Participants of the workshop will become aquainted in a hands-on manner with all the current decks of cards of the OH series and their specific purposes. You can anticipate getting in touch with your own stream of creativity and processing skills, and accessing intuition and communication skills through the use of OH Cards. Various systems of use and their underlying ideas are explored. These uses of the cards increase awareness of self and others, and develop the ability to positively influence private and professional situations.

The OH Cards are designed to increase intuition, imagination, insight and inner vision. People around the world use them to reclaim their sense of self and their place in the universe. The goal of the workshop is that participants will be able to transfer the aquired experiential knowledge to their own professional and private lives.

The workshop fee is $120 (includes coffee/tea, but no meals or accommodation). The number of participants is limited and advance registration is required.

To register for the workshop
or to find out more, write to info@OH-Cards.com.

More About the Workshop Leader

Moritz Egetmeyer has a BA degree from Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, an MA from Antioch University’s Cold Mountain Institue, and trained as a psychotherapist. He grew up in Germany’s Black Forest and went to Vancouver, Canada, to study humanistic psychology. It was there that he first met the OH cards and became fascinated with the possibilities OH presented as a tool for authentic self-discovery. In 1984, Moritz began to publish the original OH Cards deck, establishing a company to distribute the cards worldwide and add other decks. Feedback from card-users all over the world continues to confirm their value.

The popularity of the OH Cards genre has grown organically from a small seed into a large community spanning many countries, cultures, languages, and professions. In workshops around the world, Moritz trains professionals from the social and therapeutic professions to use the OH Cards in their work.

OH Cards Workshops Around the World

Moritz is based in Germany, so although North American workshops are rare, there are other opportunities for attending a workshop if you want to travel or are already planning to travel, particularly to Europe (you’d need to know the language the workshop is given in). Upcoming OH Cards workshops are listed in the right sidebar on the OH International website.

TANDOO’s 99 picture cards and 44 action sign cards are all about couple relationships, prompting ideas and communication about being together on the journey.

The concepts and imagery of the cards were created by a group who have worked together before, on the COPE deck. Psychologist Ofra Ayalon and artisit Marina Lukyanova, with input from OH publisher Moritz Egetmeyer, combined their extensive expertise to create TANDOO.

You can read more on the TANDOO page.

This observation, made repeatedly, has in some circles led to the associative cards being ascribed an almost magical force, as if the cards themselves have the ability attributed to oracles of being able to reveal the questioner’s innermost self.

Are such parallels between card sets and actual life situations mere coincidence, or are other mechanisms at work which we do not understand?

Excerpted from the book Strawberries Beyond My Window: Games of Association for Opening the Door to Creativity and Communication, by Waltraud Kirschke.

Last year, we Israelis lived through one of the most traumatic periods of our existence. There were many terrorist acts in the country, suicidal bombings that cost the lives of innocent citizens…. Children were also involved: many were badly wounded or maimed, some lost their lives. Others lost their parents, leaving them orphaned. Moreover, many parents of young children who were not directly affected by the bombings became over-protective toward them, transmitting their fears and anxieties onto them. Many of these children could not concentrate on their studies, were restless, and regressed in behaviour. Scenes of acting out were common during this period. To top this, our prime minister, Mr. Rabin, was assassinated by a fellow Jew. This was the last straw. It was even more traumatic for the children, as he was, on the one had, a father figure, while on the other hand, some of the pupils had heard political utterings against him in ther homes. This led to their feeling rather guilty.

As can be very well imagined, it was almost impossible to treat these children. We tried many and various methods. Many of them were almost catatonic, depressed, and would not cooperate. On the spur of the moment, I took out the ECCO cards. I laid them out on the table, face up, and told the children to choose one that reminded them of recent events. Unbelievably, these cards were the only key to their bottled up fears, frustrations, and traumas. Somehow, these cards seemed to enable them to project their feelings onto the abstract forms. My next step was to ask them to find, in the very same cards, some silver lining, something that gave them hope for the future. Each and every child was able to do so.

This gave me a bright idea: I invited their parents for a session, working in the same way with them. I explained that I wanted them to know what their children had undergone. They were to imagine which card their own child had chosen and what he or she had said. Naturally, they also projected their own feelings onto these cards, and after a deep discussion, they were mentally free to help their children.

It goes without saying that my students at the teachers’ training college learned to do the same with their pupils. The ECCO cards are a wonderful help, at all times, in working with children.

Adina S. Flasher, PhD
Kiriat Bialik, Israel

Excerpted from the book Strawberries Beyond My Window: Games of Association for Opening the Door to Creativity and Communication, by Waltraud Kirschke.

Each child drew one SAGA picture and one OH word card bearing a verb (I had sorted the cards in advance). The picture card was to be the subject and the word card the predicate. Each child constructed the shortest possible sentence with his card set — for example, “The raven takes” — and in doing so playfully and intuitively grasped the concepts of subject and predicate.

Edith Schuette ~ Teacher
Hamburg, Germany

Excerpted from the book Strawberries Beyond My Window: Games of Association for Opening the Door to Creativity and Communication, by Waltraud Kirschke.

We also talked about what functions and tasks the individual inhabitants of the forest fulfill, what characteristics they have and what they look like. It became apparnet that for many of the children much of the information was completely new. Afterwards, I told them about the importance of ants and other insects to the life of the jungle.

After this exchange of information we began playing with the cards. Our game was accompanied by Latin American music playing softly in the background, which enhanced even more the warm atmosphere.

Robert Doman ~ Teacher
Lublin, Poland

Excerpted from the book Strawberries Beyond My Window: Games of Association for Opening the Door to Creativity and Communication, by Waltraud Kirschke.

“The importance of play to young children’s healthy development and learning has been documented beyond question by research. Yet play is rapidly disappearing from kindergarten and early education as a whole.”

Through a review of new studies on the topic, they build a case for increased play in children’s lives. The type of play recommended by the report is the kind of play OH cards encourage and stimulate:

“Building a bridge from oral language to written language is vital in kindergarten. But the bridge must be built on a strong foundation of oral language and imaginative thinking, which are developed through play.”

“When children are given a chance to initiate play and exploratory learning, they become highly skilled in the art of self-education and self-regulation. The role of the teacher in supporting such an approach is subtler and more profound than the didactic or scripted pedagogue. She is attuned to the children’s play themes and builds on them, introducing new content and play materials to stimulate their minds.”

You can read more about Crisis in the Kindergarten: Why Children Need to Play in School, by Edward Miller and Joan Almon, in their Summary and Recommendations PDF and in the full report PDF.

Further resources on this topic can also be found on Alliance for Childhood’s Restoring Childhood Play web page.

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Image from BodyComm Kinesiology, Australia.

University Professor
Canada

*  *  *

While politicians from the warring sides in former-Yugoslavia were negotiating a brittle peace agreement in Dayton, Ohio, in mid-November of 1995 a group of 28 psychologists from Bosnia, Serbia, Croatia, Macedonia and Montenegro convened in an isolated, snow-covered, hilltop hotel on the Hungarian border to negotiate the psychological prerequisites for reconciliation. Meeting under the auspices of UNICEF and U.K. Jewish Aid, our training team was composed of three Israeli psychologists (Ayalon, Lahad and Gal), experts in issues dealing with war-traumatized populations.

One of the leading themes in this workshop was exploring the archetypes of Shadow and Evil and learning to recognize the projections of internal evil on the image of the Enemy. Our purpose was to show how an “Enemy” attracts “demonic” attributes which “justify” hatred, persecution and annihilation.

The purpose of presenting this theme was to raise participants’ awareness of the duality of “good” and “evil” within the human psyche and to experience and understand the human tendency to project “evil” onto others. By re-owning these rejected parts of ourselves we take the first step toward accepting the “other.” This process of awareness demands increasing the ability to contain opposites — such as good and evil, right and wrong, et cetera — within ourselves and to integrate them into our personalities.

We used PERSONA cards as the trigger for these projections in a process which we called “Me and Not-Me (a Blind Date): a dialogue between the imaginary representations of inner dichotomization.”

The PERSONA images were used in two phases — first, to split, and, later, to integrate projections of the “me” and the “not-me.”

We asked the participants to choose two images from the PERSONA portrait deck, to bring them together as if on a “blind date” and then to create a dialogue between them. The instructions were as follows:

1. Choose one image that you like and one image that you don’t like.
2. Place them in front of you on a piece of paper. Divide the paper in two.
3. Write whatever comes to mind for each image.
4. Choose a real or an imagined space where these two people can meet. Who will be the first to notice the other? Let them tell each other about themselves — where they live, how old they are, with whom they live. What are their first reactions, feelings, thoughts toward each other? Let them respond to each other.
5. See where this dialogue takes you.
6. Sit in couples and share your stories.
7. Reflect on the process and on the following questions:

Were you able to bring them closer to each other?
Did your feelings about them change at all?
Can these people co-exist or do they need to stay separate?

The process: Participants created imaginary dialogues with their personified portraits, wrote about them, addressed them directly, role-played and listened carefully to their own voices. These creative activities helped participants expand their self-awareness and acceptance of their inner demons. Later, this process moved from imaginary to the cognitive channel through a re-framing of the process and discussion of methods of bridge-building between polarized ethnic and political groups. The PERSONA cards were found to be very useful for triggering intense emotions (such as love and hate) because the images are portrayed in a way that makes them personal and archetypal at one and the same time. The same process that was used in this workshop for reconciliation and peace work between countries is often used successfully in my clinical work for couples and families.

Dr. Ofra Ayalon, psychologist, couple and family therapist, bibliotherapist
Tivon, Israel

Excerpted from the book Strawberries Beyond My Window: Games of Association for Opening the Door to Creativity and Communication, by Waltraud Kirschke.