Somatic Mythwork™
A creative, embodied approach to transformation through mythology, storytelling, ritual and the nervous system
Reconnect with your creativity, reclaim your voice, and rediscover the woman you are through immersive women’s creative retreats rooted in mythology, storytelling, ritual, expressive arts and embodied practice.
Somatic Mythwork™ is our original methodology for creative transformation, rooted in Dr. Ellie Chadwick’s research into collective wellbeing and Historically Responsive Storytelling.
It brings together mythology, archetypal psychology, expressive arts, ritual, storytelling and trauma-informed somatic practice to help women experience—not simply understand—lasting change.
Rather than asking, “What’s wrong with me?”, Somatic Mythwork™ asks:
What story have I been living?
How has my body learned that story?
And what becomes possible when I begin creating a different one?
Through movement, creativity, imagination, embodied practice, and community, women don’t simply learn new ideas. They begin rehearsing new identities.
Why Somatics?
Stories do not live only in the mind.
They live in posture.
In breath.
In muscle tension.
In voice.
In movement.
In the nervous system.
Many of the beliefs we hold about ourselves were never consciously chosen.
They became embodied through repeated experience.
This is why Somatic Mythwork™ integrates trauma-informed somatic practices and contemporary understanding of nervous system regulation.
When we begin listening to the body alongside imagination and creativity, transformation becomes something we experience—not simply something we understand.
Why Mythwork?
Across every culture and throughout history, human beings have understood themselves through stories.
Myths are not simply entertaining tales or religious traditions. They are symbolic maps of the human experience.
Carl Jung recognised that myths and archetypes express recurring psychological patterns that appear across cultures, dreams, literature and imagination. They offer us a way of understanding not only who we have become, but who we are capable of becoming.
One of the questions that has fascinated Ellie throughout her entire career is this: Why have human beings always turned to art, performance, and storytelling during times of uncertainty, grief, celebration, transition and healing?
Long before psychology existed, communities gathered through storytelling, theatre, music, dance, ritual and visual art to process change, strengthen identity and reconnect with one another.
Creativity originally was not just entertainment. It was a way of making meaning, exploring the profound and unfathomable, coping with the crises and agonies of being alive. Performance and making art was not “pretending” but provided a place for humans to rehearse possibility. Every time we tell a story, imagine a different future, step into a role, or speak a truth we have never voiced before, we are practising becoming someone new.
Today, an increasing body of interdisciplinary research continues to explore the profound relationship between creativity, embodiment, imagination, wellbeing and human flourishing. Modern neuroscience increasingly recognises that imagination, embodiment and repeated experience shape the nervous system. Theatre has known this for centuries. Performance allows us to safely explore identities that previously felt unavailable. To experiment, to witness, to be witnessed and held, and to discover that transformation is not something we think ourselves into but something we embody, repeat, rehearse.
Across psychology, neuroscience, anthropology, arts and health, trauma research and cognitive science, researchers are increasingly recognising something our ancestors perhaps already knew: creative processes help us encounter ourselves differently.
Where did Somatic Mythwork™ come from?
“Somatic Mythwork™ is the culmination of almost twenty years working across theatre, directing, performance, higher education, ritual studies and now trauma-informed therapeutic practice.
Before founding Wanderess, I spent over fifteen years directing theatre, researching performance, teaching at universities, and exploring the relationship between creativity, ritual and human transformation/meaning-making. My doctoral research examined the ancient ritual roots of theatre and their continued relevance for contemporary performance and wellbeing. This research later became my book, Historically Responsive Storytelling (Routledge, 2023).
In it, I explored the idea that contemporary theatre—and modern culture more broadly—still carries echoes of much older ways of understanding ourselves and the world. Drawing together anthropology, philosophy, historical and cognitive phenomenology, neuroscience, and theatre studies, the book argues that many contemporary creative practices continue to reflect ancient ritual modes of storytelling.
These include ways of working that are: embodied rather than purely intellectual; symbolic rather than literal; collective rather than individual; liminal rather than fixed; imaginative rather than purely analytical; sacred rather than purely functional.
The research asks: What might happen if we remembered creativity not simply as self-expression, but as a way of experiencing deep transformation and self-realisation through connection with the self, each other, and the whole/the divine?
Somatic Mythwork™ is one response to that question.”
–Dr. Ellie Chadwick
What happens in Somatic Mythwork™?
Every retreat and programme is different, but Somatic Mythwork™ includes something from each of our four pillars:
Ancient wisdom. Contemporary understanding.
Somatic Mythwork™ honours both ancestral knowledge and contemporary research. It recognises that ancient ritual traditions understood something profound about storytelling, symbolism, creativity and community.
It also embraces modern understandings of trauma, attachment, the nervous system and embodied psychology.
Neither replaces the other. Instead, they enrich one another.
Ultimately…
Somatic Mythwork™ isn’t about becoming someone else. It is about remembering who you have always been beneath the inherited stories, protective patterns and forgotten possibilities.
Not by escaping your life. But by returning to it with greater presence. Greater imagination. Greater agency.
And a deeper sense of belonging—to yourself, amongst others, and to the unfolding story you are still writing.
