in - Blogs - Depth Psychology Alliance2024-03-28T23:15:22Zhttps://depthpsychologyalliance.com/profiles/blogs/feed/tag/inTiger Power - dream interpretation by Howard Teichhttps://depthpsychologyalliance.com/profiles/blogs/tiger-power-dream-interpretation-by-howard-teich2012-11-26T20:20:06.000Z2012-11-26T20:20:06.000ZCamille Cusumanohttps://depthpsychologyalliance.com/members/CamilleCusumano<div><p><strong>Dream interpreted by Howard Teich, Ph.D.</strong></p><p>A man of Asian descent has the following dream:</p><p><i> “I was in a far away exotic place. Eventually I noticed things on the floor. They looked like old washed up, mud-covered tree trunks, embedded in the floor. I looked closer at one, and it looked like a dark mud-covered stone tiger. Looking closer, I realized it just didn't look like one, it was a tiger, sort of half incarnated. Out of fear, I kicked sand from the floor on its face to see if it was real. I felt bad, immediately after. The tiger looked back at me.</i></p><p><i>I am in a light-blue-colored room and I see two tigers and then notice that the room is full of tigers. One is bigger than the rest. There are two more big female tigers, each with two cubs. I make sure the door is closed. There is no lock. The door is flimsy, a poor Asian sliding wood door with windowpanes.</i></p><p><i>I decide to switch to a room upstairs. I walk out of the room, and realize I forgot my phone and my key to that room. I go back in and find them. I go back out of the room and try to lock the door. It won't lock. The more I try to lock it, the more the door comes off the hinges. There is another door to a room adjacent to the room I was in. That door opens and men and women appear. That door falls off too. Then the tigers come into the room. There are two. We are somewhat afraid but we stand there and do not run. The two tigers sit there against the light-blue wall.</i></p><p><i>I feel myself surrendering to the situation. The room goes dark. And out of nowhere, there is a light coming from above me and to the right, just slightly in front, like a flashlight shining down on me. It is a pure white light. Not too bright. Not too dim. I just stand there. Empty mind, just light. Until it eventually fades. I think of the old paintings from Europe lit in the same light, when someone is spoken to from above. The light at the end was amazing. It was there whether my eyes were open or closed. Didn't matter. I was in pitch black room lying in bed, in a lucid state. It wasn't a big light. I remember it was very white, though.”</i></p><p> </p><p align="center">••••••••••</p><p>Dreams are the way the psyche speaks to images and gives expression to instincts that derive from most primitive levels of our existence to return us to the natural law of our being. Creativity is woven into us and ready to be ignited like the tiny speck of immense energy in the early moments of the universe. Instinctively we know that life is an adventure of chaos and order; we desperately want to control things for the fear of disequilibrium. This dream actually offers us a paradoxical dynamic in the face of chaos, the courage to “surrender” to the moment rather than to try to control it. When the dreamer surrenders to the environment, “the room goes dark . . . out of nowhere, there is a light, coming from above . . . like a flashlight shining down (on the dreamer). It is a pure white light . . . I just stand there, empty mind, just light . . . I think of the old painting from Europe lit in the same light, when spoken to from above . . . the light at the end was amazing.”</p><p>Surrendering in Goethe’s words is to “die and become.” To the extent that the ego consciously embraces “death” it constellates life in depth. Surrendering is to give up a belief about some form of control and reposition us for a different type of encounter. What we have to give up in our surrender is our “objective” mechanical worldview and reintegrate ourselves into nature’s self-organizing patterns that provide us access to light and energy. By surrendering we once again immerse ourselves in light and energy.</p><p>Light and energy are the creation principle of the cosmos and our planet. In the new scientific Gaia creation story, the theory is that our planet and its creatures constitute a single self-regulating system, which is in fact, a “great living being.” We now recognize that the Earth itself comes alive in the whirling dance of matter in space that manifested the crust of the earth that eventually transformed itself in what we call nature, water, mountains, valleys as well as stones.</p><p>The dream begins with nature in the form of trees and stones, “I was in a far away exotic place. Eventually I noticed these things on the floor. They looked like old washed up, mud-covered tree trunks . . . embedded in the floor. I looked closer at one, and it looked like a mud-covered, dark stone tiger.” Our awareness of “mud covered tree trunks” initiates our understanding that we are about to enter a story of growth, proliferation, generative and regenerative processes. Trees, often symbolized as the tree of life, stand for inexhaustible life, and are equivalent to a symbol of immortality.</p><p>“Out of fear, I kicked sand from the floor on its face to see if it was real.” Creation stories from all around the ancient world have a common theme, where mankind is created from sand, dirt, mud, or clay. In the Egypt creation myth, sand and mud are obtained from the Nile to create life. In Genesis 2.7 “the LORD God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature.” In China the goddess Nau Gua “carefully shaped yellow clay making human images which she breathed into and they came alive.”</p><p>The mud, clay or dust form of the tigers is the <i>prima materia</i> that births this primal creation energy into the dreamer’s life. In alchemy, the <i>prima materia</i> is the “single original stuff that goes through a number of alchemical operations to produce the Philosophers’ Stone.” One alchemist says, “one must start with a bit of the Philosophers’ Stone if one is to find it.” As Jung says, “. . . the entire alchemical procedure . . . could just as well represent the individuation process.” Tiger energy is for this man his access to man’s Philosophers’ Stone for his individuation process.</p><p>Tigers are the biggest cats in the entire World. The tiger is associated with Tsai Shen Yeh, the Chinese God of Wealth, and this god is usually seen sitting on a tiger. The tiger is the protector of the dead, and will often be seen in graves as a mark of protection, assuring peace for those who have died. It is also an image that symbolizes the supremacy of the intangible forces, and our ability to harness the tiger's power in our lives.</p><p>Stones are symbols of being, of cohesion and harmonious reconciliation with the Self. Their hardness and durability suggests to us the antithesis of a biological thing subject to the laws change, decay, and death as well as the antithesis to dust and sand as aspects of disintegration. Paradoxically, the Philosopher’s Stone symbolizes unity and strength. In Islamic worship, the most celebrated stone is the Kaaba meteorite in Mecca, Among the stones venerated by the ancients, the Greek’s had the <i>omphaloi</i>, or in Hebrew, the stone is God’s house, “and this stone which I have set for a pillar, shall be God’s House” (Genesis 22). In other words the stone is a symbol of authentic Self, a symbol of our wholeness and individuation.</p><p>Stones are among our earliest tool, weapons, and symbols of power, Increasing the might and the effectiveness of early men and women in coping with their environments. The stone as an archetype can be compared to our brief human life span as a symbol of endurance; indeed it suggests the concept of eternity. Yet, the common stone surrounds us everywhere and we give it little value. For the alchemist, the “mean, uncomely stone, cheap in price” becomes the indestructible material of transformation into the Philosopher’s Stone. The Arabian alchemist Morienus expressed it even more directly: This thing (the philosopher’s stone) is extracted from you: you are its mineral and one can find it in you.” The dreamer must patiently work throughout his life, like the ancient alchemists, “with love” to transform what we least value—the dead, the ignorant, or false aspect of ourselves, into the true stone, wise and eternal.</p><p>The Gaia creation story tells us that all the mysteries of life, including the matter in the universe, are part of our ecosystems in evolution. Even DNA, virtually the oldest thing in Earth’s evolution, still propagates itself from the beginning in the unbroken chain. Rock transformed into “endless creatures who recycled it in turn into sediments that were subducted back into the magma of origin by great tectonic plates.” In other words, at one point, the matter of stones, like all earth, were part of the self-regulating living systems of which all other life forms evolved. As the crust became more alive with bacteria it created its own atmosphere and finally produced the larger life forms—the trees, animals (tigers), and people.</p><p>Tigers in many Asia cultures are powerful symbols, the emergence of the king archetype. The central organizing principle of the Self, the Light, has emerged to shine on this man’s birthing his creativity at a deeper level, giving him access to the cosmic energy of all life. This illumination is a signal of his spiritual strength.</p><p> To surrender to an archetype like the “tiger” takes an authentic ego rather than the inflated ego that tries to dominate and control life. In the evolving authentic ego, dreams engage an archetype of an earthly animal, representative of transpersonal principles. Here the awakening to the evolution of the authentic ego. It alliance with unconsciousness is able to animate the “stone tigers,” birthing their living presence as a primal force of his nature and humanity. The dream shows there is no way to keep this tiger family of energy inanimate in his life and work any more. Here the urge to consciousness that has resided in the unconscious, and that had not been fully realized as a natural urge, has emerged. There is no way to lock away this energy. The tiger path is his “light” and the archetypal state of his enlightenment of the authentic Self emerged, as opposed to a previous state of ego consciousness</p><p>The blue color of the room that the tiger emerges in, is important. It represents the lunar context that is the holding container of this energy for the dreamer. Just as the lion is representative of the burning force of the sun, the solar aspect of life, in contrast, the tiger with its yellow body and black stripes mirrors the symbolic ambivalence of the power of the night and the lunar. The tiger, as a big cat that can dispatch its prey with a single stroke of might to the neck, is an energy of lithe elegance and lusty sensuality. It conveys protective grace and noble authority that has inspired everything from warrior societies to shamanic magic. Tigers hunt in silence and agility that almost seems supernatural. The tiger signifies the structure and ferocity of the warrior, the capacity to spring into action at a critical time, yet as the dream shows, the ability to “surrender” to the silence of nature. On its black forehead marking’s every tiger carries a pattern identical with the Chinese character for “king.” In the Japanese tradition, the tiger is a creature of mountainous ascent and descent, and evocative of the qualities of the lunar yin, at sunset, autumn and earth. Here and not here, the tiger is like a spirit of wind, “The mysterious rustling of the wind in a bamboo thicket, a sound that has an unearthly and eerie charm.” The tiger represents the vital powers within ourselves that are now being embodied in space and habitat and respects the force of its living presence in nature. The tiger represents one of nature’s most extraordinary incarnations of creative aggressiveness and sovereign instinct.</p><p> </p></div>Peter Weir's 'The Last Wave', Tidal Wave Dreams and Neptune in Pisceshttps://depthpsychologyalliance.com/profiles/blogs/peter-weir-s-the-last-wave-tidal-wave-dreams-and-neptune-in2012-03-21T21:30:00.000Z2012-03-21T21:30:00.000ZCathy Paganohttps://depthpsychologyalliance.com/members/CathyPagano<div><p align="center"></p><p align="center"><span class="font-size-4">‘The Last Wave’: The Archetypal Tidal Wave</span></p><p align="center"><span class="font-size-4">Cathy Pagano</span></p><p align="center"><span class="font-size-4"> </span></p><blockquote><p><b> "There are times when people need stories more than they need nourishment, because the stories feed something deeper than the needs of the body." </b></p></blockquote><p><b> Charles DeLint, <u>The Onion Girl</u></b></p><p><i> </i></p><p> <span class="font-size-1"> <span class="font-size-2" style="font-family:'times new roman', times;"> <a href="{{#staticFileLink}}9142439285,original{{/staticFileLink}}"><img width="666" class="align-center" style="padding:11px;" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9142439285,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9142439285?profile=original" /></a></span></span></p><p><span class="font-size-1"><span class="font-size-2" style="font-family:'times new roman', times;"><font size="4"><span style="line-height:115%;"> The World is full of magic and mystery, if we will only believe. Life is arrayed in beauty and possibilities, if we will only see. Our imagination interprets the world for us. It's how we communicate with Nature and how we sense each other. We are here to experience in full what human life has to offer: lessons of wonder and creativity, pain and suffering, love and companionship, trials and rewards, responsibilities and pleasures. And though each of us is a unique individual, we all go through the same trials and joys of life here on Earth. That's why we need stories to help us understand our shared experiences. Stories are born so we don't have to constantly re-invent the wheel. <br /></span></font></span></span></p><p style="color:#000000;"><span class="font-size-2" style="font-family:'times new roman', times;"><font size="4"><span style="line-height:115%;"> Human Beings have always made sense of our shared experiences through this amazing form of Wisdom called Story. Stories pass down tribal wisdom. Stories help us compare notes with girlfriends. Stories shape the way we see and experience the world. Stories tell us how to meet the darkness.</span></font> <font size="4"><span style="line-height:115%;">If a story is good and true, it will wake up your imagination and teach you something new about life. <br /></span></font></span></p><p style="color:#000000;"><span class="font-size-2" style="font-family:'times new roman', times;"><font size="4"><span style="line-height:115%;"> </span></font><font size="4"><span style="line-height:115%;"> But of course, it depends on if the story speaks to that something deeper that is looking for nourishment. Unfortunately, many of our modern movies and books don't speak to our hearts nor awaken our imaginations. Instead they seem to put us to sleep. <br /></span></font></span></p><p style="color:#000000;"><span class="font-size-2" style="font-family:'times new roman', times;"><font size="4"><span style="line-height:115%;"> This happens when a people's stories no longer help them meet life. <br /></span></font></span></p><p style="color:#000000;"><span class="font-size-2" style="font-family:'times new roman', times;"><font size="4"><span style="line-height:115%;"> The truth is that many of our old collective stories are worn out; losing their vitality they become stereotypes (despite the obsessive insistence of the truth of those stories by some people). Archetypes, although eternal, need symbolic renewing from age to age. When the old form of the story has lost its enchantment for us, it no longer serves its true function of helping us cope with life. Our modern world is too different and so much more complex than our ancestors' worlds. The times are changing. We need new stories!</span></font></span></p><p style="color:#000000;"><span class="font-size-2" style="font-family:'times new roman', times;"><font size="4"><span style="line-height:115%;"> Especially in times of unrest and instability, we need stories to help us make sense of our lives. We are living in those times when ‘people need stories more than they need nourishment. . .’ Unfortunately, even though stories are available to us 24/7 – now available on your phone! - most of our communal stories don’t satisfy us on a deep level. We are stuffed with stories, but are we inspired by them? Do we find the deep wisdom in them that can change our lives? And when we do find a story that inspires us, do we treat it as a pleasant fantasy or do we allow it to grow into something unique and splendidly different in our lives? Do we make it our own?</span></font></span></p><p style="text-indent:.5in;color:#000000;"><span class="font-size-2" style="font-family:'times new roman', times;"><font size="4"><span style="line-height:115%;">We can also come to know ourselves through our dream stories. We all are fascinated by our dreams. I can vouch for that – when people hear I’m a dreamworker, they are eager to share their dreams. But since we’ve been taught by our culture that dreams have no real meaning, most of those people don’t respect the story messages that their dreams bring them every night. We no longer remember the symbolic language of dreams and metaphors, humanity’s original language that we seem to have lost building the Tower of Babel. When we lose our child-like ability to imagine and fully inhabit a symbolic understanding of life, we lose our capacity to digest our stories so that they ‘feed something deeper than the needs of the body’. </span></font></span></p><p style="text-indent:.5in;color:#000000;"><span class="font-size-2" style="font-family:'times new roman', times;"><font size="4"><span style="line-height:115%;">We’ve also lost our separate cultural stories along the way, those ‘folk stories’ and folk wisdom that get passed down through families and cultures. Too often, our modern ‘myths’ can’t help us create and deal with real change in our lives and our world like the old stories did for past generations. Our educational system, as well as our modern media, so often sever this connection to our cultural stories and to the mythic imagination, leaving us in danger of losing our ancient wisdom traditions as well as our own ability to create new stories and discover new wisdom. </span></font></span></p><p style="text-indent:.5in;color:#000000;"><span class="font-size-2" style="font-family:'times new roman', times;"><font size="4"><span style="line-height:115%;">But a strong connection to the Creative Imagination within us can change that. This is our untapped gift, another lens on our world that can help us navigate the changes coming our way. We still have our dreams, if we are willing to respect their messages. We still have great storytellers, who study the ancient stories and birth the new ones. The great cosmic laws of life are still at play in the world and within us, even when we don’t recognize them.</span></font></span></p><p><span class="font-size-5" style="font-family:'times new roman', times;"> While we all have the potential to engage this Creative Imagination, not all of us can do it in equal measure. It is the true storytellers who have the gift to tap into these cosmic laws on an imaginal level and who pass it on to us through songs and stories that open us to cosmic truth on a heart level. </span></p><p><span class="font-size-5" style="font-family:'times new roman', times;"> Peter Weir is one of those great storytellers. He’s brought us <u>Picnic at Hanging Rock, Gallipoli, Year of Living Dangerously, Witness,</u> and <u>Dead Poets Society</u> to name just a few of his marvelous movies.</span></p><p></p><p><span class="font-size-5" style="font-family:'times new roman', times;"><b><i><u>The Last Wave: An Archetypal Movie about a Change in Consciousness</u></i></b></span></p><p><span class="font-size-5" style="font-family:'times new roman', times;"><b><i><u><br /></u></i></b></span></p><p><span class="font-size-5" style="font-family:'times new roman', times;"> Peter Weir’s 1977 movie <i><u>The Last Wave</u></i> is a moody, mysterious story about personal and cultural change. Two men from different worlds are confronted by a <i>mystery; </i> they both respond to it with honesty and integrity. This mystery seemingly centers around a mysterious death involving Australian Aborigines. But the real <i>mystery</i> forces one of these men to confront a rejected part of his inner psyche, an aspect of human life which western man has worked hard to make irrelevant. </span></p><p><span class="font-size-5" style="font-family:'times new roman', times;"> It is the mystery of the psychic dimensions of life, our sixth sense that opens us to unseen realities, which are considered ‘primitive’ by rational standards. Our left-brained culture often chooses to ignore and vilify the reality of this right-brain imagination. This story points out the fact that without both views of life, we die.</span></p><p><span class="font-size-5" style="font-family:'times new roman', times;"><br /></span></p><p><span class="font-size-5" style="font-family:'times new roman', times;">Continue at: <a href="http://www.starofthebards.com/movies/the-last-wave-the-archetype-of-the-tidal-wave" target="_blank">Star of the Bards: The Last Wave</a><br /></span></p></div>Marion Woodman: Dancing in the Flameshttps://depthpsychologyalliance.com/profiles/blogs/marion-woodman-dancing-in-the2011-02-16T17:30:00.000Z2011-02-16T17:30:00.000ZMelissa Janehttps://depthpsychologyalliance.com/members/MelissaJane<div><h3 class="post-title entry-title"></h3><div class="post-header"></div><p>The evolution of Jungian psychology owes a great deal to the work of Marion Woodman, a renowned analyst and author who is a pioneer in the understanding of the role of feminine principles in the healing of the human psyche. Her life and work are chronicled in Adam Greydon Reid's striking documentary <i><a href="http://dancingintheflames.com/Marion_Woodman/VIDEO.html">Marion Woodman: Dancing in the Flames</a></i> (Capri Films, 2010), which I highly recommend to anyone with an interest in depth psychology and to Woodman fans especially.<br /><br />Through dynamic conversations with mystic and political activist <a href="http://www.andrewharvey.net/">Andrew Harvey</a>, Woodman shares the personal and professional experiences that fuel her belief in the importance of cultivating a sacred connection to the feminine—meaning to body and to earth—in order to facilitate personal, cultural, and environmental transformation. She teaches that opening to change requires a willingness to surrender to the archetypal processes of death and rebirth, and asserts that even our very Earth is going through such a process now; it's up to us whether or not the Earth is reborn. <br /><br />With sparkling eyes and her trademark passion and grace, Marion details how she became intimately acquainted with psychic death through her struggles with anorexia and uterine cancer, both of which she overcame by working with her dreams, particularly by learning to integrate the emotional energy of her images into her body. The story of her recovery from cancer is an exceptionally moving testament to the miraculous healing power of making the unconscious conscious.<br /><br />Probably one of the most poignant and inspiring aspects of the documentary is its exploration of Marion's 50-plus–year partnership to her husband, Ross. Reflecting on the many shifts that have been a part of their journey to mature intimacy, the Woodmans joke that they have had four marriages. Each stage of the relationship has involved the shedding of increasingly deeper levels of projections—a process their marriage is still undergoing, Marion reveals.<br /><br />As Marion speaks, her words are at times illustrated by the evocative animation of Academy-Award–winning artist Faith Hubley. Hubley's whimsical, at times surreal, images do a wonderful job of bridging the gap between intuitive and intellectual understanding of Woodman's philosophies, and also reflect the dreamscape from which many of Woodman's ideas originated.<br /><br />All the elements of the film—dialogue, animation, and music—seamlessly work together to capture the fiery spirit of a woman whose desire to become conscious—to dance in the alchemical flames of her soul—saved her very life. Longtime fans of Woodman may find, as I did, such an intimate portrait simply sublime.</p><p> </p><p>Find more of my writing on <a href="http://www.thenightisjung.com">www.thenightisjung.com</a>. —Melissa Chianta</p></div>“Sound Archetypes and the Four Seasons” - Children’s Video and Documentationhttps://depthpsychologyalliance.com/profiles/blogs/sound-archetypes-and-the-four-seasons-children-s-video-and2016-03-06T20:42:47.000Z2016-03-06T20:42:47.000ZWilli Paulhttps://depthpsychologyalliance.com/members/WilliPaul<div><p><span class="font-size-5">“Sound Archetypes and the Four Seasons”</span></p><p>Children’s Video and Documentation </p><p>by Willi Paul, Planetshifter.com Media (+PDF)</p><p><a href="http://www.planetshifter.com/node/2340" target="_blank">http://www.planetshifter.com/node/2340</a><br /><a href="http://www.planetshifter.com/node/2340" target="_blank"><img src="{{#staticFileLink}}9142453886,original{{/staticFileLink}}" width="495" class="align-center" alt="9142453886?profile=original" /></a><a href="http://www.planetshifter.com/node/2340" target="_blank">fter.com/node/2340</a></p></div>Mary Pipher's Answer to 'Willful Ignorance'https://depthpsychologyalliance.com/profiles/blogs/mary-pipher-s-answer-to-willful-ignorance2014-12-05T15:12:01.000Z2014-12-05T15:12:01.000ZPatricia Dameryhttps://depthpsychologyalliance.com/members/PatriciaDamery<div><p><a href="http://www.patriciadamery.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/Unknown.jpeg"><img class="alignleft size-thumbnail wp-image-911" src="http://www.patriciadamery.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/Unknown-150x150.jpeg" alt="Unknown" width="150" height="150" /></a>Mary Pipher, author, psychotherapist, and activist, spoke at the recent <a href="http://futurefirst.us">Future First Conference</a> in Minneapolis, addressing the most dangerous defense the human race could adopt at this point, that of "willful ignorance". According to Mary, willful ignorance occurs when we are caught between facing something too dreadful to acknowledge yet too dreadful to ignore.</p><p>"Yet we cannot solve a problem we cannot face," she asserted, and she continued to lace the hard facts of climate change and the political corruption supporting its denial, with anecdotal, funny stories, including influencing state legislators with apple pies (and not in the face, either!)</p><p>"We have a disordered relationship with the web of life," she said. "We never get into the zone to work on issues." She told of her own activism in forming a group in Nebraska to oppose the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline through their state, and particularly through the ecologically vulnerable Sandhills, actions which have successfully tied up the passage of the pipeline through the state for a few more years.</p><p>"Never ever allow yourself to get caught up in either/or," she advised. "Move to a both/and." She discussed how her group found common ground among people who have been manipulated to be polarized around issues that should not be politicized. We all want clean water. We do not want to be poisoned into perpetuity by spills or dumping of toxic chemicals. And many of us love the place we live. In finding this common ground, and not being divided by corporate interests and corruption, we can find ground to make positive change.</p><p>There were other gems to take away:</p><blockquote>"If you are going to be an activist, you had better have fun!"<p>"Every emotion about climate change is the right emotion."</p><p>"Once you face the truth about climate collapse, you can have a transcendent response: you grow bigger!"</p><p>"Acting as if we can change the situation is a healthy response."<br /> "Amazement antidotes despair."</p><p>"We can grow and enhance our moral imaginations. Good increases moral imagination; evil decreases it."</p></blockquote><p><br /> Her recent book, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Green-Boat-Reviving-Ourselves-Capsized/dp/1594485852/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1417540733&sr=1-1&keywords=the+green+boat"><em>The Green Boat: Reviving Ourselves in Our Capsized Culture</em></a>, describes her own path in dealing with what she calls <em>planetary anguish</em>, a book I found soothing and inspiring to read. The new normal of the new, unknown future will require we each find ways of dealing with planetary anguish over and over, and Mary Pipher's story offers guideposts.</p></div>Interview with Jungian Analyst Barbara Holifield: Moving in Depth and Dream of the Earthhttps://depthpsychologyalliance.com/profiles/blogs/interview-with-jungian-analyst-barbara-holifield-moving-in-depth2014-02-08T15:00:00.000Z2014-02-08T15:00:00.000ZPatricia Dameryhttps://depthpsychologyalliance.com/members/PatriciaDamery<div><table cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left:auto;margin-right:auto;text-align:center;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align:center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-qrnzhgJ-Eu4/UvMMsEdzZiI/AAAAAAAACcU/eADvm0__0h4/s1600/Bholifield,+photo.jpg" style="clear:right;margin-bottom:1em;margin-left:auto;margin-right:auto;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-qrnzhgJ-Eu4/UvMMsEdzZiI/AAAAAAAACcU/eADvm0__0h4/s1600/Bholifield,+photo.jpg" alt="Bholifield,+photo.jpg" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align:center;">Barbara Holifield</td></tr></tbody></table><p><br /> <i>On February 22, 2014, the C. G. Jung Institute of San Francisco will offer the first of a series of eco-psychology seminars and workshops on the environment crisis. These workshops will be from differing perspectives but of one piece: the necessary crisis of consciousness in earth changes and what we can/must do. In this first workshop, <a href="http://www.eventbrite.com/e/indwelling-our-human-participation-in-the-dream-of-the-earth-registration-7406756809">Indwelling: Our Human Participation in the Dream of the Earth</a>, analysts Barbara Holifield and Carol McRae will lead participants into active imagination states through drumming and authentic movement. Following is an interview with one of the seminar leaders, analyst Barbara Holifield. </i></p><div><br /> <b>Barbara, could you explain what authentic movement is? How did you get in to it? Does it serve your own connection with the earth and if so, in what ways?</b><br /> <br /> I began working with Authentic Movement, also known as Moving in Depth, in the mid 70’s. I was a member of a learning community at Prescott College in which we were exploring ways of bringing conscious awareness to the body, and to the psychological dimensions of body-based experience. During that time emersion in wilderness was the ground of much of our exploration.<br /> <br /> Moving in Depth is a profoundly simple process in which one, in the presence of a witness, closes one’s eyes, and turning his or her attention inward, listens for felt sensation, emotion and the stirrings of imagination, allowing one’s self to move and be moved. One may move into deep stillness, very subtle or active movements of the experienced body. This approach, rooted in Jungian active imagination, is like a meditation based in the feminine principle: self-guided and aligned with one’s own inner knowing.<br /> <br /> Whether one is moving or witnessing, a foundational aspect of the practice is a rigorous tracking of inner experience such that one becomes aware of the process of projection and re-integration of projection. This work, so integral to Jung’s Individuation process is also essential in clarifying the intersubjective field whether between persons or between persons and the natural world.<br /> <br /> For me it is a practice in which I access the depth of my innermost, direct experience of s/Self and self in relation to other, including the more-than-human others of the earth community.<br /> <br /> <b>Could you talk about the split between humans and the earth and how indigenous peoples connected through stories and land?</b><br /> <br /> There are many perspectives one could take to understand our culture’s disconnection with the earth: philosophical attitudes embedded in monotheistic religions, the way we have adopted our approach to science, the industrial revolution. However, as a Jungian analyst, I want to try and understand this dilemma from a psychological perspective.<br /> <br /> When things go well enough developmentally, with the aid of a resonant caretaker/ mother we learn to lean into our joys, struggles and pains of living, we learn to embody life. In this there is an inner quickening as psyche indwells the soma, a process the poet John Keats’s described as soul making. From a developmental perspective we know this starts as life begins and goes on throughout the life cycle. The infant needs a resonant, compassionate witness to facilitate, what later becomes internalized and practiced, in the person, less a disconnect between body and psyche occurs when a person is faced with overwhelming affect.<br /> <br /> It seems that people also need that resonant other, which is exemplified by the culture of Native Americans, to mediate the insistent power of the natural world, that union of what is beautiful and what is terrifying. It seems we need this to live in congruence with the reality of the land as it is given, less we disconnect or split from the earth when faced with the overwhelming forces of the land by withdrawing or alternately exerting our will to change it into something else. It is a developmental task. Native American and other indigenous cultures, through their stories, myths, rituals and ceremonies mediate between the person and our bigger body, the earth, connecting and reconnecting the person, their peoples, to the land. Our culture promotes an attitude of “getting away” or “rising above” or “defending against” or “winning the battle” with the natural forces in both our inner and outer worlds.<br /> <br /> When recognized the land in turns reciprocates offering unimpeachable wisdom on living a life of dignity. And something is quickened between the person and the land in this kind of meeting…our stories en-soul the land. A bond is formed and there is an ongoing exchange of recognition and reciprocity between us and the land, and the land and us.<br /> <br /> <b>Can you say what you mean with the phrase: human participation in the dream of the earth?</b><br /> <br /> Thomas Berry, a theologian dedicated to earth-human relations, poses that our hope for the future lies in our human participation with the dream of the earth. In this he points to an urgent need for revelatory experience that is accessed through our senses when we open to the sacred grandeur of Earth processes. He lets us know that this is ancient, rooted in shamanic times. This is the kind of space that opens when one is quiet, attuned to the breathing earth and earth community, listening, dancing, drumming. It is the mytho-poetic realm that is within us and between us and the natural world, quickened by dropping down into a realm of relating that is not solely rational.<br /> <br /> <b>Do you have a story of your own about how you have connected/reconnected with nature and land through story and myth? </b><br /> <br /> Recently, when I allow myself to be seen by a certain tree that lives on the ridge near me, I experience my humanness in a very distinct way. I become acutely aware of co-inhabiting this earth with many other species. I feel aware of the particular gifts and responsibilities of being a human other. I feel seen as having an intrinsic dignity and desire to be aware and responsive to co-inhabiting this earth with so many living others.<br /> <br /> The stories told by the voices of contemporary Native American women poets carry me through the journey. For example this poem by the Chickasaw poet, Linda Hogan:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq"><br /> <b>Skin Dreaming</b></blockquote><blockquote><br /> Skin is the closest thing to god,<br /> touching oil, clay, intimate with the foreign land of air<br /> and other bodies,<br /> places not in light,<br /> lonely for its own image. </blockquote><blockquote><br /> It is awash in its own light.<br /> It wants to swim and surface<br /> from the red curve of the sea,<br /> open all its eyes. </blockquote><blockquote><br /> Skin is the oldest thing.<br /> It remembers when it was the cold<br /> builder of fire,<br /> when darkness was the circle around it,<br /> when there were eyes shining in the night,<br /> a breaking twig, and it rises<br /> in fear, a primitive lord on new bones. </blockquote><blockquote><br /> I tell you it is old,<br /> it heals and is sometimes merciful.<br /> It is water.<br /> It has fallen through ancestral hands.<br /> It is the bearer of vanished forest<br /> fallen through teeth and jaws of earth<br /> where we were once other<br /> visions and creations.</blockquote><br /> <span style="font-size:x-small;">From the <i>Book of Medicines, </i><span style="font-family:Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Coffee House Press, Minneapolis</span></span><span style="font-size:14px;"><span style="font-family:Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">. </span></span><span style="font-family:TimesNewRomanPSMT;font-size:14px;">1993.</span></div></div>