Some new sprouts on our Forum which is itself a living, breathing entity.  I am inviting myself to let go of trying to control anything here, to be with Jung/I “I’m a free spirit just wondering.”  This resonates with a dream image which I recently worked.  Dream Janet is very concerned that many people are wondering into her space and intruding on her privacy.  She follows the man who is the leader of these men outside to complain and ask him to control them.  He looks at her and says they are not harmful. In the transit into this dark haired, social services type man his stocky build, relaxed shoulders and open chest reveal themselves.  He leads without controlling.

I don’t know how many of you are following the study guide written by Jill Fischer.  Her synopses give us all a common way into the material in the lecture under discussion. So I’ll comment on a few passages that particularly move me.

Here in lecture 7, we enter ever more deeply into the death/rebirth mysteries.  The death and rebirth of the sun is profoundly expressed in Egyptian mythology—Mother Nut who swallows the sun each night and gives birth to it each day.  From “the sea of blood…the new sun arose…Jung/I:  “When I comprehended my darkness, a truly magnificent night came over me and my dream plunged me into the depths of the millennia, and from it my phoenix ascended.” p. 274 fac. Let the horror be present. If you don’t confront it, Death will grab you from behind. Experience the fullness of Death—its own light. And then begins the reemergence—Jung’s optimism.

I very much appreciated the discussion of the necessity to develop the eye of cruelty and how to use peripheral vision to engage with the horrible/the traumatic without dissociation.  How to be at the side of the countenance of the trauma and still have a clear vision of it. How to focus on an element that is not totally dangerous and then the trauma can freeze the system and slowly move through it and not grab you from behind.  Again, from a recent dreamwork:  a naked couple is seen.  Suddenly the man seizes the woman, drags her outside and shoves her face down in the snow yelling (shaming her for being sexual?) In the dream Janet perspective there is great tension in the shoulders, fists in eyes full of tears not wanting to see this horrible shoving of the woman in the snow.  But in the transit into the Primavera like woman, the cold of the snow slows everything down, there is stillness of breath and quiet.  In her body the posture is a prostration, a surrender, a lion pose.

This is how the Red Book material is working me.

Best to you all,        

Janet