A Book Review

Amirrorself.com Applauds: Seena B. Frost, SoulCollage® Evolving, An Intuitive Collage Process for Self-Discovery & Community, 2010. Hanford Mead Publishers.

Seena B Frost

Seena B. Frost and Her SoulCollage® Cards

(Hanford Mead Publisher’s Permission)

I never met the lady though I imagine Seena B. Frost a woman of great presence due to her magnanimous spirit. It takes an imaginative, highly intuitive, insightful, and visually oriented person to create what she has. Did she know SoulCollage® would last beyond her years? That the SoulCollage® fever would spread worldwide? What’s the secret behind the process? Decide for yourself. Try it for yourself. Follow me through the pages of Seena’s book, SoulCollage® Evolving to discover the genius behind the work.

Imagine Seena Frost leaning over a huge cauldron dipping a long wooden spoon into a soup, where she instructs you to: “Stir together the ingredients of your imagination and intuition with a few powerful, cut-out images, and you create your first SoulCollage® card.”

All you need is a glue stick and images to cut and paste on a 5X7 inch piece of cardstock to make a SoulCollage® card. But there’s more to it than meets the eye, as Seena informs, “…with the fun of creating these simple cards are the surprising ways they help explore your Soul, your Shadow, and your inborn gifts.”

Seems like too much to ask from a simple card. Yet SoulCollage® Evolving walks you through the self-discovery process. From doing a one-to-three card reading, to learning how to role play and speak from your cards, to guiding you through a meditation sequence, to teaching you how to journal and write about your experiences: “Our Job,” Seena says, “is to embrace the Shadow to find its vitality and to understand its needs and fear and anger.”

This is the type of work that can be executed by yourself or in the company of friends, family, intimates, even strangers. It requires an open yet safe and quiet place to work and for SoulCollage® to do its work. The book goes into detail regarding ambiance, and who should facilitate individual sessions and/or handle a group. Working in a group, according to Seena, encourages community and fosters the practice. A practice that Seena tells us: “We must work with all our strength, and with the help of Neter allies both within and without to correct the Shadow’s selfishness, greed, and violence.”

Seena Frost meant SoulCollage® to be inclusive, far-reaching, universally understood, and of personal use to everyone. Fully illustrated with an array of sample SoulCollage® cards, her book voices the beliefs and the stories of people from diverse cultures and varied levels of education. People who, throughout the years have benefited from their participation in SoulCollage® workshops.

Forget trying to paint like Picasso, do the kind of magic David Copperfield creates, or write a literary masterpiece like Mary Shelley. Throughout Seena’s book you get the message that you don’t have to be an artist to make art that defines you.

Though the claim is that there aren’t any rules to the card making process, a few rules do apply. While constructing a card, Seena asks that you portray one facet of your personality at a time. To choose an image that correlates and represents one energy (Neter), or one archetype on a card, so that the image depicts either the Light or Shadow side of your personality. Too many images dilutes the energy and the message the card offers. So to simplify matters, Seena advises to choose a background then your central image, and make that the focus of attention.

My Creative Spinner, Committee Suit

Seena B. Frost’s Personal SoulCollage® Card

(Permission from Hanford Mead Publishers)

Heart Chakra, Companion Suit

Seena B. Frost Personal SoulCollage® Card

(Permission from Hanford Mead Publishers)

In the section on how to phrase your question when doing a reading, Seena makes it very clear that the question you ask your cards should be of vital importance to your life. How and what you ask should be poignant, relevant, significant, fully considered, clearly stated, and written precisely how you meant it to be wholeheartedly expressed.

Eager to do a reading and experience the results for myself, I tried what Seena Frost advised: I took my time to ponder and align myself to my question. I closed my eyes and chose a card at random. When I opened my eyes I gazed on the face of my card and instantaneously felt at-one with the image. When I posed my question using the I Am the One Who … The voice I heard answer, came from my knowing self.

Subsequent chapters explain the mystery behind the four Suits, help you to define your Neters, and show you how to access your chakra animal companions. Every morsel of information carefully served, intent on helping you tap your inner wisdom.

To the dismay of bloggers, WhatsApp users, the Twitter and Facebook enthusiasts eager to post their SoulCollage® cards for the world to see, images, unless copyright-free are not to be displayed, exhibited in public, sold, traded, or uploaded on any Social Media network. You have to understand that these collaged images aren’t yours to do with what you want. You neither photographed nor had anything to do with creating them. You simply arranged, cut, and pasted them to construct a card. Unless you pay a licensing fee to every provider, the chances of getting sued by the artist or corporation is great and costly. You are forewarned!

For the reasons that were stated above, Seena continuously reminds SoulCollagers that the cards you make are for your own personal use. That means the only person who can read your cards and decipher their meaning, is you. The idea of creating your deck is for self-understanding, self-awareness, to strengthen your relationship to yourself. Therefore, every deck becomes a unique life-story that belongs to the maker.

No two decks can ever be alike nor the cards their definitions. SoulCollage® cards are nothing like the Tarot or fortune-telling cards where you look up what each card means. There’s no wish fulling magic or crystal ball used here. SoulCollage® isn’t going to predict when you’ll find your soulmate or win the lottery.

What SoulCollage® offers is the opportunity to discover and trust the Higher Self that knows, so you can face the obstacles that bind and hold you in place. Seena Frost doesn’t see Shadow Neters as energies to be stifled. The opposite is her truth, stating that, “These Shadow imbalances can act as prods to keep us evolving as human souls; they can keep us ever striving towards better balance.”

To conclude, in the process of making my SoulCollage® cards, intuiting their meanings and attempting readings, I bonded with my cards.

I no longer see these cut-out images as random advertising illustrations from some obscure magazine as apart from myself. In their universal appeal, the images in my cards are a means of recognizing the Light, and acknowledging the Shadow aspects of my personality. The aspects of myself that are very much alive and active in everything I do, and the relationships I have with colleagues, friends, and loved ones.

Spreading my SoulCollage® cards on the floor, when I stand I have an aerial view. I see how the face of each card mirrors this self, speaks of my soul. Every card the sum of-a-whole visual autobiography. Light, as well as Shadow emanating love. The love I have for myself. The love we reflect from one to another. I wonder if this is Seena’s way of letting us know we’re part of the One and the Many…

How this happens I’m not sure. I neither doubt nor question the process. I surmise this is genius at work. The mystery of what makes SoulCollage® attractive. The ingredient that makes Seena B. Frost and the process unique.

So, what’s the secret behind the process?

Let Seena B. Frost and her book, SoulCollage® Evolving show you your way.

To learn more about Seena B. Frost, SoulCollage®, our workshops and courses logon to www.soulcollage.com, or visit me Ivette Ebaen, SoulCollage® Facilitator at: www.amirrorself.com

*Photograph of Seena B. Frost, her personal SoulCollage® cards, and quotes from SoulCollage® Evolving, used with permission from Hanford Mead Publishers.