ON-DEMAND COURSE

Living a Mythic Life

Jungian Psychology
TEACHER
Leigh Melander
TOPIC
Archetypes
Format
3 class course
DURATION
3 hours

Payment options: Credit Card or PayPal.

Step toward your soul by leaning into myth.

Myth is about yearning, it speaks to our desire to be larger than our ordinary lives. Hooking up to the mythic imagination can bring us back to our souls and help us be part of something beyond us.

Join Leigh Melander, PhD in cultural mythology and psychology, for a lively spin through the many ways of looking at and through myth. Leigh starts by presenting the views of many experts in the field of mythology; Joseph Campbell, Carl Jung and James Hillman among them. Then she helps us to look through the mythic lens.

Leigh suggests we use myth and story in our lives in a way that quickens imagination by sitting with its images and metaphors. She favors the psyche-centered view of myth that calls for more opening to possibilities, and less settling on fixed interpretations.

Catch Leigh’s enthusiasm for attending to mythic images and soon, from the corner of your eye, you’ll catch the spark of an ancient myth moving in your life. Her interactive resource packet will get you started on where to find the mythic in your life and includes exercises on how to tend it. In it you’ll find suggested reading as well as film recommendations. 

Whatever your story, whatever the myth, learning how to look through the mythic lens will help you live with your questions rather than jump to answers.

Course Description

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Leigh Melander offers a scholarly, playful and inquisitive look at what myth is and why it’s important in our lives. She shares voices on myth from ancient, mystical, academic and psyche-centered perspectives. She settles in for a longer view of myth as a living, shape-shifting process that can’t be pinned down or paired up with specific pathologies or motivations. What makes a myth useful for us is how it changes our vision in any given moment. What we see in the myth and through the myth will change how we see our life situation. 

Leigh explains the views of Joseph Campbell, Carl Jung, James Hillman and many others on myth, metaphor and image. She describes how myths become road maps, touch points, and reminders that our individual stories are fed by larger stories.

Myths can be metaphors that transfer meaning from the literal and concrete to the imaginal and intuitive. Leigh gives examples from her own life of how exploring a myth created a meaningful context and liberating space for a stifling personal situation.

Leigh encourages you to find an image, a metaphor that speaks to you, to pull it apart and see what it opens up for you. That’s how you learn to see with inner vision. That’s where the individual soul meets the vastness of the cosmos and the richness of the whole of human experience. 

This course affirms that the archetypal gods and goddesses are always present in our lives and culture. As Jung said, the question is to find out in what form and to what purpose. 

In our epoch myths are closer to the surface than they have been in recent history. Much is at risk as more people are living stories that are highly divergent. Learning to see events with a mythic lens is more important than ever as it helps us hold contradictions and avoid polarized positions.

Sitting with the paradox at the heart of myth is an art. Start your apprenticeship here, or come here to refresh your work with the story that is never ending.

This program is ideal if you want to be able to

  • Look up your ordinary life to the expansive world of myth and learn how to find company, consolation and counsel for your life situations in myth. 
  • Catch the glimmer of mythic quicksilver in current films, events and literature and stretch your ability to live with paradox.
  • Sit with mythic images to develop your inner vision and see through the movements of the psyche while feeling the potential of myths to connect you to the deepest realms of soul and spirit.
  • Play with some tools that will help you see thru a mythic lens and let mythic seeing help you find truth in the stories that people cling to that are very different from your own.
  • Understand the psyche-oriented view of myth as a living process and have examples of how we can see mythic figures metaphorically in a way that brings meaning to our own personal circumstances.
  • Value your unanswered questions as ways of reaching into unknown layers of life and appreciate that what you find in any myth will change depending on your own moment in life.

Course overview

What you will receive

*You will receive a certificate of completion, but it’s not from an official accrediting body. Please check if it will be accepted by the organization you wish to use it with.
3 video & 3 audio recordings
Course guide
Auto-generated
Certificate of completion*
Available in English

ABout the teacher

Leigh Melander

Leigh Melander, Ph.D. has a doctorate in cultural mythology and psychology from Pacifica Graduate Institute, and has a background in writing and the performing arts, marketing, and strengthening communities nationally and internationally.

Scholarships

We here at Jung Platform want to make these programs available to anyone. If you would love to participate yet can’t pay for the full course, then please send us an email at scholarships@jungplatform.com and describe why you feel you qualify for a scholarship, how much you can pay, and what you will do to help the Jung Platform promote this and other programs.

The Jung Platform Guarantee

We stand by our programs. If within 30 days of your purchase or the live course start, you're not satisfied, we offer a replacement or a full refund.

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