This school is a dedication to those of us who are in love with stories – telling them, listening to them, studying them.
💫 We study, honour and raise stories
that serve as altars for the new world paradigm💫
We share teachings on storytelling technology
from an ancestrally guided framework,
and offer courses, a podcast,
as well as multidisciplinary works via our patreon.
We specialize in divination techniques such as
channeling, ancestor/quantum communication,
astrology, tarot and more.
Our expertise is in alchemizing ritual, ceremony,
and one’s unique magic in the creative process.
Some of our areas of interest and focus include:
- animal companionship
- grief recovery*
- soul/life/ancestral purpose work
- quantum physics and multidimensional theory
- sacred entrepreneurship
- heart healing
- relationship, intimacy & community building
- survivor-centered, QTIBPOC** art making.
*We use the word grief “recovery” intentionally. Not to suggest we are supposed to “get over” our grief. But rather, by tending to our grief with the right tools, we recover much of importance: parts of ourselves that have been missing, stronger ways of being in relationship, skills to connect with loved ones across time, space and dimension, ancestral memories and clarified life purpose.
**QTBIPOC = queer, trans, Black, Indigenous, people of colour
check out our current offerings
Courses
Podcast
Altars
Patreon
Read on to learn more about some core concepts, principles and values of our Storytelling School
💫 guided by our ancestors 💫
An ancestrally guided approach to storytelling understands the creative process as aligned with the cycles, patterns, movements and medicine found in nature and the cosmos.
We know that colonization and supremacy culture purposefully and forcefully attacks The Storyteller.
Just like how colonization displaces people from their land, it also displaces stories themselves from the land. So much of what we know and have learned about storytelling craft has been stripped of its inherent medicine and connection to the land – and when we say “land” we mean every small and giant part of nature that houses us, from the soil underneath our feet, to the solar system moving us, to our bones holding us, to the Black Hole far out in space.
The colonization of stories and storytellers, and the relentless, generations-long violation of our birthright to mind-body-land-spirit connection, is the root of why we have so many problems with racism, sexism (all the isms), abuse of power, and supremacist gatekeeping in creative industries like publishing, hollywood, and even trickling down to your average progressive independent theatre company.
At Otherworldly Giants, it is our joyful, exuberant and playful mission to nerd out hard about all the things we love about storytelling craft, narrative theory, the creative process, and link these bodies of knowledge back to repairing, (un)learning and healing with the land and cosmos.
We understand the study of stories IS the study of land IS the study of self IS the study of collectivity.
And, by repairing with the land, we are returned to our Ancestors.
Our ancestors are not just our human blood/chosen lineages, they are also our star relatives, the trees in our neighborhood, beloved animals, the water we drink and that we cry.
The stories we birth through our Creation Company rest on our expert ability to access multiple forms of divination techniques and listening in order to communicate with our ancestors and receive their guidance while writing a script, exploring in the studio, or putting on a production.
As a Death Doula, Shaunga’s stories are more often than not portals and rituals to assist and carry loved ones through illness, death, transition, and ascension in order to become and evolve as ancestors.
Learn more about our original Ancestrally guided theatre productions here.
💫 stories as energetic medicine 💫
At Otherworldly Giants, “art,” “medicine,” and “teaching” are not separate career paths, they are integrated alchemy.
This is why Shaunga’s major offering on grief is described as a grief memoir and a set of teachings on grief and a medicinal tincture. Like intersectional feminism* has taught us, we’re not women one day, and then brown the next day, and then a survivor the day after that. We are women of colour survivors all the time.
*Shout out to Black feminist scholar and activist Kimberlé Crenshaw for developing the language of intersectionality!
Similarly, our offerings are art, medicine and teaching all at once. And no, it’s not too confusing, it’s not too much – it’s motherfuckin’ alchemized.
All stories carry a frequency, and just like water, they carry a memory of everything that happened to them during the creation process. We can apply this to ‘official’ stories delivered through the big screen or books, and also to the stories we learn to tell ourselves about each other and the world. Stories in their energetic memory and expression can be toxic, healing, destructive, generative – or a complicated mix of all these things.
We are experts here at studying the energetics embedded in a story, and also in designing and delivering stories as medicine, because we deeply understand and practise healing, magic and ritual in our daily lives. This means we have the power to create stories that contain potent codes of liberation, empowerment, deeper connection, inner truth, balance, and integration.
Learn more about Shaunga’s grief companion, Let Loss Make You Warm, an example of the powerful alchemy of teaching, medicine and art.
💫 you were myth-taken! 💫
We are in the very beginning stages of a new paradigm. That means many of us are awakening to our roles as birthing doulas and death doulas – we are here to not only give life to a new paradigm, but also to help the old paradigm die a good death, as much as we can.
Part of what we do at Otherworldly Giants is deconstruct, dismantle and transmute old paradigm, oppressive myths and conditioning about what it means to teach, learn or create.
For example, in a colonial/capitalist/ableist paradigm we are conditioned to believe that in order to succeed at learning, we have to push ourselves past our limits, ignore our physical and emotional well-being, pull all nighters, burn ourselves out and be in a perpetual state of stress. That’s how we know we’re really “giving it our all.”
At Otherworldly Giants we equally value and uplift methods of learning that involve being still, listening quietly, receiving information instead of always speaking, being okay with “I don’t know” instead of always needing the answers, and prioritizing integrating activities such as sleeping, resting and dreaming.
Another myth to dismantle is around failure. One of the most offensive parts of the modern day school system (okay, there are many), is the idea that you can “fail” at learning. That you can fail a test, a class, or fail at being a valuable community member.
Otherworldly Giants is invested in the true spirit of learning,
where failure is not an option, because it doesn’t exist.
There are times that we do not meet internal or external goals and expectations, yes. There is only more learning to be found here. There are times that we lose, that we are disappointed, that we are misunderstood. There is only more to learn here, and more to heal.