embraces change
It embraces the liminal world that is born when we desire change or when we are forced into it by life’s circumstances. Rather than seeing periods of uncertainty as negative, they are seen as lands fertile with potential for discovery. The cabinet allows us to navigate this unknown terrain by giving us a loose map or resting points along the journey that help us reach a destination that may have not even been imagined yet.