Imagine a velvet curtain-lined space privately tucked away in the heart of Le Marais (in the center of Paris) on a weeknight - and within this space you are sitting with charcoal and paper in hand, along with others being guided by a beautiful French artist and her muse for a live nude drawing experience. Between petite sessions the artist shares her poetry and the muse wanders with a joy-filled gaze as she looks at the art that you have created.

I feel in my heart of hearts that this might be the Paris dream of many listening today, and this was precisely how I met my guest for today’s episode - living a Paris dream.

Last week she invited me to her newest exhibition, Originelles: Les 22 Allegories – a body of work that moves between painting, poetry, and archetype. What began as an intimate artistic exploration has grown into a symbolic language rooted in memory, embodiment, and the lived experience of the feminine body.

About Déborah

Déborah Calfond is a French artist whose practice weaves painting, drawing, and poetic text. Trained in spatial design and architecture, her work explores the body as a site of memory, transmission, and sacred language. Rooted in her French, Tunisian, and Jewish heritage, she engages symbolism; particularly the Major Arcana and Hebrew letters, as living structures through which image and word become incarnate.

Alongside her studio practice, she leads poetic live-drawing sessions that approach the body as ritual space and collective experience.

Artist Statement

Déborah Calfond’s work explores the body as a site of metamorphosis, memory, and animality. Fragmented and hybrid, oscillating between human, animal, and landscape, the body becomes raw material and reveals our multiplicity.

Informed by a reflection on mother-child relationships, transmission, and transgenerational heritage, her work examines the visible and invisible traces that history leaves within bodies. Through painting, drawing, and writing, she seeks to render these ruptures perceptible and at times to gesture toward their repair.

Her expressive paintings, combining oils, inks, pigments, and handwritten text, give rise to figures in motion evolving within uncertain spaces, somewhere between landscape and stage. The body becomes a lived territory, at once memory and becoming.

I am filled with joy to sit with Deborah in today’s episode to explore where this work comes from, the stories that it carries, and what continues to move beneath its surface.

If you liked this episode please leave a comment for us, and if you are enjoying the podcast please consider leaving a 5-star review. Every listener matters to us, thank you for being here. If you feel inspired to share the podcast, it will help us to reach more seekers - thank you!

To Connect More Deeply with Déborah:

www.deborahcalfond.com

Originelles Les 22 Allegories

Support Déborah’s Crowdfunding Project

www.instagram.com/deborahcalfond

To Connect More Deeply with Patricia:

www.sacredparis.com

www.instagram.com/sacredparis

https://www.linkedin.com/in/sacredparis

Thank you for listening...until next time, may you find the sacred in everything you do

I fell in-love with my guest today on the path, literally, in Sainte Baume last year. We found each other by way of Meggan Watterson’s House of Mary, and it was during one of our hikes to Mary’s cave that our love for story, writing and holding space came together in a desire we shared, and this desire came to fruition in May of this year as we co-created and hosted our first “Writing the Heroine’s Journey” pilgrimage in Sainte Baume. For me, it was a delight to spend time with Catherine again, to be sitting at the table with other ‘real’ writers and a celebrity one guiding the magical journey of story…in a place that I feel is the most sacred of all…it was and still is a pinch-me moment in time.

.

Today’s conversation is a selfish endeavor, I’ve asked here.

If you liked this episode please leave a comment for us, and if you are enjoying the podcast please consider leaving a 5-star review. Every listener matters to us, thank you for being here. If you feel inspired to share the podcast, it will help us to reach more seekers - thank you!

To Connect More Deeply with Catherine:

www.herbadmother.com

www.instagram.com/herbadmother

www.holydoodlebug.substack.com

www.sacredish.substack.com

To Connect More Deeply with Patricia:

www.sacredparis.com

www.instagram.com/sacredparis

https://www.linkedin.com/in/sacredparis

Thank you for listening...until next time, may you find the sacred in everything you do.

I fell in-love with my guest for this episode between the covers of her book In Secret and Shadows. There are many, many books on the subject of the Cathar, gnostics, and Mary Magdalene in the South of France (and I've read most of them), but I read Janet's book from start to finish the minute it landed in my hands. And, it was the book that inspired my solo pilgrimage into Cathar country last year.

.

Join us as we explore the path as pilgrims, seekers, and lovers of curiosity, early Christian wisdom, and of France.

.

Janet Renu Pullen is an author, psychotherapist, practitioner of Kripalu Yoga and lifelong spiritual seeker. For over 40 years, her life work has been deeply rooted in self-inquiry, mindfulness and a search for truth. An enlightening experience at a mysterious medieval ruin deep in the foothills of the Pyrenees mountains of Southern France where Christian heretics were burned at the stake ignited an unexpected mystical adventure. Fueled by the questions, who were these heretics and what secrets of theirs were silenced in the flames, she set off on a quest for answers.

.

Janet’s debut book, In Secret and Shadows: Discovering Light in the South of France, invites readers into a powerful journey of personal transformation set against the backdrop of the historical persecution of the Cathar in the South of France. Her forthcoming book, Starry Fields of the Holy Grail, carries readers with her on a continuing quest for truth along the ancient Camino de Santiago de Compostela. Her unexpected initiation along the Camino forces her to confront her fears, unprocessed traumas and false beliefs which leads to a mystical encounter with the lost heart of Christianity, Mary Magdalene.

.

Currently Janet lives in New Jersey with her family. She frequently returns to France often leading mystical tours to places that continue to preserve sacred history.

.

If you liked this episode please leave a comment for us, and if you are enjoying the podcast please consider leaving a 5-star review. Every listener matters to us, thank you for being here. If you feel inspired to share the podcast, it will help us to reach more seekers - thank you!

.

To Connect More Deeply with Janet:

www.janetpullen.com

.

To Connect More Deeply with Patricia:

www.sacredparis.com

www.instagram.com/sacredparis

https://www.linkedin.com/in/sacredparis

Thank you for listening...until next time, may you find the sacred in everything you do.

.