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(This is a blog post I wrote for the Jung Society of Utah, and can be found in its entirety here.)

“When animus and anima meet, the animus draws his sword of power and the anima ejects her poison of illusion and seduction. The outcome need not always be negative, since the two are equally likely to fall in love (a special instance of love at first sight).” - C.G. Jung

Carl Jung used the term anima to describe “the inner figure of a woman held by a man,” and animus to describe “the figure of a man

When I first began writing about “keys for the future of dreams,” I had reached four key words when I had a dream that told me I had to add afifth word. Furthermore, the dream insisted, it had to be a fifth “C-word.”

Having learned that there is more wisdom in obeying the orders of dreams than in refusing them, I consulted the I Ching “dream gourd” that has become part of my daily practice.

The dream-gourd answered my query with Hexagram 3 (Zhun, tr. “beginning”). From the etymological pictograph,

Epic

I inclined 

To lose my faith in Ballyrush and Gortin

Til Homer’s ghost came whispering to my mind,

He said: I made the Iliad from such

A local row. Gods make their own importance.

-Patrick Kavanagh

Outlander season 2 is complete, and boy has it been a season for the ages. As this new droughtlander begins, I’m left feeling and thinking all the things. Thoughts are swirling like a whirlpool in my mind, buzzing like the stones at Craigh na Dun, making it nearly impossible to compose an articulate rev

We experience times of breakdown and transformation. We need both. We can't stay the same and change. Breakdown takes down what needs to be taken down so that, potentially, what is really there and new and more meaningful can flourish.

Transformation, as psychologist Michael Eigen notes, gets its power from " . . . the moments of breakdown that went into them." Dreams say everything is falling apart. We panic. But, hold on, if we step back and gain insight into what's happening in our life, there

“The body is merely the visibility of the soul, the psyche; and the soul is the
psychological experience of the body” —C.G. Jung

“Yoga is most often understood as the union of the individual with the
transcendental self, with what Jung terms the Self.” —Judith Mills

In recent years, the practice of yoga has made headlines in the mainstream media as parents in U.S. school districts challenged its inclusion in the curriculum at public schools, insisting it amounts to religious indoctrination and t

As an activist working with NGOs to stop shark finning in Central America years ago, Dr. Lori Pye was once a target of a malicious act intended to intimidate her.

The experience plunged her into a sort of psychological crisis. Finding herself face to face with a stark and undeniable image of ecological devastation, she had an epiphany: our own psychological destruction is being expressed in destruction of the ecological world.

The experience profoundly renewed Dr. Pye’s focus on ecopsychology. At

The alternative to cultural appropriation is cultural appreciation: learning about another culture with respect and courtesy. Some prefer the term “cultural exchange.” It is appreciating a certain culture enough to take time to learn about it, interact (or study with) with members of its community, and receive a certain blessing to carry its wisdom forward. The operative word here is permission.

Universalist-Unitarians, who proudly but sensitively use many cultural forms, offer us a poem (appropr

Gays in Search of Meaning

Many gay people are acknowledging a need for a more meaningful way of living to avoid a motionless and purposeless existence. Lack of depth and meaning has caused many gay people to experience feelings of boredom and emptiness. Such feelings have forced many to look for something outside of themselves in order to feel content. Some indulge in drug use, excessive drinking, or brief romantic affairs, while others might engage in excessive shopping, traveling, or overeating

When the heart weeps for what it has lost, the spirit laughs for what it has found. — West Africa

Over the years I have written extensively about grief: cross-cultural grieving traditions, the lack of such rituals in American life, the consequences of our inability to grieve and the absolute necessity of restoring  an apprenticeship with sorrow. I have addressed this critical subject in previous blogs here, here and here.

For many years I led grief rituals at men’s conferences, and for twenty year

When Michael Meade was thirteen, his aunt, seemingly by accident, bought him a book of mythology for his birthday. Though he felt profoundly aligned with the book and stayed up all night reading it, it would take another 20 years before it became evident it was his path in life, guiding him to his current calling as a renowned storyteller, author, and scholar in mythology and depth psychology.

 “The soul’s way of being is unique to each person,” Meade wrote in his acclaimed book, Why The World Do

By Carol S. Pearson

Hillary Clinton has major archetypal advantages and faces equally major challenges, similar to ones we all confront in figuring out how to link our strengths with the needs of a time and place. I’m sharing this analysis of her archetypes as a model for what any of us can do to be effective in the environments we must deal with.

Strengths: Hillary’s Ruler[1] archetype strengths are important to the role of a President: her knowledge of the issues, her public policy savvy, her

There's something to our life. We're meant for something, to live in one way and not another. We have a path to follow, a livelihood to make, love to find and live out. As we do so, we discover and fulfill our destiny.

CG Jung wrote, "It is only after illness that I understood how important it is to affirm one's destiny . . . Nothing is disturbed - neither inwardly nor outwardly - for one's own continuity has withstood the current of life and of time. But that can come to pass only when one does

Islam and Peace

"Even though you are of the earth in form, still, you are the fine
spiritual thread made of the very substance of Certainty.

You are the trusted guardian of the treasury of the Light of God.
Come, at last, to the Source of the source of your own self!

Know that when you have bound yourself to selflessness, you will
escape from attachment to self-ness [ego].

And then you will leap away from the bonds of a thousand traps.
Come, at last, to the Source of the source of your own

I am drawn to a dream from years back. It was a word dream, a message coming straight off the hotline of the unconscious mind. It said, "If you stop, you drop." Immediately I took this to heart. There's no going back from healing, growing and changing. 

If we try and stop our transformation process, we deteriorate. We notice this via symptoms. We become neurotic, unhappy, fretting about this or that. We're in an awful predicament of our choosing.

To stop up consciousness requires work. We need to

Featured Image: Full Moon Wind

It is said that long ago, human lives were full of magic. We could perceive it all around us. It was in everything we saw. It inspired our songs and our legends. The land around us was alive and every part of it contained the palpable legends and living history of that place. Magic sparkled forth from the people themselves: The rippling beauty of a baby's first laugh; the miracle of new life through birth; the otherworldly wisdom sought from revered elders. Almost l

Read Part One of this Report here

Dr. Vandana Shiva, author and activist, has courageously spent the last decade working on soil solutions to climate change, steadfast in her belief that if governments can’t make the shift, people can.

In her recent talk at Pacifica’s “Climates of Change and a Therapy of Ideas” conference, she focused on the dangers of genetically modified crops and the big business that seeks to capitalize on it. Monopoly rights on seeds and plants are increasingly being imposed

I wrote the first three parts of this essay (here, here and here) almost a year ago, and now I perceive an aspect of this theme I couldn’t have seen prior to the presidential primary season. Nicholas Lemann writes:

…the nation has become Southernized just as much as the South has become nationalized. Political conservatism, the traditional creed of the white South, went from being presumed dead in 1964 to being a powerful force in national politics. During the p

"A Game of Chess"

the years between the wars

mae culpa

through my fault

through my fault

through my most grievous fault

 hmmm...

Really... Are you Positive?

there are a lot of very smart people telling

me that the environment of my being is Important...

Heroes have passed to the spirit realm.

Shed a tear...

Our biological time is the same interval. 

He left us as a revered elder.

A nightmare on the ice, a gentleman off the ice.

An aspect of the business of Professional Hockey...

A Human Being with a Morality Eq

Topics

      The Problem with Psychiatry (A Rant)

      The Assimilation / Accommodation Model of Scientific Epistemology

      A Turning Test

Topic: The Problem with Psychiatry

My problem with psychiatry as a medical discipline concerns human primate interaction.

A human being to human being interaction.

What makes a being human is not an arm or a leg or the brain. This is not to deny that the human nervous system is the vehicle for Being in the instant of present. But that instant - (for discussion p