about Maggi Colwell

Artist ⭐️ Ritualist ⭐️ Jungian Analyst in Training

Welcome to the maggi-verse

I'm glad you're here.

I've been drawn to image and imagination for as long as I can remember. I was an avid dreamer. I remember at around age 5 or 6, declaring, loudly, to my mom, “I don’t know why some kids don’t want to go to sleep. I love sleeping. My dream life is just as important as my waking life!”

I wanted to understand the big life questions like what is our purpose, what is life, what are the mysteries beneath the mysteries. If that isn't a recipe for a Jungian analyst in the making, I don't know what is.

I was the kid pulling the family into the metaphysics shops and the quirky artsy stores. Halloween was, and still is, my favorite holiday. Edgar Allan Poe was a favorite in third grade. So were The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe and A Wrinkle in Time, the books about journeys to the other realms, where magic and science blend and teach us about archetypal truth.

When I was eight, a painting teacher told my mother: "She's got the burnin' desire." She was right. I don't remember a time before painting. It has always been the way I explore the fantasy world of my soul through mythology, symbol, and mystery, and workshops that explore healing through image, myth, and creative ritual.

Portrait of a smiling woman with glasses, short brown hair, wearing a black and white striped vest over a black shirt, against a dark background.

What’s with all the waterfowl?”

Three framed nature prints on a teal wall, depicting ducks and marshland scenes.

Honoring the beginning

I grew up in Maryland, near the ocean and the Chesapeake Bay, where there's a strong tradition of decorative decoy carving and watercolor nature painting. My first mentor was a watercolor illustrator named Tom Jones. I studied painting with him between the ages of eleven and twenty.

The watercolors of waterfowl that hang in my waiting room are his work. I celebrate his memory and his patient, encouraging spirit with the work I do now.

A waiting room is itself a threshold, the liminal space between the world and your meeting with your own unconscious, between your present and the change you've come for. The more clearly you see where you've come from, the clearer your current path becomes. The deeper I get into analysis the more I realize that you can only see your destiny unfolding, the innate order of your life’s story by looking back through memory at where you’ve been.

Two lineages, one practice

I work with a synthesis of two traditions most practitioners keep separate or don’t touch.

The path of dream and depth

I read Jung's Memories, Dreams, Reflections in high school. I majored in fine art and minored in anthropology in college because I was already chasing the same questions through pre-history, tribal cultural practices, mythologies, beliefs, and rituals. I never wanted to be a "normal" therapist; that wasn't my path. My path started with dream and symbolism and creativity.

I hold a master's of science in art therapy from Florida State University (2018) and am a board-certified art therapist (ATR-BC). I completed a Master’s Level Dream Pattern certificate at the Assisi Institute, and I am currently in analyst training at the C.G. Jung Institute in Zürich.

Marie-Louise von Franz wrote that the work of the Jungian analyst is that of a psychopomp — a modern-day shaman, an attendant who walks with the soul through its passages. I take that lineage seriously.

Watercolor painting of an eye and butterfly wings or petal shapes, with swirling colors representing atmosphere and cosmic environment, including stars and nebulae.

The path of ritual and priestess

At nineteen I began formal training with the Assembly of the Sacred Wheel. Twelve years later, I received my third-degree initiation as a High Priestess. I founded a ritual group in New Jersey, taught at conferences across the country, and self-published a book on the work in 2011.

This lineage continues to shape my approach to creativity as ritual, to image-making as more than expression, and to the encounter with image as a real crossing between worlds.

Colorful drawing of the ocean with a large yellow star, moon, pomegranate and water currents, with handwritten notes and sketches about a woman's thoughts.

The dark night, and what brought me back

After undergrad, I naively found that being an artist wasn’t necessarily a path to a secure job. So I got a job and spent the next 15 years in commercial insurance and risk management. As you might imagine, this was not a great choice my creative proclivities. I learned about business and spent my twenties training in ritual and getting real life experience. However, in my early 30’s, a hard season took me out of all of it for a while. Out of my marriage, out of my magical practice, out of art. I moved home to where my parents were living in Florida and decided to make some major changes in my life.

What brought me back, slowly, was a class. Patterns of the Creative Unconscious with Loralee Scott at the Assisi Institute. I started painting again. I started reading Jung again. Soon after, my mother died of cancer, and hospice held our family with a care I have never stopped being grateful for.

In 2016 I had a dream. That dream marked the beginning of my journey into formal Jungian analysis. My first analysis took five years. It changed my relationships, my art, my beliefs, even my capacity to be here, in this life, in this body. I was becoming a Jungian by having my dreams guide the internal alchemical process first.

Colorful abstract drawing featuring rainbow spiral, a blue star, and splashes of pink, blue, purple, and black paint, with handwritten words like "want" and other partially visible text.

Why I hold them together

The deeper I've gone, through energy shifts, synchronicities, the real magic that happens when art and dream and witnessing meet, the more I have come to understand that my life isn't about work and art and magic as three separate things. They are all intertwined. A beautiful soup.

Art is my ritual. My soul is my guide.

"What Maggi does is magic. As we got into the work, I saw things in my world start to change around me. My energy is always high vibe after our sessions." — depth-work client
"Maggi is okay with the dark, the pain, the grief, the bad moments in life. She is accepting of different lifestyles too." — client

What I want

I want to live my life as a Jungian Art Priestess, where the Great Work becomes healing, where your creative potential and your relationship with your own inspiration can feel guided and alive.

That's what I offer in the practice now.

Illustration of a woman with short brown hair and glasses, smiling, with a lotus flower in front of her at her heart, set against a swirling green and blue background and a fire floating above her had representing auras and energy.

My work today

The work moves through three forms.

One-on-one depth analysis — Jungian dream work, shadow work, active imagination, somatic work, and art-making are all part of the process. For people in real psychological-spiritual depth. → Read about depth work

Original art and prints — paintings born from my personal engagement with the archetypal. These pieces are symbolic and alchemical. Each piece is a visual mantra, a yantra made through focused energy, music, meditation, and inspired visionary messes from the unconscious. They are an energetic blessing, made for those who recognize themselves in image. → See the work

Writing, podcasts, experiential workshops, and speaking — essays and conversations on dream, ritual, art, astrology, and depth work. See below!

(I'm also available for podcast interviews, lectures, and workshops. Get in touch if you'd like to collaborate.