Nature and Soul: Musings of a Jungian Psychologist
Making Thunder
Close your eyes and imagine the sounds from your life that captivate you the most. Are they sounds from nature like the roar of a mighty waterfall? Do you visualize the sounds of a booming drum, your favorite musician's voice, or maybe the blast from a jet airplane?...
In the Middle of the Night: Coyotes, a Synchronicity and the Trickster Archetype
On January, 11, 2014, a good friend of mine who lives in Tucson, AZ, spontaneously sent me a series of photographs taken with a “trail cam.” This camera was mounted in his backyard which backs up to the desert. The photos were all of coyotes in the middle of the...
An Unhealthy Concern for You
If you are looking for a Hallmark, feel good Holiday time read stop reading this article now. Lisa (not her real name) was a client of mine who was awakened in the middle of the night by a “voice.” This voice was clear and ominous and it simply said this, “An...
Abundance
And He said to them, “Cast the net on the right side of the boat, and you will find some.” So they cast, and now they were not able to haul it in, because of the multitude of fish. John 21:6 The past months have seen an abundance of anchovies in the Monterey Bay....
The Psyche at Dawn and Dusk: A Look at Crepuscular Moments
Any fisherman or fisherwoman knows that fishing is best at dawn and dusk. Similar to the feeding behavior of fishes, other wildlife is most active at twilight during those precious crepuscular moments. Crepuscular is a term used in biology to describe animals that are...
The Wind
Sitting on a small island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean I can’t help but notice the wind. As the temperatures climb, the trade winds pick up bringing with them a cooling breeze as thoughts and memories drift and shift with the symphony of the wind. Something deep...
Fighting with the Shadow: An Ethological Approach
We can learn much by observing and studying animal behavior in a natural environment. Witnessing raw, unedited scenes of animal behavior can give us clues on how to approach raw, unedited images that occur in our psyches. But before I talk further about using an...
The Psyche is Alive
What does it mean to be alive? Most everyone can agree that a horse is alive or an oak tree is alive. But is a river alive? Are clouds alive? Is the psyche alive? We call something alive for different reasons—one being when the thing that we are trying to describe as...
Calcinatio: Sitting in the Heat and Fire
NPS Photo by Jim Peaco Fire and heat—what occurs outside in nature and is viewed as a natural process there can also occur inside of us in the form of symptomology. But because of one dimensional views on natural psychological phenomenon on the inside, we sometimes...
The Ghost of Ed Ricketts
Ed Ricketts and backdrop of Monterey Bay I have written about Ed Ricketts before. His life and story still haunts me. Perhaps this is because I need to continue to write about his story and his work. But like all great mysteries, my quest for understanding what Ed...
Hope, Hillman and the Pitfalls of Intellectualism
James Hillman, a psychologist and Jungian analyst, was a brilliant man and something of an iconoclast. He died October, 27, 2011. I had never met Hillman, or attended any of his popular lectures or classes. But like many people who study Carl Jung’s theories and/or...
The Mighty, Mighty Wren and the Tiny, Bold Voice of the Self
The voice of the Self needs to be heard and it can be tiny at times, like the wren. I was out for a hike in the coastal mountains under a stand of old growth redwood trees mixed in with a younger generation of redwoods. It was shortly after sun rise—a perfect time to...
The Psychotherapist, the Client and the Tide Pool of Depression
There is a great paradox for the psychotherapist in helping a client navigate through depression. On the one hand, life can be extremely painful and debilitating for a person suffering with symptoms of depression, especially for moderate to severe depression. Some...
Transitions: Taking the Baton in the Relay Race of Your Life
Let’s imagine for a moment that life is like a relay race. In a relay race, each person on the team has a leg of the race that they are responsible for. Each person is also a part of the larger whole—the relay team. If the team wins the race, the entire team wins,...
The Two Million-Year-Old Man/Woman and You
How do you fit the two million-year-old man or woman into your modern world? In other words, what aids this transition? I wrote an article last month called, The Ancient Path. It was about the idea that there is a two million-year-old man or woman in all of us. The...
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