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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

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Blessed Greenness

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 Detail of Gaia, Ceramic Piece by Genevieve Haven


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


…the state of someone who, in his wanderings among the mazes of his psychic transformation, comes upon a secret happiness which reconciles him to his apparent loneliness. In communing with himself he finds not deadly boredom and melancholy but an inner partner, more than that, a relationship that seems like the happiness of a secret love, or like a hidden springtime, when the gree
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Young Dream

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 1880's.

I think it's because of his inquirin
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Awakening the Divine Feminine!

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

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Review: Platko's In the Tracks of the Unseen

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

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The Therapist's Task by John O'Donohue

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

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Health Research Project

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

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How to be a Good Consumer

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

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The Coming of Winter

 


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Most writers of memoir need not expect the chill and silence that has followed in the wake of my publication of In
the Tracks of the Unseen; Memoirs of a Jungian Psychoanalyst
. My story touches upon the history of a psychoanalytic community, and while mine is not a narrative about the New England Society of Jungian Analysts, it references, in part, my experiences within it. Over a period of thirty-some years this institution and ever-changing collection of analysts have played a major role in m

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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

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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

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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

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It's All Good, But Some Good is Gooder

     There is a popular trend in the modern new age movement that is inclined to label some things as "spiritual", implying of course that other things are not "spiritual". Many seem to think that the word "spiritual" ought to be understood--believing that things like meditation, yoga, Depak Chopra and an assortment of trendy new age books, gurus and ancient secrets are "spiritual". I haven't really heard anyone clearly define what is not spiritual, but the general unspoken consensus seems to be
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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

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Suffering, Again!

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

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

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This is an excerpt from my new, but yet unpublished book, called "Lifting the Veil; Becoming Your Own Best Astrologer." Although some of the book deals with the grammar of learning how to do this, there's also a section on mid-life passages and the journeys we take from our childhood religious views to new ways of seeing....and in my case it was from Catholicism, to Existentialism, to archetypal astrology. If you are interested in t
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I Am Like A Rose

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

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Honoring the Ancestors: Part One

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Honoring the Thinning Veil, Glastonbury, 2010


Each year the San Francisco Jung Institute celebrates Ancestors’ Day around the time of the Day of the Dead. Analysts, candidates, and interns gather and remember those in our Institute community who have passed the threshold into the Beyond.

This last Sunday we especially honored Donald Sandner, an analyst who passed suddenly on Easter Sunday 1997. In part two, to be posted later this week, I will talk more about Don.

We began the day by watching

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I shouted out, “Who killed the Kennedys?” When after all it was you and me.  – Mick Jagger

Myth Making

1 – Inventing Camelot

The Kennedy clan began to manipulate the media images of JFK and his immediate family long before his election and has continued to do so long after his death. Shortly after the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962, JFK, fully aware of both the political moment and the mythic implications, told a historian, “If anyone’s going to kill me, it should happen now.”

Then came Camelo

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