Blogs

More than ever, many of us are looking for meaning in a culture where we are moving faster and connecting with each other less and less. The more things feel out of our control, the more we tend to tamp down emotions and not allow ourselves to witness or feel the devastating effects of our environments and the things going on around us.

After all, feeling the impact of the horrors of genocide, war, disaster, famine, or senseless acts of violence such as the mass shootings in Newtown, Connecticut

In the heart of the jungle in Columbia, the U’wa people live a simple existence mostly beyond the reaches of modern society, having had little contact at all with the outside world until a few decades ago. Their indigenous relationship to the earth sustains them in a collective role as caretakers of the earth and an equal facet of nature. Thus, when the prospect of international firms making plans to drill into their ancestral lands for oil in the late 1990s arose, they perceived the concept to

Jungian analyst, Ann Belford Ulanov’s most recent book, The Psychoid, Soul and Psyche: Piercing Space-Time Barriers, explores Carl Gustav Jung’s concept of the “psychoid.”

“Psychoid refers to unconscious processes that are unrepresentable in word or image,” Ulanov says. “We live them, but we don’t know about them. And they can make us feel mad, not angry, but crazy, and I believe they can also be a third source of healing.”

Jung described the unus mundus, or “one world,” as more than psychological

Is schizophrenia a “severe mental disorder,” as defined by the World Health Organization (WHO)? How might changing the perspective of the traditional western medical model, which labels certain symptoms as strictly pathological, ultimately transform those who are suffering? The Hearing Voices Movement (HVM) which originated in Europe teaches people with schizophrenia to respect their voices and to treat their voices as persons, says Dr. Tanya Marie Luhrmann, whose research seeks to understand th

Trauma is an injury to our capacity to feel. When our capacity to feel is injured, we cease to be able to imagine, because imagination depends on emotional literacy, says Dr. Donald Kalsched, who for 20 years has been crafting a model of the dissociating psyche.

This model describes various unconscious archetypal powers arranged in a dynamic system of defense that attempts to protect a sacred, innocent psyche from further violation. In order to leave this enclave, we need to become emotionally li

NEW! *Read a written transcript of this interview here

In this interview, Sandra Easter, Ph.D., author of Jung and the Ancestors: Beyond Biography, Mending the Ancestral Web, speaks movingly about how developing a relationship with our ancestors and ancestral past can help us heal, both individually and collectively.

Sandra offers workshops in ancestral soul work and transformational visioning for individuals and organizations, and she will be presenting about ancestral soul work at the C.G. J

We are all more or less traumatized, affirms Donald Kalsched, Jungian analyst and trauma specialist who wrote Trauma and the Soul. Kalsched avows that reality confronts us with things that break our hearts, noting that there’s also a huge amount of unacknowledged terror in all of us.

Nightmares stemming from neurotic psychology might be terrifying at the beginning of the analytic process, because they are an effort to help us integrate some of the disowned material which can come back in angry fo

We are all more or less traumatized, affirms Donald Kalsched, a Jungian analyst and trauma specialist who wrote Trauma and the Soul. Kalsched avows that reality confronts us with “things that break our hearts,” noting that there’s also a huge amount of unacknowledged terror in all of us.

Nightmares can be an effort by the psyche to help us integrate some of disowned material from our childhood. In what Kalsched has termed the “self-care system,” a system of defense which is made up of both protec

There is a certain kind of transformational process that demands the most and the best of us so that we can respond to traumatic situations, just as military, veterans, and first responders do on a daily basis. From a depth psychological perspective, this kind of transformation can be initiated through a psycho-mythic journey to warriorhood, believe Ed Tick and John Becknell, who offer archetypal and depth psychological frameworks for military, veterans, and first responders, including police of

     “Will you catch me when I fall?”  Those are the words of a refrain from a Danish song by the group Danser med Drenge (Dancing with Boys).  The image helped me recall the old trust games used in group-building back in the day.  Someone stood in the center of a group, crossed their arms across their chests and closed their eyes.   They were to fall backwards, trusting that they would get caught before they hit the ground by their co-workers.  That exercise was used to ‘teach’ trust among peop

When the waves crest

In Australia

Sometimes you can see dolphins

Or other fish

Backlit by the sun

Suspended in the clarity of water.

That moment of perfect balance

Before the wave crashes

And dissipates

Leaves scant traces of shells

Which will be brought back into the ocean

Soon enough.

            This image appeared in a recent session as a client was describing the sense of despair after a wonderful vacation with family.  Why, after such a good time, were the memories of beach, tides, and laughter tin

Here is a link to my most recent blog posting...

The Wounded Healer = Bodhisattva

The other day I found these words in my heart, wanting to be written:
Barcelona, May 1, 2014

In a few days it will be Buddha Sok Ga Mo Ni’s birthday. As this joyous occasion is drawing near, this year, Queen Maya keeps coming to mind. 

In my work as a DFA practitioner of Somatic Pattern Recognition and Archetypal Pattern Analysis, I have the chance to observe the patterns that evolve out of the early conditions of my clients’ lives. Since humans are born before gestation is complete, it continu

When we are not grounded, not connected to our roots, terrible psychic issues occur, which lead to feelings of intense fear and anxiety suggests Jungian analyst Judith Harris, in her book Jung and Yoga: The Psyche Body Connection. She quotes C. G. Jung, who, in his complex work, Mysterium Coniunctionus, establishes that the element of earth holds the exact central point between the tensions of two opposites.

Grounding oneself in the earth results in feeling held by the Great Mother, rendering one

Carl Jung & Jungian Topics: Dreams,Archetypes, Symbols 

Individuation: The Process of a Lifetime: Jung defined it as "the process by which a person becomes an "in-dividual…” http://www.jungiananalyticpraxis.com/individuation_lecture.htm

Book review: What Story Are You Living? By Carol Pearson and Hugh Marr> Are all stories are derived from archetypes? http://psychcentral.com/lib/2010/what-story-are-you-living-2/

Depth Psychology and Myths Today: The mystery that surrounds us feeds the myths we make

Carl Jung & Jungian Topics: Dreams, Archetypes, and Symbols

Dreamwork as a rewarding spiritual practice by Jean Raffa: http://bit.ly/gPWY9r

Before the Meyers-Brigg (MBTI) Jung developed personality typologies. What’s yours? Free online test: http://www.humanmetrics.com/cgi-win/JTypes2.asp

Vampires embody all aspects of the darker side of human nature. It’s what Freud called the Id and Carl Jung called the Shadow: http://www.chateaugrrr.com/featured-guests/martin-v-riccardo

Carl Jung’s ideas on the f

Depth Psychology is the study of the Unconscious, an inquiry into what we don’t know by looking at how psyche emerges in symbols, mythology, art, & dreams and how we live out the repressed, the silenced, & the marginalized in our personal lives and in the culture at hand. It explores our relationship to soul, and includes ideas from anthropology, cross-cultural studies, ecology, philosophy, theology, indigenous cultures, the arts, and more. Early pioneers of the field are Sigmund Freud and Carl