separation - Blogs - Depth Psychology Alliance2024-03-29T15:40:10Zhttps://depthpsychologyalliance.com/profiles/blogs/feed/tag/separationGreater than the Sum of Its Parts: Depth Psychology and the Honeybee Hivehttps://depthpsychologyalliance.com/profiles/blogs/greater-than-the-sum-of-its-parts-depth-psychology-and-the-honeyb2015-03-07T02:15:01.000Z2015-03-07T02:15:01.000ZBonnie Brighthttps://depthpsychologyalliance.com/members/BonnieBright<div><p>I am honored to have been invited to post a guest blog on the Pacifica Graduate Institute Alumni Association. It's about the Alliance and it just went up! Check it out if you have a moment:<br /><br /><strong>Greater than the Sum of Its Parts: Depth Psychology and the Honeybee Hive</strong><br /><br />One glorious late spring day on Pacifica’s Ladera Campus I witnessed a humming, writhing, vibrant swarm of honeybees on a bougainvillea bush. It stopped me in my tracks, entrancing me with the sheer number and proximity of bees buzzing around what seemed to be a living, breathing organ that almost pulsed with power—what turned out to be, in the end, a mass of bees itself. It is no wonder that the beehive is known as a super organism, more than the sum of its individual parts.<br /><br />I have been fascinated by honeybees since the first warning signs of an alarming phenomenon taking place in the natural world—a problem that came to be called “Colony Collapse Disorder.” In 2006, a significant number of beekeepers began reporting finding their hives unexpectedly empty, except for the queen and a handful of her attendants. To the great bewilderment and concern of scientists, the majority of the bees appeared to be vanishing without a trace.<br /><br />Captivated as I was by this inexplicable disappearance of the honeybees, I set out to research it in depth, ultimately writing my Master’s thesis in depth psychology about the symbolic nature of bees and the significance of Colony Collapse Disorder, a theme I expanded to the notion of Culture Collapse Disorder when it came time to write my doctoral dissertation at Pacifica. My conclusions ultimately focused on the problem of separation and its implications. In Colony Collapse Disorder, bees seem to become disoriented and unable to go home to the hive. Their failure to return is a virtual death sentence for the individual bees, who are unlikely to live through the night when their wings grow too cold to carry them, and they are left alone, vulnerable, and unable to fend for themselves. It is also signals a death knell for the hive which, as more bees go out to forage and fail to return, grows empty and cold, no longer able to sustain itself as a buzzing, vibrant life force—both a container for and a source of life.<br /><br />In contemporary western culture, humans, too, suffer from separation—the loss of connection to a larger web of meaning embodied by nature and enlivened by our now-forgotten ties to the sacred that was once the domain of our ancestors. While Jung, Hillman, and others have gone to great lengths to....<a href="http://www.pgiaa.org/greater-sum-parts-depth-psychology-honeybee-hive/" target="_blank">Click here to finish reading on the PGIAA site</a></p></div>Reconnecting with the Sacred: Finding Homehttps://depthpsychologyalliance.com/profiles/blogs/reconnecting-with-the-sacred-finding-home2013-06-12T23:34:01.000Z2013-06-12T23:34:01.000ZBonnie Brighthttps://depthpsychologyalliance.com/members/BonnieBright<div><div class="boxHeaderOuterContainer"><div class="boxHeaderContainer"><div class="d1"><div class="d2"><div class="d3"><div class="d4"><div class="d5"><div class="d6"><div class="d7"><div class="d8"><div class="d9"><div class="inner"><h4 class="boxHeaderTitle"></h4></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div><div class="boxBodyOuterContainer"><div class="boxBodyContainer"><div class="d1"><div class="d2"><div class="d3"><div class="d4"><div class="d5"><div class="d6"><div class="d7"><div class="d8"><div class="d9"><div class="inner"><div class="boxBodyContentOuterContainer"><div class="boxBodyContentContainer"><div class="d1"><div class="d2"><div class="d3"><div class="d4"><div class="d5"><div class="d6"><div class="d7"><div class="d8"><div class="d9"><div class="inner"><div class="blogPostBody"><p><font face="Verdana" size="3"><i>“The decisive question for man is: Is he related to something infinite or not?<br /> That is the telling question of his life.”<br /></i><i>-(-</i>C.G. Jung, 1961, pp. 356-7).</font></p><p><font face="Verdana" size="3"><img src="http://www.depthpsychologylist.com/Resources/Pictures/Man-Stranded-On-A-Rock3547876-pd.jpg" title="" alt="" width="225" height="300" border="0" align="right" />Watching what’s going on on our planet each day, I am continually struck by the suffering and grief that seems to be inherent in the human condition. It occurs to me that part of the problem is that western culture places so much value on individualism, independence, and getting ahead, venerating community and interdependence less. As a result, many of us generally live lives of separation, disconnected in various ways from a larger kinship of our fellow human beings, unable to perceive how intrinsic each of us and every single aspect of earth and nature is to each other. It often seems to take a tragedy to bring us together in community, force us to meet our neighbors, or realize a felt sense of being part of something larger than our individual selves living our everyday lives.</font></p><p><font face="Verdana" size="3">Due to our overwhelming self-centeredness (a term I use not to mean arrogance so much as the unconscious evolutionary tendency to create our lives to revolve around what’s important to “me”: <i>my</i> life, <i>my</i> schedule, <i>my</i> work, <i>my</i> preferences, <i>my</i> family, etc.), it seems our cultural evolution has led us to abandon both the general human community as well as the earth itself. Little do we realize this leaves us vulnerable on many fronts.</font></p><p><font face="Verdana" size="3">Without a larger circle of support from interconnection, or the sense of being held within a greater fabric of being, stressors stemming from challenges we’ve created for ourselves through various aspects of culture and development (along with their correlating psychological issues) affect us more deeply. Climate change, ecological destruction, natural disasters, and pathological culture-related events including outbreaks of violence all feed into our anxiety and fear, triggering sometimes unhealthy coping mechanisms. In addition, without community, we lose the capacity for having our own actions reflected back to us, causing those actions to appear to occur in a vacuum without apparent consequence.</font></p><p><a href="http://www.culturecollapsedisorder.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/Screen-shot-2013-06-08-at-12.58.19-PM.gif" target="_blank"><font face="Verdana" size="3"><img class="alignright size-medium wp-image-37" alt="Navigating the Coming Chaos - Carolyn Baker" src="http://www.culturecollapsedisorder.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/Screen-shot-2013-06-08-at-12.58.19-PM-247x300.gif" width="247" height="300" /></font></a></p><p><font face="Verdana" size="3">The unconscious ways we each contribute to our collective discomfort and dis-ease in a world where we have isolated and alienated ourselves only serve to amplify and perpetuate a drastic systemic imbalance for both nature and culture. This imbalance continues to feed on itself, manifesting in a critical rise in adverse conditions for earth and all its inhabitants. Carolyn Baker offers some excellent and compelling insights into the... <a href="http://www.depthpsychologylist.com/Depth-Psychology-Practitioners-Blog?mode=PostView&bmi=1312653" target="_blank">(click here to read entire post)</a></font></p></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div>