Creations

To help facilitate relational healing, growth and consistency, we have created an interactive curriculum called Creating the Authentic Self, nicknamed Creations. Our students and counselors meet several times a week as a community and explore relational themes that are full of rich experiences and perspectives. Students are encouraged to struggle with the great existential questions like: who am I, what is the purpose of life, is there something greater than me.

The Creations curriculum is divided into four sections, each section with a major theme and correlating with a season of the year. Each theme teaches students how to acquire and develop relationships with self and others, rather than just working on her inner self. Our students learn to live in a world of interdependence where they see and understand how they affect and are interconnected with others and others to them, rather than to strive for independence and separation from vital relationships.

Each season is represented by an archetype that emulates a unique set of virtues; the objective for the quarter is for each girl to inculcate the archetype into her personal identity. Because dialectic learning can often be a very powerful tool, there is also an anti-archetype or nemesis that represents the opposition to the archetype. This character has traits we all experience that would sabotage healthy relationships. Students glean knowledge and motivating insight as meanings hidden within the conflicts of the archetype and its nemesis are revealed.

For example, the Creation of Autumn personifies the archetype called the Wounded Healer. This is someone who has suffered considerably but has learned to release her pain and use the energy from that pain to serve others. Students learn and experience the origin and relational nature of pain and how it can be released. They integrate the Wounded Healer into their lives while managing or reconciling its nemesis, the Narcissist. Other archetype/nemesis pairs that are personified in The Creations are the Seer and the Fool, the Sage and the Glutton, and the Invisible Warrior and the Player.

If the Creations is compared to an ethics class, the Aspirations would be the real life application.