Why Coaching Requires Continuous Personal Development
Coaching teaches us about true companionship. It asks us to: be present, open and inquisitive, and embody the experience with the client so that the Soul can reveal itself. Tending to this process of personal development—individuation—of the client and the coach is the biggest gift that coaching offers.
How to Overcome Codependency?
‘Working in the helping profession—as a psychology lecturer, trainer, and coach—has helped me to recognize and deal with my codependency. But it has been a long journey to give up the role of the ‘savior’. Luckily this journey has brought a great sense of freedom in no longer feeling a need to help others all the time.’
Four Roads to the Creative Self: Musings in Process
Our soul’s creative impulse originates in a desire to imitate/participate in the original act of creation—that of a God or Gods creating the cosmos. Creativity is as well an attitude of seeking wholeness, not completeness. Our creative life is risky business; but it is also immensely rewarding.
An Aesthetic Arrest
Tracking our subjectivity in the helping profession is good practice. We can ask ourselves how our experience in the presence of another, might hold information for the other person’s struggles.
Exploring Individuation with the Tarot
I hear you asking, “A Jung Platform course on the Tarot? Isn’t that fortune telling? What next, tea leaves?” My only response: perhaps!
Among the many orthodox and heterodox psychological concepts that Jung explored, divination and its companion, synchronicity, are part of the Jungian canon. Rather than being surprised at this, it is helpful to see Jung’s wide-ranging interests, including not only divination but also alchemy, flying saucers, and discussions of religion, soul, and spirit, as a testimony to the power of Analytical Psychology as a discipline as well as a therapeutic method.
Songs of the Soul
Singing is a deeply human activity. It is part of every human culture around the world and throughout time. Our kin have used singing to do so many things.Only in the very recent past have so many people stopped singing. We have become consumers of song instead of makers of it. Something essential is missing. Our voices and souls are starving for song.At any given moment, a song could arise and be sung out loud – imperfectly and with great joy. So I ask you now, friend – why not sing?
Three Archetypes You’re Likely to Meet as a Mother
Carl Jung coined the term “archetype” to refer to innate patterns of human experience. Images of such patterns can be found in myths, fairy tales, and other ancient stories. When we have children, we find ourselves living out one of the great archetypes – that of The Mother. Mothering is an enormously complex psychological experience. It confronts us with a range of emotions that we might not encounter elsewhere in our lives.
Keeping Appointments
According to Hollis our individuation process is indeed our calling, it is that which serves the soul, not the world around us. Discernment and the courage to risk will help us find the answers to the Big Question: What is wanting to express through me? What is wanting to enter the world through me?
The Eco-Heroine’s Journey
For a good number of centuries now, Western civilisation has been living according to a myth founded on a belief in humanity’s dominion over nature, along with the relentless pursuit of unending growth. We have become separate from the world around us; we’ve abandoned our roots in nature and the land. In Western societies we are seeing more calls for a return to native wisdom and they are deeply rooted in the heart of our own native landscapes.
Experience What is Implicit
In any good crossing, the cumulative effect is always greater than the sum of its constituent parts, and I have found this to be the case in combining Jungian and Focusing-oriented therapy. The methods complement, enrich and deepen each other: Gendlin brings experiential depth and ‘life-forward’ movement with his focus on the body, while Jung brings imaginative richness and numinosity with his deep fascination with the image.
The Fearsome Creature in the Mirror
Cast upon this planet so many aeons ago, imperiled, sensitive, semi-conscious, and vulnerable, humankind learned fear. Their fears were not imagined; their perils were real as ours remain.If Jung is right, then the fear that I would have to face is not in my opponent, or my neighbor; it is in me, the one who stares back from the mirror.
Open Your Heart for Love
Learning about the barriers we’ve built against pain and love is how a heartbreaking experience can serve as a valuable teacher. By accepting the invitations of heartbreak, we learn about ourselves, about letting go and allowing renewal to take place so that we open ourselves up for love again.’ What are some of these inner barriers that we construct to protect ourselves against pain?