Greetings from the (sometimes) sunny Okanagan Valley in BC, Canada.

I have many interests: history, art, art history, ceramics, jewellery and jewellery-making, painting, drawing, costume design, theatre and stagecraft, comparative religion, shamanism, philosophy, nutrition, decision-making, journalling, dreams and working with dreams, psychology, body image and body positivity, music. There are many topics I could teach.

Ten years ago, my marriage broke up, and I started to read voraciously. At first, it wasn’t clear to me what the theme was for all of my reading, but over time, I realized I was researching how we make decisions and the huge role of the unconscious. One author uses the analogy of an elephant and rider. The rider thinks he’s in control, but he can’t actually make the elephant do anything it doesn’t want to do. The same is true for our conscious minds, which think they run the show, and our unconscious mind which actually stores most of the information we know, understands context, and is better at social intelligence than our linear rational mind. There’s a lot more to it, but all of the available research in many fields adds up to this, and it’s something more people need to be aware of in order to make better choices or understand why they make the choices they do.

Since I embarked on the new adventure of being on my own, I’ve been journalling daily, which is, among other things, a tremendous tool for understanding how our minds actually work. I’ve started paying attention to my dreams, mainly using techniques from Robert Moss. And 4 years ago, I suddenly discovered shamanism, which has changed my life. Even if people have no desire to become shamanic healers or practitioners, there are shamanic techniques that can help people sort out their motivations, find inspiration, and get in touch with their larger selves.

I’m also interested in myths, fairy tales and history, as well as genetics and genealogy, and for me, these all weave together.

I have a diploma in Fine Arts, a BA and 3 years of grad school in Art History. I always say that art school taught me how to think. We had to solve problems in innovative hands-on ways. Art History is sometimes called the modern discipline that comes the closest to the medieval university in its emphasis on the process of thought, the process of how you ask questions, how you structure your research, how you organize your thoughts. Art historians have to think about thinking. One of the classes I’ve taught several times is on Research and Documentation for people researching daily life and the arts and skills of the past. I’ve focussed mainly on women’s lives and the skills that women would have had in past centuries.

What I would like to teach is not 100% clear to me yet. I can teach informational classes about history and related topics, art and art history. I’d also like to teach people to transform their lives through understanding how they think, how they can think, how to do research on the projects and ideas they have. We need to know how to be logical, we need to know when to trust our intuition, the difference between intuition and impulse, and when we need which type of intelligence. Which sounds very dry, but there are tons of ways to make this exciting, from looking at dreams to drawing for people who can’t draw, games, all kinds of active ways people can access the different parts of their minds and see how intelligent and creative they really can be.

I’m taking this course to sort out my own Why, and help me set up e-courses that can help people think better and develop skills that will empower them.

What makes me come alive is really good conversation with thoughtful people, and working things out with a team. I’ve done amateur community theatre for years, mainly set design and scene changes, and I love the way a group of people can go farther and come up with ideas that one person working alone could never do. The most fun things I’ve ever done are singing with a group that did Gregorian chant, and an art group that gets together once a year to “rip off” a famous artist in our own mediums.

I’ve been creating websites for fun for years. The website for the art group is ripoffartists.ca and I maintain that site. My own personal website is joannturner.ca but it’s still in process. It’s more static than I would like and doesn’t reflect the person I am now. I also run a website called goldenswan.org dedicated to an annual contest in the Society for Creative Anachronism, a medieval re-enactment group. I’ve been organizing that contest for the past 20 years and there’s a lot of detail on that site. I had a personal website as a hobby years ago that actually was quite useful (it became the Gold Standard for information about Anglo-Saxon Pottery online, because it was the ONLY source!) but it was on geocities, which closed in 2009. But that website is archived and can be seen at http://www.geocities.ws/olwenpenaur/ Not modern in layout or design, but I still really like that site best of all the ones I’ve created.

I’m looking forward to the great e-course adventure!