Blogs

In my first blog, I related the events surrounding a transformative dream I had which evoked a powerful feeling tone, its effect rippling out through my life. A series of events the previous day, coupled with reading an S.T. Coleridge poem upon cracking open the first Jung volume I had yet to read, seemingly led to my experience of this dream, replete with a mysterious archetypal projection.

I amplified the image, researched the content to the extent that I was able, but only much later did I mak

"I really need practical changes from my therapy," a new patient asserted. I affirmed that practical changes within depth therapy are inevitable. "We face what's dark, we face what's bad, then come to terms with what's healing and good. Practical change happens."

For the next three years he faced trauma demons from the past. He'd been badly abused as a child. The fact was that he'd also replicated this abuse in present day life. All this needed to be dealt with, worked through. Changes in relatio

The Heart Arrow Quest is a time and place for men to remember who they are on a deeper level: as a man, as a human, as a seed of this earth, here to flourish in our own unique manner for this lifetime, for our people, and for the many lands entrusted to us.

It is a time for reconciling the balance of my life: do I have enough of my soul, enough spirit, enough of me in my life to carry me forward, to carry me home?

It is a place for standing in our being and allowing all the branches, all the strea

Jung's general ideas on therapy seem especially appropriate today in light of so many forms being available. Whether or not many are based on hit-or-miss assumption is unclear, as what is presented as deduction is often selectively pre-arranged to reiterate the premise. Aristotle introduced the idea of a "petitio principii" in 350 B. C.; but philosophical sophistries aside, there are other factors to be considered. Jung wrote in The Practice of Psychotherapy:

"Each of them rests on special psycho

“C. G. Jung’s Vision of Spiritual Democracy”

A Talk for the Fourth Joint Conference of the IAAP & IAJS, “Psyche, Spirit, and Science: Negotiating Contemporary Social and Cultural Concerns,” Yale University, July 2015

Paper Synopsis:

            Spiritual Democracy is a religious attitude that respects the dignity of all religions, and views all peoples, races, genders and sexual orientations as equals across the entire globe. This unifying vision was first proposed by Walt Whitman and Herman Melvil

C.G. Jung was a strong proponent of balancing rational thought with non-cerebral intelligence, insisting that consciousness inherently resides in the body and in the natural world around us. In fact, he was quite taken by Austrian Nobel prize-winning ethologist Karl von Frisch’s notion of how bees communicated navigational information to their sister bees so that they could forage the best pollen around the hive. Frisch’s research suggested the “waggle dance” performed by bees was both intellige

Therapy through the Ether

I have spent all day alone in my office

Seeing people

The ping of the computer announces that the connection is made

Video

Microphone

All check out

The image appears, sometimes clear and sharp

Sometimes distorted.

Carried by whatever gods rule this realm,

The temenos is activated.

In ancient times,

The supplicant would prepare in a stone room by a water source

Filled with serpents

First, they wash and fast

Then sleep and wait for the dream to speak with the voice of the gods

The hea

C.G. Jung wrote, "..the world is empty only to him who does not know how to direct his libido toward things and people and to render them alive and beautiful." (CW vol. 5 253). The capacity to feel happiness is thus a cultivated ability. Shamanic psychology teaches that illness and well being are choices. We direct energy into life and beauty and happiness becomes possible.

Of course, this depends on clearing out emotional debris. We can't put on a happy face and suddenly experience authentic joy

I often refer to the question of privilege in the pages, so I thought it would be helpful to spell it out. Of all that I have written, this is the one essay I would encourage you to print out and discuss with your friends.

Privilege is utterly invisible to most whites and perfectly, constantly, daily, painfully obvious to almost all minorities. It provides whites with a place in the social hierarchy, a belief in upward mobility and a sense of identity – they can know who they are because they are

Culture has changed in the last fifty years as in no comparable period in history. The religious perspective of the last century, indeed centuries, is quickly losing relevance for an increasingly material viewpoint. Media technology now serves and promotes a commercial thing-orientation as calculated and contrived as it is self-serving -- and self-alienating.

Beneath the changing viewpoints lies a major shift in cultural values (in case you haven't noticed). The social networking craze is only on

We just got a gracious and insight-full review of "Images of Soul: Reimagining Astrology" on the Astrology News Service website (lots of good stuff there) http://astrologynewsservice.com/book-reviews/book-review-images-of-soul-reimagining-astrology/

It's a welcome augury on the day of this 7th Uranus-Pluto square.

Stilling mind conjures creative psychic images. Archetypal presences come our way once mind becomes calm, receptive. They speak to us of what furthers growth, prohibits stagnation. They are energies that in old religious language were referred to as angels.

Carl Jung on “Meditation in Alchemy" noted, " ..But the alchemists really try to establish an objective relation to a "second" in their meditation, and this "second" has been regarded since olden times as the so-called "paredros", a spiritual 

I am honored to have been invited to post a guest blog on the Pacifica Graduate Institute Alumni Association. It's about the Alliance and it just went up! Check it out if you have a moment:

Greater than the Sum of Its Parts: Depth Psychology and the Honeybee Hive

One glorious late spring day on Pacifica’s Ladera Campus I witnessed a humming, writhing, vibrant swarm of honeybees on a bougainvillea bush. It stopped me in my tracks, entrancing me with the sheer number and proximity of bees buzzing ar

C.G. Jung was a strong proponent of balancing rational thought with non-cerebral intelligence, insisting that consciousness inherently resides in the body and in the natural world around us. In fact, he was quite taken by Austrian Nobel prize-winning ethologist Karl von Frisch’s notion of how bees communicated navigational information to their sister bees so that they could forage the best pollen around the hive. Frisch’s research suggested the “waggle dance” performed by bees was both intellige

If you’re submitting budget proposals for a law enforcement agency…you’re not going to submit the proposal that “We won the war on terror and everything’s great,” because…your budget’s gonna be cut in half. You know, it’s my opposite of Jesse Jackson’s ‘Keep Hope Alive’—it’s ‘Keep Fear Alive.’ – former FBI assistant director Thomas Fuentes

In the era of constant electronic media, Ronald Reagan mastered a new technique, the intermittent reinforcement of denial and fear. He calmly reassured whites

With today's blog post, I'm going to be wrapping up my series on Urban Terrapsychology and Creative Placemaking for the foreseeable future. 

In my last post I discussed how the people of the Upper Mississippi Valley became aware that the 1854 Grand Excursion went awry in some ways that were evident at that time, but in other ways that weren't evident until our own time.  The problem recognized in 1854 was Saint Paul's failure to exhibit appropriate hospitality to visitors.  The problems evident b

Keep watching the Sky. Stay vigilant against another attack. – The War of the Worlds, 1953

Nineteenth century scholars saw hysteria in accounts of Dionysian cults rather than recognizing the god behind hysterical behavior.

In the 1930s, Life Magazine published articles such as “The Trojan Horse Policy of Communism in America” and “If the Communists Seized America.”

Hollywood helped demonize communists with Ninotchka, Comrade X and Red Salute; this continued into the Cold War (The Iron Curtain, The

By the year 2050, it was beginning to dawn on humanity that it had a deeper working knowledge of outer space than its own inner nature. The uncertainty attending the shift in perspective produced strange effects within a generation. A crippling stasis gripped cultures world-wide. Medication therapies no longer allayed symptoms which had steadily ballooned over a century.

Irrational obsessions and compulsive urges of the weirdest subjective varieties were pandemic, threatening the very fabric of h

This is the third post in my on-going series about Archetypal Dreamwork and the 12 steps...

Archetypal Dreamwork and the 12 Steps, The Recovery Chronicles #02