Don preparing to carry Taos drum up a cliff in a bedspreadd.

Don Sandner was a training analyst in our Institute for years. He also worked with a Navaho medicine man for 16 summers, resulting in his book Navaho Symbols of Healing (Hartcourt Brace, 1979; Healing Arts Press, 1991). He initiated a conference that met over several years studying the overlap of analytical psychology and shamanism, documented in a collection of papers that he co-edited with Steven H. Wong, The Sacred Heritage: The Influence of Shamanism on Analytical Psychology (Routledge Press, 1997).

My candidate group entered training at the C. G. Jung Institute of San Francisco in 1989, a time our Institute was in severe crisis for various reasons. We candidates really took the brunt of it. Training committees were dysfunctional, and there was general bedlam. Many of us began to wonder what were we doing there.

In the second year candidates participate in a case conference with a selected analyst, and my group chose Don Sandner. At the end of the year we asked him to take us to the Southwest and he agreed.

On the way to the cliff.

The structure of the trip was this: During the day we would visit various archeological sites, including attending the annual Corn Dance at the Santa Domingo Pueblo. We would not just visit these sites, we would sit for an hour or so in various ancient kivas, or drum in a ruin. Once we carried Don's Taos drum to the top of a cliff to a ruin of a pueblo to drum in the glaring midday sun.

In the evening he would show us slides of sand paintings, and then we would drum for an hour or so.

He did not charge us a cent for the trip. He arrived early to the motel where we candidates were staying and spent all day with us, driving us all around the country, and then around 11 pm he drove the hour back to where he was staying in Sante Fe. He taught the whole time. We had many questions. His words formed the cells of my professional body. He said:

1. You have to have a discipline to deal with spiritual energy. It matters less what the discipline is than that you practice it regularly.

2. When you have been healed in a deep way, you have to pass it on.

3. Make a sacred circle each morning. If everything relates to the center, we do not have to impose ethics from without. You will not be doing harmful things.

4. He was very much into holding the opposites, talking things through. He felt we need the other way of viewing things.

Really, the experience of being with him on this trip initiated the true learning of my candidacy. It formed the cells of my professional body.  It was a kind of spiritual transmission: his teaching, his generosity, his love of the work. It was as if he formed a sand painting of wholeness there in the ethers of the Southwest, sat us in the middle of it for ten days, and through applying the experience, returned us to a balance. This was the experience that I thought the candidacy would be, and because of these ten days, it was.

 the candidates' last meeting with Jo and Jane Wheelwright, also the founders.

Honoring the Thinning Veil, Glastonbury, 2010

Each year the San Francisco Jung Institute celebrates Ancestors’ Day around the time of the Day of the Dead. Analysts, candidates, and interns gather and remember those in our Institute community who have passed the threshold into the Beyond.

This last Sunday we especially honored Donald Sandner, an analyst who passed suddenly on Easter Sunday 1997. In part two, to be posted later this week, I will talk more about Don.

We began the day by watching a video of Don, Joe Henderson, one of the founders of our Institute who lived to be 104, and Mary Jo Spencer, still with us at close to 100 years old. In this yet to be released film produced by Steven H. Wong, these three analysts discussed the ancestors and death.

To watch this film brought back a wash of memory for many of us. I had seen an early version of the film in 1999, but this time I was alert to how all three talked with certainty about the presence of the dead. Joe Henderson said that grief and sadness bring us close to the dead, although he added that he did not so much miss those he loved who had passed as he felt them in the present. Mary Jo talked about her ancestors visiting her in her living room, something I have heard her say more than once, and Don talked about the draw into death when loved ones die and about the recent loss of two very close friends and the impact of their deaths on him. He died within six months of the filming of this segment.

The vineyards are quiet; the nights, cold; the goats, rowdy with too much rest. This is the time to sink into the sofa and seed yourself with Spirit, whether that be from meditation, dreaming, or from reading. These books are some of my own reading that I have gotten a great deal from this season, books which relate to Biodynamic farming and spiritual development.

My friend Katherine Presley recommended Tanis Helliwell's Summer with the Leprechauns:A True Story. When I started reading the book, I thought the book was entertaining. The more I read, however, I realized its beefiness. I strongly recommend it in this day and age that we need to learn differentiated ways of viewing energies of the earth and how to interact with them.  It reads like a novel, yet offers concrete suggestions on learning to listen to presences that are non-human.  In fact, I got so much from the book, I ordered the sequel.

Pilgrimage with the Leprechauns: A True Story of a Mystical Tour of Ireland is an account of one of those tours-from-hell that we all embark upon in some way from time to time, when everything goes against our plans! The mishaps of this particular tour Helliwell organized were engineered by the leprechaun "Lloyd" (not his true name.) By the second book the reader is well aware of Tanis' relationship with Lloyd and Lloyd's fun-loving yet deadly serious mission to help humans with their evolution. Lloyd says that he was originally solicited a hundred years ago by Rudolf Steiner to become a part of an evolving group of elementals who would develop some of the human traits to become conscious creators. They in turn were to help human evolution.

Both of these books provide wonderful teaching through a kind of storytelling and are an important seeding of purpose for those of us working with the Earth. Whether or not these particular ways of Helliwell's are yours, her descriptions nevertheless are distinct, are grounded in universal truths and practices, and invite you to develop your own relationship to the tree outside your window, the grass in the cracks, the path that sometimes is not what you planned.

Do you have your own discipline/methods of communicating with the non-human, whether that be of the earth, animals, plants, cosmos? What have you learned is most important for such communication to happen?

Four Eternal Women: Tony Wolff revisited: A Study of Opposites, by Mary Dian Molton and Lucy Anne Sikes (Fisher King Press, 2011) amplifies Toni Wolff’s paper, “Structural Forms of the Feminine Psyche (1934).” The model uses Wolff’s quaternity of archetypal patterns of women’s development: the personally related modes of Mother (Mary, mother of Jesus), and its opposite, Hetaira (pattern Tony Wolff lived out with C. G. Jung); and the other pole of the impersonally related: Amazon Woman (Gloria Steinem) opposite Medial Woman (Hildegard von Bingen). Although some of these terms may be unfamiliar, the authors’ full treatment of these patterns brings them to life and the reader will find soon enough that they have relevance today. 

Using case examples, interviews, film studies, and well researched biographies and writings of famous women,  the authors have grounded the book in history and culture, giving perspective and depth to feminine development and differentiating archetypal patterns often unconsciously lived out. Not only are the positive aspects and characteristics of each pattern fully explored, but the shadow sides as well.

As I read, I found myself considering the authors’ amplifications of these patterns in myself and in women in my practice. How many times do we unconsciously retreat to familiar archetypal patterns rather than embrace what is unknown? The function opposite one’s primary function is the most undeveloped and least likely to be lived out, but those either side offer important alternative paths of development. How often does a woman whose primary pattern focused on nurturing her children (Mother), upon their leaving home, place her identity in Grand-Mother?  Wolff, and then Molton and Sikes, suggest that she might more fully develop Amazon interests of becoming independent and self-contained or, should psyche dictate, the non-rational ability of the Medial Woman to receive frequencies and material of the collective unconscious. 

I was taken in by the fullness of the reading and the examples, gaining new perspective. Molton and Sikes’  Four Eternal Women is a contribution to understanding women and our relationships in the world.