Since being vulnerable does not always come easily to many of us, it is important to have empathy for anyone who struggles with it. The internet is flooded with writings and talks on encouraging people to show vulnerability. Having trouble expressing it often gets associated with a lack of authenticity. Such judgmental interpretations can frequently trigger shame in people who don’t feel safe enough to be vulnerable due to certain socio-demographic factors. There is a misconception that expressi

Part Five

He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past. – George Orwell

I will never apologize for the United States of America. I don’t care what the facts are.  – George H.W. Bush

Universities commonly mirror what students have already endured. Public education reverses the age-old tradition of identifying a child’s innate and unique gifts. Indigenous cultures emphasized what the Romans called educare – to identify, encourage and welcome that which t

Part One

What went before, as told by those who think they know it. – Gary Snyder

Everything comes to the reader as interpreted by the historian. Everything is seen through the medium of his personality. The facts of history when they are used to teach a moral lesson do not reach us in their entirety…but selected and arranged according to the overmastering ideal in the mind of the historian. The reader is at the historian’s mercy. – Peter Novick

History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it.

‍I love to track what is going on in the inner life of people around me by reading best-selling fiction with an attention to archetypal patterns. When a colleague told me to check out the All Souls Trilogy by a notable historian, Deborah Harkness, I was intrigued. The heroine of these books is Diana Bishop, an academic (Sage), hiding the fact that she is a witch, but just studying alchemy, not practicing it. Then she falls in love with Mathew Clairmont, a researcher (Sage) who is studying the DN

Introduction: Branding ideally is integrated into organizational development activities. A brand archetype held too rigidly can throw a social system out of balance. The solution is to reinforce a complementary archetype, one already active in the organizational culture. Compelling situations can obscure both. The enmity between our political parties has constellated a war story (the culture war). Once a war story gets constellated, our brains notice events that reinforce our passion for our s

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1l5MeTY91KlYwwat5KSijFfhb7u7wTD1kIQBDxhdxRUE/edit?usp=sharing

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Blog One:  Series Introduction

America On the Couch: How To Understand the Stories Driving Us

By Carol S. Pearson

I’m writing this blog series for those who, like me, are worried about my country (the United States). I suspect it is not news to you that our two-party system has devolved into an endless cultural civil war that makes it difficult to solve the urgent problems we face. As the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on January 6th, 2021, demonstrated, some p

Part 1 – Framing the Message

Most American men above the age of sixty who learned about masculinity by watching John Wayne movies as children are familiar with this melody without knowing its name, let alone its history. Here it is.

Recognize it? The tune is called “Garryowen,” and it has been featured as a military marching song in several movies, including The Fighting 69th, They Died with their Boots On, Fort Apache, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, The Long Gray Line, Little Big Man, Son of the Morni

Hello Depth Psyhology Alliance community!

I am reaching out in hopes you might be able to connect me with potential participants for my research study.  I am studying how the experience of working with depth and transpersonal psychology methods changes an individual’s day-to-day experience in meeting the challenges of ADHD.

I am in my third practicum year of an MSc in Consciousness, Spirituality, and Transpersonal Psychology with Alef Trust / Liverpool John Moores University. I am also training in

Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety. – Benjamin Franklin

I was married 18 years, two kids, unfulfilling work; alienated from society, heritage, creativity and former spiritual interests; never cried as an adult, rarely felt either joy or anger; had a cynical, judgmental, self-deprecating sense of humor; was more like my father than I knew, needier for maternal for affection than I knew.

Then my wife had an affair with

Part One

Na na na nana na, nana na na na nana na na…

Why does  The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down continue to move us over 50 years after The Band first recorded it?

The fact that so many people continue to debate its meaning online (see links here, here, here and here) is a mirror of America’s ongoing uncertainty about the motives of the Civil War’s opposing sides, of its resolution and of its meaning for our time. In other words, the war (and the Viet Nam war during which The Night was composed)

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1U74BEkyZjPz-j3K3qfaAODsTaXBU1c86SIl2TYLd_aM/edit?usp=sharing

Happy New Year

Peace + Love Linda + Darlene

January is the time to clarify intents for the year. Notice that I did not say “make resolutions.”

For most people, resolutions are well meant, but often not achieved in practice. That is because it is widely assumed that we will accomplish them by willpower triumphing over what we actually want to do. Too often, resolutions are what we think we should do, perhaps in response to messages from others or from the media.

I don’t know about you, but my life has been enriched by partnering with a dear

Part One 

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Part Six

A myth never says what to do; it points out where the difficulties will arise. – Ginette Paris

The past isn’t dead. It is not even past. – William Faulkner

At this point things get far more complicated, just as they do in the unconscious mind. Pelops and Hippodamia had many children, but his favorite was an illegitimate son, Chrysippus. Hippodamia convinced her own sons Atreus and Thyestes to murder him. Pelops banished them, and Hippodamia hanged herself. The exiled brothers went to Mycen

Part One

In memory of Robert Bly 

A little rest for the wounds – who speaks of healing?
(And the howl of the orphans is passed from one generation to the next, as in a relay race:
the baton never falls.) – Yehuda Amichai

Why do some stories stay with us over long periods of time? All the classic stories (Dante, Shakespeare, Melville and, of course, the Greek and Bible myths) deal with universal, archetypal themes that live to some extent in every human heart, every society and every family. Mythic fi

How old is the habit of denial? We keep secrets from ourselves that all along we know…For perhaps we are like stones; our own history and the history of the world embedded in us, we hold a sorrow deep within and cannot weep until that history is sung.  – Susan Griffin

I am convinced that we would solve many things if we all went out into the streets and uncovered our griefs, which perhaps would prove to be but one sole common grief…The chiefest sanctity of a temple is that it is a place to which

Part One

My point…is not that those ancient people told literal stories and we are now smart enough to take them symbolically, but that they told them symbolically and we are now dumb enough to take them literally. ― John Dominic Crossan

Two events in late July and early August of this year (2021) seemed very significant for me. The first, on July 28^th, was the death of Roberto Calasso, best known for his 1993 retelling of Greek Myth, The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony.

It’s a difficult book, and I