Blogs

OBAMA’S FOREIGN POLICY

A reader posits: If presidents are so completely bound, can we really blame them for being complicit? Isn’t voicing soul and decency at least superior to abandoning it altogether? Or, as you say, is it better we face the monster unmasked, as we are doing now? These are precisely the inquiries that lead to the kind of soul work – for ourselves and our world – that I’m trying to provoke. And of course, struggling with them is more important than answering them.

Just as with hi

OBAMA’S ECONOMIC POLICIES

The first thing to understand about Obama is that he was Wall Street’s man from the beginning. He was, after all, the first candidate to turn down public campaign financing, because he didn’t need it. As I mentioned earlier, Goldman Sachs had been his largest campaign contributor in 2008, despite his criticism of “the greed and irresponsibility of Wall Street”. He also took huge donations from the defense industry as well as the pharmaceutical industry, which reversed ye

Lisa Schouw has had a long career in the arts, in singing, songwriting, theater, and as a teacher of those arts. She began her formal study as a depth psychotherapist later in life when she was nearly 50, after discovering Pacifica and pursuing her Master’s degree in the Engaged Humanities and the Creative Life Program there.

While the early part of her life was very creative as she moved back and forth between dance, music, and theater, Schouw had had a longstanding interest in psychology, and r

Domestic Policies, Continued:

5 – The Environment

Obama quoted environmental writers such as Michael Pollan and visibly countered the lunatic Republican denial of global warming.  But soon it was clear that he was subtly supporting much of the agenda of the oil and petrochemical industries. In 2010 the administration began an ambitious antitrust initiative against Big Food but soon tabled the motion. “Whenever the Obamas seriously poked at Big Food,” writes Pollan, “they were quickly outlobbied an

OBAMA’S DOMESTIC POLICIES

The lesser evil always paves the way for the greater evil. – Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor

 1 – Immigration:  

Bill Clinton began the hysteria back in 1996, when he greatly expanded the number of crimes that could lead to forced removal from the US. By 2008, immigrant bashing had become an easy way for any president to deflect attention from more basic economic issues.

Obama declared himself the “champion in chief” of immigration law reform. However, under his watch, immigration

In the years since my book was published I’ve written many blogs about Barack Obama. How could I not? He was anointed King for a while in this version of our national myth. In each essay I attempted to temper my expectations as well as my growing anger and grief, with a broader, mythological perspective and more questions than answers. What story are we in? What story calls to us? I invite interested readers to review them:

Blog # 9: The Presidential Dilemma

Blog # 17: The Face of the Empire

Blog #

Sometimes I’m shocked to wake up and realize that it’s 2017 there’s still so much conflict and suffering in our world. We need more and better ways to provide aid, education, and support for developing countries and for those individuals who are struggling due to poverty, hunger, lack of education, poor access to clean water, disease, and violence, among many other challenges.

On March 1, 1961, President John F. Kennedy took a giant step in the right direction when he created the Peace Corps[1],

Sometimes I wonder whether the world is being run by smart people who are putting us on, or by imbeciles who really mean it. – Mark Twain

I’ve listed four perspectives from which we grade Obama, beginning with the most idealistic (that is, our most idealistic – and innocent – projections) and moving toward what some might call more cynical, or realistic. Let’s continue.

Myth # 5 – No intentions whatsoever, except to survive. In this story, Obama was simply the latest in a very long line of narciss

The King: One of his primary mythic roles is to inspire the inhabitants of the realm to greatness, to inhabit and embody their higher selves. And, after the madness and degradation of the Bush years, that’s exactly how so many imagined Obama in 2008. Many saw his potential to to organize a lasting grassroots movement. The numbers were certainly there, writes Micah Sifry:

His political machine…amassed more than 800,000 registered users on My.BarackObama…(which) gave supporters the ability—unthinka

We can and should denounce Donald Trump. But until we address the systemic causes that gave rise to him, we are wasting much of our energy. As Glenn Greenwald writes: “Focusing on and attempting to counter the fundamental flaws of the Democratic Party is not a distraction…it is a central priority, a prerequisite for any kind of success.”  We have Trump now not despite Obama, but because of Obama.

This essay expands upon a blog series I wrote in March 2016, before anyone took Trump seriously. Now,

The hit television series, Cheers, was a staple for many of us in the 1980s and early 90s. Sitting down in the front of the TV to catch a good laugh was sometimes the highlight of a busy week. Little did I know that decades later, I’d be having a conversation—about depth psychology—with on one of the award-winning writers of the series who is pursuing a degree in the Engaged Humanities and the Creative Life Program at Pacifica Graduate Institute. Cheri Steinkellner has an impressive number of aw

In this latest interview from Depth Alliance founder, Bonnie Bright, PhD, Dr. Jean Houston makes a passionate call for us to each "elect ourselves" and to "become party to all our parts." There couldn't be a more compelling and poignant call at this critical time in our world....

Jean Houston is almost legendary in popular culture for her passionate engagement, poetic rhetoric, and her poignant appeal for transformation and belief in what she calls “the possible human,” also the title of one he

On Inauguration Day in the US, I was interviewed on the Women in Depth podcast.   It was deeply symbolic for me, because intense feminine energies that have been underground for centuries have been showing up in full force in Doorway sessions these past few months. There's a whole other realm that urgently wishes to be known by us. 

You can listen or download the podcast here: 

http://lourdesviado.com/29-the-power-of-metaphor-to-unlock-creativity-and-inspire-breakthroughs-with-kim-hermanson-phd/

IN

William James in The will to believe and other essays in popular philosophy asserted, "our science is a drop, our ignorance a sea" (1897, p.54). What we do not know, our ignorance, extends into science and everyday life. Relationships, especially, hold witness to what we know and what we do not know. Truth is reflected in the quality of our relating, an imminent and mystic fact.

Through decades of dream tending the symbol of the sea comes to me when I'm most in need. The quality of the sea reflec

Trees live in a world of change, while remaining rooted in the deep darkness. They stand bare in the cold blustery winter storms. Their leaves and buds sprout with the onset of spring rains. The sun and heat of summer entices the flowers to bloom and the fruit to ripen.  As the days get cooler and the winds blow, the leaves and fruit drop from the branches and then winter returns. Once again, the tree stands bare and exposed to the elements.

The life of the tree is similar to ours.

We can go throu

Even before getting her Master’s degree in Counseling psychology at Pacifica, Adriana Attento was working in the field of psychology. During that same period, she was also doing a lot of writing—meeting with a friend to free write next to the ocean every morning for an hour—and she was also meditating as a regular spiritual practice. Somehow, she now believes, the combination of these two practices opened something up for her, creating a “flow, and abundance of images that images that felt very

If we require an answer to a problem, we need to go no further than our dreams. They speak to us; they spill the beans about what the concern is really about and what we need to consider or do about it. I was at a psychoanalytic conference in which dreams were discussed in highly technical and empirical ways. Raising my hand I offered, "Let's cut to the quick here. Dreams spill the beans. They tell us what's going on in situations, in relationships, and what people are about as opposed to what t

Dreams take us to a certain and more intense point of consciousness where higher energies filter in. William James wrote, "The whole drift of my education goes to persuade me that the world of our present consciousness is only one out of many worlds of consciousness that exist, and that whose other worlds must contain experiences that have meaning for life also, and that although in the main their experiences and those of this world keep discrete, yet the two become continuous at certain points

Some of the best memoirs you can read are those that are reflective, those which are informed by dreams, myth, and synchronicities, maintains Maureen Murdock, a Jungian-oriented psychotherapist and the author of multiple memoirs and books about memoirs. In other words, there’s a depth psychological perspective that can facilitate, enhance, and deepen the telling of one’s story in a profound way.

Murdock is co-leading a 9-month certificate program on writing memoir at Pacifica Graduate Institute s