Culture and Belonging
Our existence is fundamentally interpersonal. Human beings are not isolated, free-floating objects, but subjects existing in perpetual, multiple, shifting relationships. Life is defined by these myriad interactions – by the push and pull of inter-subjectivity as well as the overt and covert social contracts. Through them we realize our incompleteness and vulnerability.
Do Lucid Dreamers Control the Dream?
Lucid dreaming is an ancient and revolutionary psychological tool for exploration, which has been scientifically confirmed in recent times. By understanding it as a relational tool, you can move deeper and deeper, achieving new and more powerful realizations. I taught myself how to lucid dream in the spring of 1975. This turns out to be the same spring that researcher Keith Hearne recorded the first ‘eye signal’ of lucid awareness in the University of Hull sleep lab from the sleeping lucid dreamer, Alan Worsley.
The Poetics of Myth and Its Embodied Expression
In the last few years a resurgence in the nature of narrative, of story and personal and collective identity has gained widespread attention. My interest in one’s personal narrative is tied to the nature and structure of myths, both personal, national and global. So what is it to make a myth and to live by a myth?
Embodying the Positive Shadow: Anya’s Story
A tall, dark-skinned, successful professional woman, Anya grew up feeling she was “too much”. Her body size, feelings, and needs were “too big”. When I’d ask her about her feelings, she reported keeping them “shoved in her body” where she “held on tight”. This manifested in stooping to reduce her height, gathering her shoulders up around her ears, and collapsing in her chest.
Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival: Gawain and Orgeluse
We continue with Lans Smith’s series The Grail Romances of the Middle Ages. In this blog Gawain encounters different forms of the feminine or the anima.
Not All Aphorisms are Equal
Aphorisms are not to be accepted or rejected; they go deeper than that. The good ones push me off my comfort chair to consider another point of view.
Healing the Severed Psyche
Jung rejected the idea that modernity could sever our ties to the mythic imagination of our ancestors. He spent a lifetime elaborating this position through his work on the archetypal structures that inform and organize human thought, emotion and behavior.
Re-Inhabiting the Body & Nourishing the Soul
After months of sheltering in place, it was exciting to see people enjoying meals together in make-shift sidewalk cafés, masks and all. With restrictions beginning to lift, we found ways to adapt to safety concerns while maintaining our spirits.
Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival: Parzival and Condwiramours
This article is Part 4 in a series about The Grail Romances of the Middle Ages and the Individuation Process by Lans Smith Parzival grows up alone, far from the…
Talking to Tina
As a little girl, when there was tension in the home, Tina Stromsted would slip out the house into the field next door, and dance. As she twirled and swooped and breathed in the rhythms of Nature, she was able to release her anxiety to the winds, and ground herself enough to straighten her small back, and return to her family.
History May Repeal Itself
Together, Liberty, Immigration and The Truth have over the decades shared a rich and compatible heritage that today is being negotiated, if not challenged, anew.
Dreaming Impossible Dreams in End Times
The art of the question is the work of psychotherapy. In the 40 years I have practiced this art as a Jungian and existential psychotherapist, it has become increasingly evident that the boundaries between the private domain of soul and the public domain of nature are two sides of the same coin.
