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Last night my wife, Kate and I were watching a television series we've come to enjoy, Jack Taylor. He's an Irish detective, a rogue rough-and-tough guy. He lives hard, barely gets by, but has some real depth to him He quoted Emerson saying that what matters most is not the past or the future but what's inside a person.

Kate and I spoke about this Emerson essay on self-reliance. It's a soulful piece, one that brings psychic reality down to earth and into everyday life. We are surrounded by the wis

Plate from The Song of Los, by William Blake

Is Soul the same as consciousness? No. What is consciousness? It is the state of being aware. Soul encompasses both unconsciousness and consciousness. What is the origin of consciousness? How do we become aware of unconscious things? First of all, we must not reify consciousness. It is a state, not a Being in and of itself. It is a quality of Being. Many times, we tend to talk about "the unconscious" and "consciousness" as if we were referring to Being

When you work with dreams from an animated point of view, notes Stephen Aizenstat, who pioneered the process of DreamTending, it brings the dream to life. When one comes into a relationship with the image, it allows the image its own innate intelligence, and it can speak to us what it knows.

Through this process, we develop a community of soul figures which become “intimate others,” offering the capacity for powerful relationships. We can “live into” these relationships in times of crisis, of dee

One of the best stories from the Land of Nowhere concerning the rainbow is the Norse saga of Bifröst. Bifröst is the bridge that links Asgard, the home of the gods, with Midgard, the world of humans. The gods traverse Bifröst on horseback, moving between earth and heaven. The Rainbow Bridge stretches from this world to Himinbjörg, "heaven mountain," home of Heimdallr, the watcher of the bridge. Heimdallr is a god who is equipped with a mighty horn to warn of Ragnarök, the death of the gods and t

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

 When there is wounding in our culture, there is wounding to the of the world. Many may be feeling “world weary” at this moment in our modern world, but this mood of despair has happened before, suggests mythologist . A distortion in the culture, whenever it occurs, weighs on everyone in the culture—but people have survived this before.  has been collecting myths about the renewal of the  for years,  he tells them elegantly  jubilantly with the use of a drum, a rare treat to watch or listen to.

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For Stanton Marlan, a Jungian analyst author of the iconic tome, The Black Sun: The Alchemy Art of Darkness, his interest in alchemy may be traced in some part to his childhood stone collection. As a child, Marlan used to use his stones to “write” in wonderful colors, delighted in the way each had a certain capacity to express themselves in a unique way without crumbling in the process.

The stones, which he kept in front of his grandmother’s house where he lived, became a very early “image” for M

The map of the psyche and the map of the world are drawn from the same story: The deeply rooted myth of a separate, independent, and autonomous self. The 5,000 year old story we live by is a story of fragmentation, estrangement, alienation from each other, from Nature and from the vast mystery and beauty of our own wild souls. It is a patriarchal story, too narrow, sterile, shallow for any of us to thrive. When we welcome the wild and sacred Feminine archetype into consciousness, and include wom

In his senior year of college, Minh Tran, a “first and a half” generation Vietnamese immigrant who moved to the U.S. as a child, started volunteering community organizations doing lay counseling work. When Tran began to pay attention, he realized he was ready to make the leap from working with community-based organizations to formally pursuing a counseling degree with a depth psychological orientation.

From a psychological perspective, there's always some part of the therapist that's also being w

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

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

Life in the 21^st century is challenging for all of us. We are living in a globally interdependent world, where time has accelerated, learning challenges are constant, and it is difficult to keep up with the pace of change and not feel overwhelmed. On top of that, physicists tell us that time and space are relative, which is difficult for any of us to understand when they seem so absolute. At the same time, neuroscientists are finding that our brains filter out much of what we see, organizing wha

I will never forget the day that I was presented to the concept of integrity. It was early in my analysis. For several years, I had been tipping toeing around a core issue. That morning, I woke up resolved to come clean about a nasty and unpleasant side of myself – or at least that is what I thought. As I climbed the rickety old wood stairs leading to my analyst’s 3rd floor office, the shame intensified with each step. By the time, I sat in the chair, I needed to muster all my courage to admit t

Society has short-term memory and is silent on issues of identity, says David Ragland, Ph.D., Co-founder and Co-director of The Truth Telling Project. Racism and causes of police violence are historical, are deeply rooted in our society, and are even an aspect of intergenerational trauma.  

The Truth Telling Project is a grassroots initiative that focuses on how communities can tell their stories. Ragland grew up a few miles from Ferguson, Missouri, a city that became famous in the wake of the fa

Unexpected life circumstances, synchronous events, hold seeds of growth. Opening our eyes to the possibilities that surround us daily can startle us as events and encounters take us by surprise. They soulfully speak to us. They, in a split second or over time, tell us something we need to know. And, it all happens without planning or expectation.

Once we're aware of this, we can tap into vital experiences. They nourish the soul. Answers to problems can come our way in seconds if we're open and wi

I had the following dream in my twenties:

A group of us are being held hostage by several men. We all lay on the deck at the front of a cottage in the middle of a field. The men sit inside watching us. We have to jump up and catch a transistor flying through the air when no one is looking to gain our freedom. I do this and am released. I walk toward the woods.

Dreams come for the benefit of the soul, not the mind. They speak in the soul’s symbolic language and not the mind’s literal language. This

The first thing Courtney McCubbin did when she landed in Cameroon for the Peace Corps was start a tree nursery, which then required her to build a fence around it to protect it from rodents. Once she began getting interest from farmers, she gave them seedlings to plant to help improve soil fertility and to prevent erosion on their lands. She also created a demonstration farm to show native farmers techniques they could use.

While a volunteer in the Peace Corps, McCubbin connected in profound ways

I enjoy and make use of a great many of the ideas of Carl G Jung. And I cannot confidently say whether the current Jungian ideas I have issues with are ideas Jung would have espoused, or merely the interpretation of his ideas by other people. But, I wish to raise some issues I have with views expressed by a number of people I know who identify themselves as Jungians. I do because I see how things relating to the conscious existence of humans can so easily be muddled and obscured by our unresolve

I’m just a comedian. – Jon Stewart

This is a revised and updated version of a blog I posted in early 2013. I enjoyed watching Jon Stewart preaching to the choir as much as anyone. However, I never expected any authentic, radical commentary from him, for three reasons. First, the fact that he never mentioned the Israeli/Palestinian conflict (regardless of whether Republicans or Democrats were in office) indicated the limits of his criticism of American policies that have been remarkably consistent

Beliefs are curious things;  we make them up and they form the bedrock of how we live our lives. They form the structure of our complex. 

This blog post covers the source of our beliefs and how hard it is to find them. 

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