Lucky me! I have the wonderful good fortune right now of spending a few days at a conference hosted by Michael Conforti and the Assisi Institute. Yesterday and today we heard extensively from Beverly Rubik PhD who is the director of the Center for Frontier Sciences.
Beverly has done much work over the years on chaos theory and field theory, conducting experiments on everything from sound therapy to energy healing to people who meditate to properties of water treated through Therapeutic Touch. The way we respond and interact to various "fields" and energy has been documented over and over by Beverly's work, resulting in profound insights about the way we are in the world and how energetic and archetypal fields affect us.
This, of course, dovetails with Michael Conforti's work about how fields inform every kind of form--and being able to observe and understand resulting patterns and outcomes allows us to take action to either intervene or prolong certain cycles in a way that will help and heal us.
Amazing stuff! The combination of Jungian and depth psychology with these new sciences will truly change the world. I wish I had more time to summarize, but google Beverly Rubik's work if you have a chance. She's truly remarkable--as is Dr. Conforti. Has anyone else studied their work in depth that can add something here?
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Yes, Bonnie----the book begins with Jo's encounter with a brown recluse spider and in many ways is the story of her journey with Spider as mythological figure. I think there's lots of juicy stuff there for you! (And you can get through the book in a day or two. It's easy to digest without being facile.)
I too loved Dr. Rubik's lecture and found her explorations very interesting and "fun" as well, since she has explored some very curious phenomenon to put it mildly. The whole idea, or shall I say fact, that form, patterns, complexes and events arise from field is essential to a useful understanding of psyche and the world we live in. I also recognize from first hand experience the value that such understanding brings to healing in the therapeutic process of psychoanalysis. When the analysand can understand and visualize from which field is sown the seeds of a complex and which event attractor (wound or action) serves as the central point of constellation of the complex then a breakthrough is immanent.
For me, it is an exhilarating experience to look at the natural world and see how it is echoed in both mind and psyche and vice-versa. This is certainly where both Conforti's and Rubik's work compliment each other. You know another thing that i liked about Beverly's presentation was her appreciation of the oddities of her own amazing work, it was refreshing.
This is powerful for me.
Only a few short weeks ago, the world lost Jo Carson, a gifted storyteller and playwright who worked with communities to help them tell their stories through theater. Her book, Spider Speculations is a great read and I highly recommend it to anyone interested in depth psychology. It profoundly illustrates the power of narrative to bring healing. She also speaks at length about Reiki. It might be a particular rich work for you to check out after this conference, Bonnie. It's also a quick little read.
As Mama Jo was dying from cancer (compounded by the lack of adequate health insurance she had as a self-supporting artist), she asked us, her beloved community, to do work around "creativity and chaos." She was asking us to pick up the work that she would no longer be continuing in this incarnation.
I am wondering if there is some intersection here....
Melanie--Thanks so much for sharing this resource. I don't know of Jo Carson but will certainly check out the book you've recommended. I am a true believer in the power of narrative for healing and hope to spend more time doing some research in that area soon. Also, I don't know if the book itself actually has anything to do with spiders but I've had my share of unique encounters with them literally, so perhaps there's some immediate intersection there for me and "Mama Jo"...