Class 3 ~ Living in a Vancouver Special - a collage exercise

The housing situation in Vancouver sometimes has us living in close quarters with unexpected neighbours. Imagine a house where the occupants are Qualities, aspects of your personality, and you want to understand them better so you can all live in the same house harmoniously.

Basement: Your neighbour(s) on the floor you below represents a quality from your past that may helped and/or hindered you.

Main Floor: You ~ a quality that’s making your life work now, or currently directing the bulk of your actions and habits.
Attic: Your neighbour(s) on the floor above represents a quality you are aspiring to in your life, a quality pulling you forward.
So … who are the neighbours? Need suggestions? Use some from the list on the previous page. Or maybe it’s a different quality you already know well from personal experience. Still can’t name it? Try  listing its attributes and see if that helps.Describe each quality as if it were a person, in as much detail as you can. Don’t worry about writing complete sentences, a bullet point list is fine. But look at them closely: what do they wear, how much noise  do they make, are they friendly in the hallway? Do you trust them to receive parcels for you? Do you know their history? Have you made peace with them? Do you feel they have any influence on you? Is that influence a help or a hindrance to you achieving your goals?

Use the following two worksheets to "build" your own Vancouver Special fold-out house:

Here are my journal pages from this exercise, so you can see how I used the handouts:

I've done this exercise a couple of times, and I always want to put steps up to the house. This time I couldn't find any "steps", but I was very pleased to find an ad full of shoes ~ so I turned them into a "ladder" of sorts, which seemed apt, since shoes are the very thing we step with. Just wanted to mention it so you can see how I sometimes use found images in different ways. 

Don't worry about "being poetic" on your pages. Bullet lists are fine - just write what comes to mind ~ everything is a work in progress, and you can be learning what you truly "feel" as you go.