Blogs

Part 1 – Framing

I want to tell you about a tune and how it has evolved. Most American men above the age of fifty who grew up watching John Wayne movies are familiar with this melody without knowing its name, let alone its history. Here it is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZ5nDTQiTfU.

Recognize it? The tune is called “Garryowen,” and it has been featured as a military marching song in several movies, including The Fighting 69th, They Died with their Boots On, Fort Apache, She Wore a Yellow Ribb

Burrrrrr!!!!! (Okay,  I know, some of you are much colder! But we Mediterranean climate people aren't used to frost!)

Besides being a Jungian analyst, I am also a biodynamic farmer. This blog is from both perspectives.

When you need gloves to walk the goats in the morning, and when the grass sparkles at sunrise like stars, you seriously consider spraying Valerian on tender young plants, if you didn't the evening before! (What is that expression about the barn door?)

Rudolf Steiner claimed Valeria

The link below leads to an article published in the 2013 IASI Yearbook (International Association of Structural Integrators). It comes out of an ongoing attempt to understand how belief systems and complexes shape the body; and it is based on the author's experience in approaching psyche from the body as a DFA (Duggan/French Approach) practitioner to Somatic Pattern Recognition

Working with Beliefs Reflected in Liquid Crystal

I have received requests from people who would like to participate in a

Detail of Gaia, Ceramic Piece by Genevieve Haven

Carl Jung defines the benedicta viriditas, "blessed greenness," as

Can't remember when I wrote this poem based on a dream. But ran across it today in my piles. Hope you enjoy. 

Young Dream

Doctor Jung comes to
visit me in a dream.

he looks younger. Not like
Felix Unger or some
bungler.

but more like Vic Morrow
or my Uncle Ray.

his 1950's crew-cut reminds
me of Russian MiGs.

black and white photos,
iron curtain.

I take the time to visit with him.
because he may not be
around much
longer.

I notice he looks very young
for a man born in

The divine feminine entrances me. The term, the concept, the energy sends me into a trance state of altered perception, consciousness, insight. I know when it happens because there's a quality of leaving behind disconnected ways of thinking and being. Rather than, logic, control, dominance being in charge, I'm more open to intuition, flow, interconnections. This is the living energy of the divine feminine.

The divine feminine shows up in dreams and in cultural events. December is the month that c

Some topics are so controversial we cannot discuss them. Jane Davenport Platko’s In the Tracks of the Unseen: Memoirs of a Jungian Analyst brings one of those topics into full view: when the doctor and patient fall in love.

While we psychoanalysts and psychotherapists have thorough discussions as to why these kinds of relationships are problematic, we seldom have open discussions about what happens when they seem to work. Those who have entered such relationships rightfully fear judgement.

I will

View this 3-minute clip of the late, great John O'Donohue speaking on the therapists's task, then tell me your thoughts, please.

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“Somehow the way that you would behold them might enable them to retrieve the lost kindness in their own eyes, so that they might learn to behold themselves truly... The other thing is: you have to bloody well live a life in order t

INTRODUCTION

We are presently  conducting research on certain aspects of Religion and Health. These aspects will hopefully be better defined as the research proceeds further. It has been suggested that we gather as much materials as possible on Psychosis and Mysticism, preferably by experts in the field, not people who write stuff based on their beliefs, on religious beliefs (which are often not founded or proved) or on their subjective experience. It has also been suggested that we also take int

from my blog at marginalaccretion.com:

As I write this, it’s Black Friday, which to my mind is the highest ritual of consumer religion, attracting untold numbers of devotees of all races, classes, faiths and belief systems. Symbolically, Black Friday is the reigning idol of consumer religion. Already I have read reports about crowds of people vying for deals — people shot and stabbed, arrests made, fights and scuffles (there were even fist fights over towels at Walmart) — all triggered by enginee

Twenty four years ago this fall, my candidate group began our training to become Jungian analysts. We were the last group to meet with Jo and Jane Wheelwright, some of the first generation analysts from our Institute, meaning that they were analyzed by Jung. They were also two of the founding members and must have been in their early nineties at the time of the meeting.

I remember the early October seminar well. We were four women very excited to begin our candidacy at a time the Institute was

Sing sorrow, sorrow, but good win out in the end. – Aeschylus

As a mythologist (and sharing our common curiosity about these things), I felt responsible to watch several of the recent (November 2013) documentaries on the Kennedy’s and read much of the journalism on the subject that was published this month. On TV, pundits lined up to calmly and rationally discuss the major issues and then conclude, predictably, that we should all trust the dominant narratives of John F. Kennedy’s life, of his dea

http://madnessatthegates.wordpress.com/2013/11/23/barrys-blog-75-john-f-kennedy-and-americas-obsession-with-innocence-part-three/

Wow! I never realized that Kennedy and Vietnam was to your generation what Princess Diana and 9/11 is to ours. – A thirty-something

The Dying God (1)

He was known in Babylon as Tammuz, in Egypt as Osiris and Serapis, in Asia Minor as Attis, in Persia as Mythra, in Italy as Bacchus, in Syria as Adonis, as Fufluns among the Etruscans, as Dionysus in Greece and as Jesus whe

Don preparing to carry Taos drum up a cliff in a bedspreadd.

Don Sandner was a training analyst in our Institute for years. He also worked with a Navaho medicine man for 16 summers, resulting in his book Navaho Symbols of Healing (Hartcourt Brace, 1979; Healing Arts Press, 1991). He initiated a conference that met over several years studying the overlap of analytical psychology and shamanism, documented in a collection of papers that he co-edited with Steven H. Wong, The Sacred Heritage: The Inf

I’d like to say that suffering has been on my mind lately, but I know better.  Suffering is always on my mind, I’m Jewish.  Inexorably drawn to it.  As a pattern analyst, I sit with people as they connect with and make meaning of pain and suffering, while at the same time, trying to interrupt the repetition that will keep them suffering the same fate.  I don’t deny their suffering or try to make it better, I cede to suffering its rightful place in the human condition.

I know from my studies that

Please click on the link:

A Brief Reflection on Climate Change

Existentialism and Archetypal Astrology...a Path to the Numinous

Dear members, 

Please share with me a favourite piece of poetry or prose that you feel describes the process of individuation.

Recently I discovered this poem and felt an instant YES!

Warmly,

Esther 

I Am Like A Rose by DH Lawrence

I am myself at last; now I achieve
My very self, I, with the wonder mellow,
Full of fine warmth, I issue forth in clear
And single me, perfected from my fellow.

Here I am all myself. No rose-bush heaving
Its limpid sap to culmination has brought
Itself more sheer and naked out of