Blogs

Today – June 19th, 2015 – is Juneteenth, the oldest known celebration commemorating the end of slavery in the United States. Indeed, today is the 150th anniversary of the date that slaves in Texas heard that the Civil War had ended and that they were free. A bit of history is in order, from www.juneteenth.com:

…it was on June 19th that the Union soldiers, led by Major General Gordon Granger, landed at Galveston, Texas with news that the war had ended and that the enslaved were now free. Note that

The MARGARET BENTLEY STORY

On June 14, 2015 on CBC Radio, the host stated: “The devil is in the details” and this phrase got my attention, so I listened on.  The content was not about the politics of earth religions – getting rid of the Old Testament, raising up Marcion’s views or finding fault with the RC Pope; the topic presented was entitled: “IN the PRESENCE of a SPOON.”

This is the gist of a true story, the pure angst and medical moral dilemma of Margaret Bentley.  Margaret is an 83 year old

"The message is unmistakable our own healing proceeds from that overlap of what we call good and evil, light and dark. It is not that  the light element alone does the healing, the place where  light and dark begin to touch is where miracles arise. This middle place is the mandorla" Robert A. Johnson

I had the pleasure of interviewing author Jean Benedict Raffa about her book “Healing the sacred Divide”. You can watch it on the Mindfunda YouTube-channel. Jean is a keynote speaker at the annual co

Austrian ethologist (animal behaviorist, different from the human ego-version), Konrad Lorenz, was of a class of empiricists whose integrity stood out in the field of observational science. His book, On Aggression, was a model in his discipline. His dedication to understanding nature equaled his love of animals, and his book was a tribute to both.

One study he recounted was an experiment by Wallace Craig on the effects of loneliness in the blonde ring dove. He separated a male in a cage to see wh

The Spark of Life  -  Spirit Reunites with the Mind and Body      - Dream from 3/10/2015

This dream is about the 'energy' that can be derived if one manages to reconnect their 'spirit' to their 'mind and body', and the obstacles encountered when one tries to discover a new path mid-stream in life. It is a very difficult road for most, but necessary to go down if one wants to have intrinsic satisfaction with their work life when disoriented during their initial career selection process.

The Dream:

Philip Wylie was a preacher's son; mainly, a fiction writer in the 40's and 50's. His keen intellect tackled the controversies of his day through the characters in his novels. He was self-educated in that he had no degree, though he'd studied physics and psychology at Cal State and Princeton, "beyond the point at which doctorates are given." He was a critical thinker in pursuit of subjective truth. 

I stumbled onto An Essay on Morals in high school. It was dedicated to C. G. Jung's psychology, th

I would like to introduce the work of my Peruvian shamanic teacher, don Oscar Miro-Quesada, and the Pachakuti Mesa Tradition, to this community. Oscar has been a teacher of world religions and a transpersonal psychotherapist in the US. But he left the academic world behind to return to the path of ancient wisdom of traditional curanderismo and Andean shamanism. 

Oscar is a seasoned traveler of the inner realms and is also a gifted healer, ceremonialist and teacher. He has had three near-death exp

At The Ravine – “You have to do it yourself” 1/26/2015 Date of Dream

 Leading Meeting – Meeting Cancelled

This dream depicts the  Jungian 'Individuation' concept which was developed by Carl Jung. 'Individuation' is a process in which an individual differentiates from others having their own personal beliefs and opinions - and a personal direction in their life essentially, becoming the true self.

I’m at the house I grew up in and there’s going to be a meeting there of some social club. Apparently,

"The world-side has been violent toward the feminine. Some speak of how we need to return the earth to the feminine, that the masculine energies are destroying the earth. But the feminine always needs the balance of the masculine, just as the masculine needs the balance of the feminine. And it is true that we are out of balance. The world fears the feminine. She is the creator and the destroyer. We have  repressed her, stoned her, bound her feet, cut off her hands. We have burned her at the stak

Depth psychology knows the psyche is a body/psyche. Jung wrote, "Psyche and matter are two different aspects of one and the same thing" (CW 8:418). What effects body effects psyche and vice versa. Life propels us forward when our energy is good. We cooperate with natural rhythms. Exercise improves our ability to be in and remain in natural rhythms of life.

Patients in depth therapy inevitably dream of exercise, diet, body self care. Once trauma/crisis has been addressed, soul turns to self care.

Part one of this essay, posted as a blog on 5/14/15, described the two main ways in which the media continually re-invigorates the myth of American innocence: fearful images (the shock) and reassuring messages (the awe). Together they contribute to a crazy-making, daily condition of simultaneous denial and distrust they we have long taken for granted.

Even before I was able to post Part Two (on 5/20), we heard of a new, but oddly familiar, news event that exemplified my thoughts. The White House

How much are each of us unconsciously conditioned by the culture we live in, and how profoundly does it affect us? Sometimes our thoughts, beliefs, values, and behaviors stemming from our individual cultures are so pervasive and embedded that we can't perceive them ourselves...like the old adage about describing water to a fish. 

Researchers who go into other cultures to study them often go in with their own lens to try and find data...and of course, the data they find is typical of the researche

Shock and Awe: Re-invigorating the Myth of American Innocence

Part One

“Shock and awe” is a military doctrine that teaches how to quickly master events on the ground, to “…seize control of the environment and paralyze or so overload an adversary’s perceptions and understanding of events that the enemy would be incapable of resistance…” We first heard the phrase in March 2003, when the U.S. struck Iraq from the air with such overwhelming force that it easily invaded and defeated the Iraqi army (the

The Tree of Life is the mystical path known as the Hebrew Kabbalah. It is so ancient that its origins are not known. It came out of hiding in the middle ages, examined throughout the Renaissance, seemed to disappear from western view and re-emerged at the begiining of the 20th Century.

C.G. Jung integrated its knowledge and wisdom into his work throughout his life. In my upcoming webinar series/interactive class via Depth Psychology Alliance, I'll be using a lens will incorporate a feminine view

Part One

Question: What’s the difference between ignorance and apathy?

Answer: I don’t know, and I don’t care!

We need to talk, and we need to listen to the voice of The Other. One of the most fundamental aspects of privilege – the privilege to ignore, the privilege to remain innocent in our minds – still retains its durability among far too many of us. We need to talk about how America established that privilege – in law – from the very beginning, indeed, from before the beginning. In other words,

In Christianity, the mystery of coming to consciousness is represented as the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the garden. Jung described the serpent as a symbol of nature's transformation in a twilight half-human which gradually came into opposition to itself. It didn't happen suddenly.

Myths contain an ambiguous wealth of unconscious information which can't be explained discursively. The psyche is a diffuse organ of perception whose wider perspective is supplemented by the focus and detail of con

The topic of my dissertation at Pacifica was on the interweaving of psychological, spiritual, and biological migration.  The work began using a medieval Sufi text on birds, but expanded to include among others, a “bird-like” migrant. I am working on a paper about this topic, and would like to share some of the ideas here.

Numerous authors write about the environmental hazards contributing to the decline of the monarch butterfly.  One of the issues for this species is that it migrates across inter

I have a group of three-year old chickens. This week I’ve introduced some new ones. I’ve done everything I can to ease their entry, including keeping them segregated but visible before letting them out into the coop. Still, the older hens are attacking and traumatizing the younger ones.

 Anyone who has chickens knows this ancient story. The older hens are re-establishing the “pecking order” by “hen-pecking” the new ones. It’s not that they are inherently aggressive. They’re confused because I’ve