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...
The Bride and the Coniunctio: An Archetypal Image of Love and Union
The Bride* The wedding and specifically the bride just might be one of the grandest of all archetypal images. We commonly associate weddings with the bride and the groom, but I'm going to make a case for the bride alone as a prime archetypal image and symbol for...
The Dream and the Ancient Path (Jungian Psychology in Everyday Life Series)
I don’t usually write about my own dreams on this blog, but I had a recent dream that reminded me of an elemental truth. Here is the dream: I was riding a horse down a river with the water up to the horse’s knees, and I had a fishing rod in my hand and I was fishing....
I am the Forest
There is a movie called House of Cards (1993), starring Tommy Lee Jones and Kathleen Turner. It is a story about a family, a father who died unexpectedly, a troubled young girl, and a big dream and vision. Tommy Lee Jones plays a psychiatrist trying to help the girl...
Consciousness: The Bright Side of the Moon
Photo credit: Abrams Planetarium by John French There are still tigers roaming our modern world, and make no mistake about it, you have a very real chance of being attacked and eaten. Of course for the vast majority of us, I’m speaking of symbolic tigers with this...
The Archetypal Way, the Serpentine Way and the Paradox of the Self
“There is a good thing on top of that mountain. I will make a straight line for it.” But the archetypal way is not like that; it is a serpentine way that wriggles and spirals its way to the top. We often feel defeated by it and brought to a standstill. It makes most...
A Realm of the Numinous: Religious Imagery in Dreams and Psychotherapy
For psychotherapists who practice therapy in a way that fully takes into account the totality of the psyche, they will be exposed to their clients’ dreams and other unconscious imagery that is mythical, archetypal and even religious in nature. Religious imagery is...
Of Mountains and Dreams 2: What the Hawk Sees
The hawk flies free over the valley below. If you climb the mountain and look toward the valley below, you may see the soaring hawk. Watch the hawk glide and circle while it soars on the currents of air, searching for its prey hiding amongst the rocks, trees and...
Silence and the Soul
Silence can be the soul’s only retreat from horror and tragedy. And that is alright. I heard on the radio this morning that the musician Paul Simon knew one of the victims of the recent school massacre. He attended the funeral this week and sang his classic song The...
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