New York Times Sunday Dialogue article (May 26, 2013) about medication and psychotherapy struck a few soul chords. Medication works for as long as its taken. There is no doubt that it can prove necessary and helpful when treating severe and chronic mental pain. However, drug cocktails don't fix soul misery and the need for meaning and wholeness. Seasoned therapists know when to use drugs, when to refrain, and about the need to guide the sufferer along deeper and darker paths of soul to find aut
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Shame and bad religion ring about as hard in the human ear as a bell clanging way too up close that finally stops. Shame gets the bell of bad religion going. Without the human capacity for shame, the inner sense of being defective, then bad religion would have no hold on the human psyche.
For over thirty years I've been helping people take the deep plunge into the unconscious mind so as to find freedom from the dark side of religion. It doesn't always work. Sometimes people want quick fixes, a
In her dream a woman is in a car hurtling down a slope with a drop-off into the water. This is not a good place to be. The dream shows imminent danger to the woman (and presumably to her car). If this situation were happening in real life—we would likely be panicking and afraid for our life. Waking up from such a dream causes us to ask: where in my life am I so out of control and what danger am I hurtling towards?
When a dream brings us such an urgent image, we are wise to sit up and pay att
According to a quote I've come across, Jung felt the problem with his (rich) female clients was that they were cut off from their biology, and therefore he advised them to 'go to the country and raise chickens, children and carrots.'
I'm keen to hear what Alliance members think of this!
At first glance the quote appears to set the feminist movement back several hundred years *but* to my mind there is also deep wisdom in it - who doesn't first and foremost need to feel connected to the earth, to f
“To the soul, the most minute details and the most ordinary activities, carried out with mindfulness and art, have an effect far beyond their apparent insignificance.”
—Thomas Moore, Care of the Soul: Guide for Cultivating Depth
and Sacredness in Everyday Life
Recently I had the chance to tune into a free teleseminar with author, religious scholar, professor and lecturer Thomas Moore of the book, Care of the Soul, fame. The teleseminar focused on how to make a masterpiece of your life. According t
A month after the Boston tragedy, now that the media have moved on to other distractions, it’s time to reconsider this difficult and painful theme. The national security state has, for a very long time, taken advantage of – or actively created – violent conditions in order to re-activate our American paranoia about the evil “Other.” Enough circumstantial evidence has accu
On this Mother's Day 2013 I thought up a little post about mother's, will, and the invisible realm. In the womb of the mother life is nourished. In the womb of mother, womb of life, the realm invisible to the eye, life starts, is nourished, and one day departs into the visible world. Psychic potential depends on will. Will takes us to the door of potential, states William James, father of American depth psychology, but forces from the invisible realm are what usher us in. No amount of strain, pu
Show me a hero and I will write you a tragedy. – F. Scott Fitzgerald
Americans have always dreamed big dreams. Perhaps, having invented the phrase “American Dream,” we may well dream bigger dreams than other people. However, when our expectations are unfulfilled, we also fall much farther than others. Gaps between aspiration and reality – the lost dream – are
In this written interview, Depth Insights host Bonnie Bright interviews Kayleen Asbo, cultural historian, musician, writer, and teacher on the topic of “The Myths of Mary Magdalene,” also the title of her upcoming webinar series. The first of that series, “The Many Faces of Mary Magdalene” is free to the public (must register to join) and takes place May 1, 2013, at 7pm PT (More details at at www.kayleenasbo.com and www.mythsofmarymagdalene.com)
BB: How did you get interested in Mary Magadelene,
I had a series of dreams last night that I found remarkable, both for their content and the potential implications of their "meaning." The area of question that is prompted is the mapping of content to (1)objective world, (2)subjective world and (3)interior brain process.
(Dream Fragment #1) "I look up outside with a companion to notice two very large trees swaying intensely in the wind, leaning over precariously, particularly aggravated by some overly large kids toys strewn in the branc
When psychological symptoms hit hard, like a Mac truck running straight into the center of your gut, then we can be sure that the self is in trouble. The New York Times article, The Problem With How We Treat Bipolar Disorder (http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/28/magazine/the-problem-with-how-we-treat-bipolar-disorder), dramatizes a woman's struggle with bipolar disorder and how she came to see that more than medication intervention, she needed help for her diseased sense of self. A diseased sense
I fell asleep in my daughter's room. She is three, and I drifted off while putting her to sleep.
I dreamed that my wife had set the cable box to the television out on the curb. I was very angry in the dream. She was hostile too. I brought the cable box back inside and hooked everything up. I tried to turn on the television. Emphatically, I pushed the on button. I woke up.
Awake, I left my daughter's bedroom and went into my bedroom. My wife was awake. She told me that the television, which is in t
http://madnessatthegates.wordpress.com/2013/04/22/barrys-blog-57-gatekeeping-in-the-desert-part-3/
I ended my previous blog by quoting George Kennan, the architect of the containment doctrine, who wrote in 1995 that there had never been “…the slightest danger of a Soviet military attack.” Significantly, he waited to admit that the Cold War had been a lie until after Saddam Hussein had become America’s favorite symbol of the Other.
In 1987, however, Kennan, unable to restrain himself, had predicted
“Spirit is the inside of things and matter is their visible outer aspect” (Jung, in Sabini, 2005, p. 2).
“I can only gaze with wonder and awe at the depths of and heights of our psychic nature. Its non-spatial universe conceals an untold abundance of images which have accumulated over millions of years of living development and become fixed in the organism….Beside this picture I would like to place the spectacle of the starry heavens at night, for the only equivalent of the universe within is the
Working with Dreams: Depth Psychology Techniques of Carl Gustav Jung and James Hillman
Dream work is ancient, it’s long tradition evidenced in the temples of Asclepius in Greece where individuals went to be healed through their dreams. Dreams have been an important aspect of many spiritual traditions, and even Freud considered the study of dreams to be his most important work. There are many methods of dream analysis. When working with dreams, it can be helpful to intentionally assess them from v
http://madnessatthegates.wordpress.com/2013/04/20/barrys-blog-56-gatekeeping-in-the-desert-part-two/
To really understand the Cold War and its relevance to our contemporary world, we must take another detour through myth. The birth of the national security state coincided precisely with the peak popularity of western movies. Westerns had been central to the movies from the beginning. In 1910, more than twenty percent of American films were westerns, and the trend continued. In 1959, westerns com
