Heavy Flowers

This experiential workshop explores grief through the Jungian lens of active imagination and the symbolic life, using Korean ancestral flower practice as embodied engagement with loss and transformation. Participants will create "grief bouquets" that give material form to psychological content that resists linear narrative.

Korean flower practice—aligned with the Cocoji tradition of natural, seasonal arrangements—offers a symbolic vocabulary for what cannot be spoken directly. Its principles of seasonal attunement, negative space, asymmetry, and honoring natural form emerge from Korean cultural frameworks around grief as something carried and tended across time and generations, rather than overcome through linear processing.

The workshop begins with photographic meditations on flowers in transformation, establishing contemplative seeing as preparation for hands-on work. Participants then engage in flower arrangement as active imagination—allowing the psyche to speak through material, color, form, and symbol rather than concept. This process is grounded in Jung's understanding that the psyche speaks in images and symbols, not only in concepts. The "symbolic life" becomes particularly essential in grief work.