The Grey Global Nomad: Introduction

The Grey Global Nomad blog series is penned by Robert Bosnak, internationally acclaimed Jungian psychoanalyst, pioneer of the Embodied Imagination (EI) and Embodied Intelligence (MQ) methods, and a long-standing faculty member of Jung Platform. Here Robert shares his inspiration for starting the series. With photography by Jodie Taylor-Bosnak.

I think best when I move.

When I wrote A Little Course in Dreams on Martha’s Vineyard in the early 1980s I paced around the backyard so much that it hollowed out an elliptical gulley in the earth underfoot. I paced out my thoughts.

But most of my thinking occurs while traveling. When I was in analysis in Zurich I dreamed that my grandfather told me I should travel the world and ask people how they dream.

I had started a more or less itinerant lifestyle early on, but when in 1992 both of my children had entered college my life became truly nomadic. I set up workshops wherever they would have me and found that many people wanted to know about the field to which I had devoted my life, the clinical uses of dreaming. I had finished my training as a Jungian psychoanalyst by 1977 at the age of 29 and by the mid eighties had developed a method that focused on the intelligence of the body to help us access the creative force we call dreaming after we wake from it. Many groups all over the world wanted to learn this embodied dreamwork. Travel became my default condition.

My life turned truly 21st century when I fell in love with Australian photographer Jodie Taylor who lives in Sydney while I live in Santa Barbara. We now have a commuter marriage that consists exclusively of honeymoons connected by too many weeks of Internet life that tends to wear thin really quickly. So when we meet each other it’s like rain after a long drought. The officiant at our wedding declared us honeymooners for life. So now I travel more than ever; Jodie photographs and I steep in the places we visit like ginger in tea.

In these Grey Global Nomad blogs I will think out loud while traveling my eighth decade, set against a background of Jodie Taylor-Bosnak’s evocative travel photography. Let’s see where that leads.