Nico Wolf is a liminal artist, a seer, guide, healing arts practitioner, beekeeper, writer, & group facilitator of dreamwork, ceremony, & shamanic healing work. She is also the co-founder of School of Liminal Arts. MysticMag chews the cud with Nico.
How and why were you first drawn to this life of ‘Liminal Artistry’?
To be honest, I think it chose me. I grew up in a very hard-to-define family – I was born in Hong Kong to a French-Moroccan/Algerian/Jewish mother and an Irish/Polish/Catholic turned Jewish father. I moved all around the world as a child and was exposed to so many different cultures and ways of being in the world.
From an early age, I fought against labels and have always challenged the status quo. I like to understand things in terms of relationship, rather than keeping them in the tidy and separate boxes that most people want to confine things to. This has always been my multi-lensed perspective in the world.
I have also been into the world of dreams since I was a young child and have followed my knowing that ‘this isn’t the only reality there is’, seeing beyond what meets the eye or the five senses. I’ve always related to the world from that expansive place.
As I became an adult, I began to find ways to work with this open way of being in and seeing the world and offer it as healing practice in a world that desperately needs a more inclusive perspective.
How does the word ‘change’ resonate with you, both in your professional and personal life?
Change is Life Force. The scientific definition of life is movement/change – when the cell stops being able to metabolize and there is no longer movement, there is no longer change, there is no longer life.
Being able to be fluid with change, to respond to what wants to change, to be alive to that Life Force, is giving into the ways that the Universe wants to express itself through us. And ever holding awareness of polarities, I also believe in the power of stillness and integrity found within the center point. Stillness is as important as change. Change is how we meet the world and the shape in which we meet it revolves around that ever expanding center point.
In my professional life, I take this principal with me into every workshop, healing session and ceremony. To know my still point and also stay alive to move with the change that wants to take place. To be of service to transformation and the unfolding healing story as it takes shape.
In my personal life, I try to meet whatever it is I’m being called to show up for. For example, my family and I have been drawn to relocate to Europe. We’re currently traveling and trying to find our next home. It’s been a lot of movement and change for us after having lived on the farm for almost ten years. Through this and other major shifts in my life, I try to stay fluid and open to these changes and where the Universe wants to guide me while also holding the needs of my family and the movements they are dancing with as well. It’s definitely a fine balance.
Would you describe your work to involve shamanic elements and practices?
If we use the modern understanding of what the word ‘shaman’ has been used for – one who sees in the dark and one who sees what is unseen – then yes, my work is very much in this realm. It involves dropping behind what meets the eye and the five physical senses to get into that Other sense of knowing.
When most people think of a shaman, they think of someone who works with plant medicine to achieve hallucinatory states. This is one way of “seeing in the dark” but my work doesn’t use hallucinogens, rather it taps into the body’s natural ability to enter ecstatic and altered states through embodiment practices, breath work, sound, ritual movement and stillness. A different relationship with reality can be achieved through breath, will and imagination – these states of Knowing are available to all humans, and not simply to the appointed shaman or someone who choses to embark on a plant medicine journey. We all have this intuitive knowing and ability to heal our selves and others, we simply need to claim it and work with honing our abilities.
What can you tell us about the School of Liminal Arts and how, when and why we should seek its help?
School of Liminal Arts exists to assist us through these disrupted times. Our familiar structures are crumbling. We are at a critical place with our environment and the way that humanity is with each other desperately cries out for change.
Change can be messy and disorienting and requires hope, courage and huge amounts of personal integrity. Working with Liminal Arts including the ancient tools and rituals brought through shamanic lineage, alongside modern practices, can be a gateway to fluidity and finding a new structure that all of humanity can bring into being together. Change won’t come through our leadership – from the top down – but rather from us working to remember ourselves back into the fabric of life and honoring the way Life Force wants to move us as individuals and on the collective level.
Humanity won’t get to this place of change nor create the new vision of the world we need and want through sitting at board meetings and working with linear thought. We will get there through those “aha!” moments, those quantum leaps of realization that come through states of Knowing that are beyond the linear mind.
School of Liminal Arts facilitates practices and rituals to assist people in navigating beyond linear thought and into the limitless world of possibility, how to feel at home in this place and how to build from here. We work with finding our way back into the knowing that humanity is a super-organism, that we can move together as the shared flock of humanity – this remembering our way forward is where we are heading, it’s where we have to head if we want to heal.
What is the essence of dreamwork and how can this be used to serve our everyday lives?
Dreamwork is an excellent way to cut through the confines of linear reality. Dream is the mother tongue of all beings. We all sleep and we all dream. When we sleep, we unplug from the physical interaction of the body and the five senses, yet there is this whole rich world of imagination and connection with archetypes. The knowing and genius that comes out of dream is incredible. All we need do is look at artists, inventors and scientists like Einstein and Dali who had their aha moments through dreams.
I believe that dream can seed a better future for us and remind us that we are all connected, especially if we dream in community. My main focus with dream work is sourcing from dream where we can ask for the healing and for the inspiration that we want in order to reimagine the world through dream and also to reconnect with each other in relationship. Amazing things can happen when we work with dream and intention. The possibilities are truly endless.
What advice to those starting out on a perhaps daunting healing journey?
There is nowhere to arrive, there is nothing to achieve. It’s an endless exploration, so the best thing one can do is stay curious and keep showing up!
A very dear friend of mine who is nearly 90 and I had an amazing moment together where I dreamt of an image with her in it. She told me that the image I had dreamt of was on the altar of a friend of hers while on her deathbed. I had this dream the day that the woman had passed on. My friend shared with me her friend’s last words. She spoke as she was in the liminal state at the threshold between life and death, ‘it just never ends…’ she said, ‘there is so much to explore, it just keeps going and going and going’.
It is so beautiful to see that if we choose this path, it is forever rich and unfolding. We have nothing to fear and only beauty to gain.
If you would like to find out more about Nico Wolf, visit https://www.nicogoldenwolf.com/ and The School of Liminal Arts – https://www.schoolofliminalarts.com/.
