Blogs

Language (5)

Honoring the Ancestors: Part One

Posted by Patricia Damery on November 23, 2013 at 8:00am
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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

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It's time to get off the island

Posted by Kim Hermanson, Ph.D. on June 29, 2013 at 2:00pm

Do you ever feel that there is so much more to you and you don’t know how to tap into it? Or do you spend too much time of your precious time lost in confusion and overwhelm? Here’s a quote from John O’Donohue that beautifully describes what I do in Doorway Sessions.

"Sometimes on a human journey a person can stay marooned on the surface of their minds, suffering the devastation of doubt, confusion and great turbulence, while the whole time just a couple of inches deeper, there was a vast world w

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Is Twitter for the Birds? The Symbolic Significance of Tweeting

Posted by Bonnie Bright on January 4, 2011 at 12:34pm
If you look at Dictionary.com, the word “twitter” is defined as a “a succession of small, tremulous sounds, as a bird” or “to talk lightly and rapidly, esp. of trivial matters; chatter.” “Tweet” fares no better, described as a “weak chirping sound.” Though the etymological derivation from Old German is slightly more positive, meaning "condition of tremulous excitement,” neither term seems to come even close to the experience had by those who have embraced it as a powerful tool for rapid and broa
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Following on How Language Can Shape our Lives

Posted by Bonnie Bright on November 7, 2010 at 3:04pm
In a previous blog, I summarized an article describing a recent Harvard study that indicates using different languages seems to create different preferences or opinions about others, thus raising the question of whether language actually shapes and creates our thoughts.

Now, in November's issue of Psychology Today, therapist Vikki Stark provides a thoughtful anecdote on how one client's recurring description of various everyday events in her life as "hell" seemed to actually be a sort of self-fu
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Does Language Create and Shape our Thoughts?

Posted by Bonnie Bright on November 5, 2010 at 5:00pm
"Charlemagne is reputed to have said that to speak another language is to possess another soul,"says the co-author of a recent Harvard study which suggests people's opinions and preferences toward ethnic groups vary depending on which language they use to express their thoughts. This suggests language is not only a tool for communication, but also actually serves to create and shape our thoughts and feelings.

Since implicit attitudes lead to outward social behaviors, all this leads to a bigger q
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