Jungian Psychology for a Soulful Life

Jung believed that dreams are doors that allowed us to access the “most secret recesses of the soul.” The technique developed by Dr. Stephen Aizenstat – Dream Tending – is rooted in Jung’s dream work and active imagination. According to Dr. Aizenstat, dreams are manifestations of the soul and by tending to our dreams, we tend to our soul. We can ensoul our daily life by paying attention to the dream figures, listening to, and befriending them. When we begin working with our dreams, the difference between night and day becomes less distinct in that the dream figures begin accompanying us even during the day, that is, the conscious part of our lives. As a result, the revelations from our soul, the direction in which it wants us to go, becomes clearer, sharper, and in focus. In this session, Dr. Aizenstat will give us practical tips on befriending dream figures and soul friends. By practising dream tending, we can infuse our day-to-day experiences with more colour, compassion, and meaning.

During this session you’ll discover:

• How the soul expresses itself in dreams
• How to befriend dream figures
• How the soul tries to guide us in dreams

About Stephen Aizenstat:

Stephen Aizenstat, Ph.D., has devoted his life to understanding the profound wisdom and healing power that exists within each of us. He is Founding President of Pacifica Graduate Institute. He has explored the power of dreams through depth psychology and his own research for more than 35 years. His Dream Tending methodologies extend traditional dream work to the vision of an animated world and his work opens creativity and the generative process. His book, Dream Tending, describes multiple new applications of dreamwork in relation to health and healing, nightmares, the World’s Dream, relationships, and the creative process.

He is affiliated with the Earth Charter International project through the United Nations, where he has spoken. Professor Aizenstat has been mentored by and collaborated with many notable masters in the field including Joseph Campbell, James Hillman, Marion Woodman and Robert Johnson. He has conducted sold-out Dream Tending seminars, workshops and “pop-up” events in the U.S., Asia and Europe.

In this session, Robert Romanyshyn guides us to a way of seeing and experiencing the Soul of the World. This way opens us to experience the miracles in the mundane, and the extraordinary in the ordinary. He will show that we can be a witness to the world—as a vale of soulmaking—through the beauty of all that surrounds us.

In his letters with Nobel prize winner in physics Wolfgang Pauli, Carl Jung describes a level of unconscious dynamics where psyche and nature are one. This is called the psychoid level or the Soul of the World. This is a place where the psyche and nature pivot around each other so that the inner world (of images and dreams) is the outer world (of events). Synchronicity is a primary example of this relation as are perhaps experiences like visions. These moments give us an immediate experience of the subtle world of imaginal reality.

In this session, Romanyshyn talks about how to experience the Soul of the World, and how the soul is addressing us as the living spirit of the natural world. He talks about ways that we can become responsive to this possibility and how that requires the cultivation of an aesthetic sensibility—a poetics of soul making.

During this session you’ll discover:

• How our own soul flows over into the World Soul
• How we can listen to the Soul of the World through synchronicities and dreams
• How beauty is a quality of the Soul

About Robert Romanyshyn:

Robert D. Romanyshyn is an Emeritus Professor of Clinical Psychology at Pacifica Graduate Institute, an Affiliate Member of The Inter-Regional Society of Jungian Analysts, and a Fellow of the Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture. He is also a Core Faculty Member at Jung Platform.

Author of eight books including his newly published Victor Frankenstein, the Monster and the Shadows of Technology: The Frankenstein Prophecies, he has published articles in psychology, philosophy, education and literary journals, published a book of poems, written a one act play about Frankenstein, and created a multi-media DVD entitled Antarctica: Inner journeys in the Outer World, a psychological reflection on the melting polar ice. In addition to online seminars and interviews, he has given lectures and workshops at universities and professional societies in the U.S., Europe, Australia, South Africa, Canada and New Zealand.

Thomas Moore says, “Soul is not a thing but a quality or dimension of experiencing life and ourselves. It has to do with depth, value, relatedness, heart and personal substance.” In this session, Moore will take us on a way of seeing life that allows us to connect with the soul, especially in the everydayness of life. When the soul is neglected, it doesn’t just go away. It appears symptomatically as obsessions, addictions, violence, and loss of meaning—symptoms, which send patients to seek therapy. If the soul’s capacity for creativity is not honored, Mr. Moore maintains, it will wreak havoc instead. Thomas Moore gives us a little hint by stating that the “soul appears most easily in those places where we feel more inferior.” He will also help us see that we can survive and learn from our personal troubles, tragedies, and follies. He proclaims that the soul cannot be separated from the body, family, work, love, or power. In the end, he calls us to our true vocation which is to care for the world’s soul and to celebrate the sacred art of life.

During this session you’ll discover:

• That soul is also a way of seeing and experiencing the world
• How to listen to the dysfunctions as callings of the soul
• Suggestions on how to care for our soul

About Thomas Moore:

Thomas Moore published his classic Care of the Soul in 1992 that sold several million copies. Since then he has written twenty books on spirituality, sexuality, myth, religion and depth psychology. His books have been translated into thirty languages. He has taught religious studies and psychology and has been a psychotherapist for over 30 years.

He often speaks at C. G. Jung societies and has done special work consulting at major medical centers with the idea of bringing soul to medicine. He was a close friend and collaborator with James Hillman and published an anthology of Hillman’s work with extensive introductions and commentaries. He writes fiction and music and has a special relationship with Ireland, the home of his ancestors. He lives in New England. His wife is Hari Kirin Khalsa, an accomplished painter and yoga trainer. His daughter Ajeet is a popular singer of spiritual music.

Join Jungian Analyst Erica Lorentz in this session about listening to the whispers of our Soul. Modern mythos pushes us to have a masculine, heroic attitude. But when we let go of this stance, we are on a journey to find and reconnect with our Soul. This session explores the qualities we need to develop to redeem our Soul and to reclaim our authentic life. When we draw upon fairytales and myths we may find guidance for the heroine’s voyage as Erica will illustrate. To rekindle the connection to our Soul, it is crucial to move beyond negative patriarchy in ourselves and the world. Through the inner pilgrimage to our own primal feminine power, present in both men and women, we can recover soulful living and also save the World Soul.

During this session you’ll discover:

• The difference between the hero’s journey and the heroine’s journey;
• That we can find the blueprint in fairytales and myths that will guide us on the heroine’s voyage
• Reconciliation with the feminine helps us to live our true essence.

About Erica Lorentz:

Erica Lorentz, M.Ed., L.P.C. is a Jungian Analyst (IAAP) with forty year of clinical experience. Since 1988, she has lectured and taught classes and workshops throughout the US and in Canada. She has been a training analyst since 1998 (presently at the C. G. Jung Institute of New England). She does does individual, couples, and group work. While she has a deep and varied clinical background, she is deeply interested in what dreams, emotions, physical symptoms, and the inner imaginal realms are trying to teach her clients. She believes that anxiety, depression, anger, compulsion, illness, PTSD, etc. are all the body/psyche’s way of drawing our awareness to how we need to grow. Erica’s training and personal experience with verbal and non-verbal/embodied processes enables her to facilitate access to and understanding of the conversation between our conscious and unconscious, and between our body/mind/soul.

In this session, Craig Chalquist illustrates that our psychological life is intertwined with our surroundings. Terrapsychology includes a suite of practices, ideas, and research methods to study how things of the world can get into our minds, hearts, bodies, and complexes. Craig exemplifies how the fantasies and dreams, moods and conflicts that we tend to take personally reflect in the events of the world such as rising breezes, packed freeways, lingering droughts, clicking crows, and cleaned rivers. As a child of eco- and depth psychology, terrapsychology illuminates our ongoing conversations with everything around us, near and far. By doing so, it re-enchants our relations with ourselves, each other, and our sentient planet. Join Craig Chalquist in this session to explore how these complex relationships appear in both realms—within and without. The session also looks at the methods we can use to consciously relocate ourselves in an ensouled world—a world filled with important signals, voices, and dreams that ripple through and transcend the night realm.

During this session you’ll discover:

• How the inner and outer worlds are interconnected;
• How to tend to the soul of a place
• The perspective of putting the presence of the world in the center of our psychology.

   

About Craig Chalquist:

Craig Chalquist, PhD is a depth psychologist and storyteller with a background in Family Systems Therapy. He teaches at the California Institute of Integral Studies and at Pacifica Graduate Institute, where he was formerly the associate provost. He has also presented at various Jungian institutes and societies.

His interests include: storytelling, depth psychology, terra psychology and presence of place, ecopsychology and enchantivism and deep systemic change. These  interest areas are reflected in his many publications and lectures.

In this extra long session Polly Young-Eisendrath talks about love and soul. All relationships can have soul; relationships with a partner, friends, family members and relationships at work. To love another requires a commitment to become a witness, to remain interested, and to break our heart. So firstly, tending to the soul in relationships with others asks that we show up fully and witness the true emergence of oneself and the other. We see the other and get reflected back. We need others to know ourselves, and we find ourselves through the witnessing of others. Secondly, we need an attitude of tolerance and reflection while we learn to perceive our relationships through a lens that is larger than our own individual feelings and concerns. We have to go beyond our own pleasures and desires to become curious about the other person. And lastly a soulful love asks us to recognize that to love someone is a vow to break our heart.

During this session you’ll discover:

• A soulful relationship asks us to love the other
• Love is a vow to break our heart
• A soulful relationship asks us to embrace our brokenness.

About Polly-Young Eisendrath:

Polly Young-Eisendrath, Ph.D., is a Jungian analyst, psychologist, and psychotherapist in private practice. She is Clinical Associate Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Vermont and the founder and director of the Institute for Dialogue Therapy. She is past president of the Vermont Association for Psychoanalytic Studies and a founding member of the Vermont Institute for the Psychotherapies. She is the author, co-author, or editor of nineteen books, ranging from parenting, adult development, intimate and parental love, Buddhist theory, Jungian psychology to women’s development, couple therapy, couple development, and various paths to awakening/enlightenment from meditation to personal love. These books have been translated into more than twenty languages. Her most recent works are The Self-Esteem Trap: Raising Confident and Compassionate Kids in an Age of Self-Importance and Love Between Equals: Relationship as a Spiritual Path.

Dr. Young-Eisendrath is a lifelong Buddhist practitioner in Zen, Tibetan, and Vipassana lineages and brings decades of leadership in mindfulness practice within the Buddhist context as well as integrated into her clinical work.

The depth psychological roots of the ecological imagination can be found in antiquity and in indigenous traditions around the world. Freud and Jung drew upon the work of the artist-scientists of the German Romantic and Classical movements including Ernst Haeckel (the German Darwin) who coined the term “ecology”. While Jung’s cosmology carried a rhizomatic vision of the psyche, the prescient quality of this has only begun to be revealed and appreciated in the 21st century. In this interview with Joe Cambray, we will consider examples of biological intelligence that rely on rhizomatic forms. It is likely that this biological intelligence is what the alchemists called lumen naturae or the light of nature. By looking at parallels with neural structures and astrophysical bodies that point to the archetypal patterns found throughout the natural world as well as in the soul, we will try to understand how synchronistic experiences shed light on the hidden (but ordering) connectedness that underlies the whole of existence. Join Cambray to learn from this antique and adaptive wisdom.

During this session you’ll discover:

• How the soul might be what underlies the whole of existence,
• How the soul expresses itself in synchronicity,
• How soul is part of ecology.

About Joe Cambray:

Joe Cambray, Ph.D. is President/CEO of Pacifica Graduate Institute; he is Past-President of the International Association for Analytical Psychology; has served as the U.S. Editor for The Journal of Analytical Psychology and is on various editorial boards. He was a faculty member at Harvard Medical School in the Department of Psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital, Center for Psychoanalytic Studies; and former President of the C. G. Jung Institute of Boston. Dr. Cambray is also a Jungian analyst now living in the Santa Barbara area of California. His numerous publications include the book based on his Fay Lectures: Synchronicity: Nature and Psyche in an Interconnected Universe, a newly edited volume, with Leslie Sawin, Research in Analytical Psychology: Applications from Scientific, Historical, and (Cross)-Cultural Research and a volume edited with Linda Carter, Analytical Psychology: Contemporary Perspectives in Jungian Psychology. He has published numerous papers in a range of international journals.

Join Jungian Author Susan Tiberghien in this session on befriending the soul through journaling. She views journaling as a voyage in self-discovery. A journal is a journey to a deeper understanding of ourselves. We slow down to sit and write. Journaling, therefore, is a spiritual practice, as Susan will clarify. With our choice of words, we give life to what we experience and how we imagine the world. As we journal, we get to know our soul. We speak to her, listen to her, learn from her. We know that Carl Jung kept a journal during his confrontation with the unconscious. He learned to listen to his soul through a series of active imaginations. He wrote about his experiences in his journals (aka ‘the Black Books’ that he later transferred into the ‘Red Book’). Having this example of creativity in mind, we can see that journaling is a way to nourish the soul. In this session, you will find that journaling helps us to engage with our soul through our imagination, permitting us to give words to our experiences, to evolve, and become whole.

During this session you’ll discover:

• Why journaling is nourishing to the soul
• That our soul wants to engage with us through journaling
• That journaling can serve as a bridge between the invisible and visible world.

About Susan Tiberghien:

For 25 years Tiberghien has been lecturing and teaching creative writing at C.G. Jung Societies and Institutes, at the International Women’s Writing Guild, and at writers’ centers and conferences. She’s an accomplished American Author.

In this session, Pittman McGehee talks about a psycho-spiritual worldview. Our worldview informs the way we live our life. It informs our value systems, the decisions we make, and our choices and behaviors. And while it may seem to be conscious, it has unconscious elements that, as Jung said, must be brought into consciousness by becoming aware of what is going on within us and in the collective. This realization of our essence—our Self—is what Jung called individuation. This means, we are not bound by fate; we have a choice on how to be in the world. We have the power to use our gifts and blessings in a way that makes a difference. But to do this, we must learn about the soul’s desire. The gateway to finding the soul’s desire is to have the willingness to be conscious—be ready to learn about ourselves and others. Because connection to our Self and other brings meaning and purpose as Pittman McGehee will show in this session.

During this session you’ll discover:

• What it means to have a psycho-spiritual view of the world;
• Why consciousness is essential, and
• How consciousness helps in clarifying our purpose.

About Pittman McGhee:

Pittman McGehee is a Jungian Analyst and an Episcopal priest in Texas. He is also a trustee emeritus of The Jung Center in Houston, Texas. He is widely known as a lecturer and educator in the field of analytical psychology and religion, as well as a published poet and essayist. Pittman McGehee is the author of The Invisible Church: Finding Spirituality Where You Are (Praeger Press, 2008), Raising Lazarus: The Science of Healing the Soul (2009), Words Made Flesh, The Paradox of Love and Growing Down (selected poems).

Romantic relationships are often laden with psychological expectations, which can be of mythic proportions. Dr. Shelby examines some of the key relationship myths, particularly the myth of Psyche and Eros, because it mines the treasures of depth psychological thinking about love. We spend so much of our life yearning for something (or someone). Many of our apparent “goals” and things we believe we want, turn out to be a concealment of our true aspirations. Our deepest wants are not reducible to physical or material goods, or even to a physical person; they are psychological longings for love, integrity, sincerity, and purpose. These longings carry within them qualities that are beautiful, valuable, and deserving of our devotion. When we can see this symbolic meaning that the soul is yearning for, we cease to reduce things to a tangible object (that never fulfills us) such as a home, a vehicle, a better job, or a human being. The connection we are seeking is to the sacred. The sacred, however, cannot be reduced to material things or persons. In honoring the soul, we come to understand that even the longing for romantic love is longing for the sacred. Paradoxically, a mature partnership born of genuine, loving acceptance can also be a sacred discipline.

In this session you’ll discover:

• The phases one goes through in romantic love
• How falling in love with soul can be the outcome of falling in love with a person
• How to better recognize projections and how they are soul guides as well

About Stacey Shelby:

Stacey Shelby, Ph.D, is an author, speaker, educator, and depth psychotherapist. She is also a Registered Clinical Counselor (RCC) in Canada, a certified clinical dream tender, and she has studied in indigenous and yoga traditions. She is gifted at working with the symbolic language of the soul and she is dedicated to honoring the soul as it presents in the lived experience of daily life.

Stacey Shelby has a thriving clinical practice in Squamish, British Columbia, where she works with adults in various stages of personal transformation. She is gifted at working with the symbolic language of the soul and she is dedicated to honoring the soul as it presents in the lived experience of daily life.

Join Connie Zweig in this session about transition into old age. She looks at aging as a rite of passage of letting go, of stepping into liminality, and of emerging renewed. We have to let go of the identification with our role in life and orient more deeply to the soul. We need to loosen the grip of our productive life so that something can make this shift from role to soul. We might, however, still choose to be active, but we will be doing it with a different purpose. That is, we will be working with a different state of mind and connected to something larger. The soul is the part within us that lives out of time and is connected to both the eternal and the collective. We have to learn to turn within and with contemplative practices face our shadow. Connie encourages you to look at your inner perceptions about aging –maybe there is an inner ageist or maybe there are obstacles such as a lack of openness when it comes to aging and dying – to find self-knowledge and connection with the soul.

During this session you’ll discover:

• What it means to transition from role to soul;
• The rewards of taking back your shadow projections on aging
• A practice of life review and learning the right questions to ask regarding your unlived life.

About Connie Zweig:

Connie Zweig, Ph.D., retired as a Jungian-oriented therapist in 2018. She is a bestselling author of Meeting the Shadow, Romancing the Shadow, Meeting the Shadow of Spirituality, and a novel, A Moth to the Flame: The Life of Sufi Poet Rumi. Her new book, The Inner Work of Age: Shifting from Role to Soul, (2021), extends her work on depth psychology and the Shadow into late life and explores aging as a spiritual practice. Her books have been translated into a dozen languages. For several decades, Connie has taught shadow-work nationwide at conferences, Jung societies, Esalen Institute, and psychological and spiritual gatherings. She is a wife and grandmother and was initiated as an Elder by Sage-ing International in 2017. Connie has been doing contemplative practices for 50 years. After investing in all these roles, she is practicing the shift from role to soul.

Join this session with Jungian Analyst Dariane Pictet as she shares why we need to know ourselves better to live a soulful life. When we don’t know what triggers us, we are locked in patterns that make us suffer. Anxiety, for example, keeps us separate from connecting deeply to what has value for us, to what makes us feel alive. Unwittingly, we distance ourselves from our soul, our potential, and the expression of our full creative selves. We all have complexes and getting to know them and having practices that help us to pause, breathe, before we jump in and act out, helps us connect to our soul. Having a soulful life means that we listen to the body and find respite from mental agitation or the internal monologue that prevents us from being present in the here and now. This can bring about an expanded consciousness in which one can rest, feel more connected to our own source of well-being, to the world, and to beauty.

During this session you’ll discover:

• Why it is paramount to know yourself to have soulful life;
• That learning about your triggers and complexes is a service to your soul;
• What practices you can engage in that will help you to live a soulful life.

About Dariane Pictet:

Dariane is a Jungian Analyst born in Geneva, Switzerland. She attended Drama School in Paris, worked as a Poetry Editor then trained as a Psychotherapist. She has been in private practice in London for over twenty years, and nowadays she lives in a small village in the Alps.

She lectures internationally, has a small online practice and supervises therapists in training. Dariane is a training / supervising analyst and lecturer at ISAPZURICH in Switzerland. She is a training analyst, seminar leader and supervisor at the Guild of Analytical Psychology, in London.

She was a Member of the Visiting Faculty of Regents University for six years where she was a lecturer, group facilitator and supervisor on the Advanced Diploma in Existential Psychotherapy. She also completed the Leadership Training of the Marion Woodman Foundation and facilitated BodySoulRhythms affiliated workshops with Marion and other colleagues.

In addition, she has published on various topics, amongst them are: ‘Movements of Soul in the Red Book’, ‘Silence in Christian Mysticism’, ‘Kali the Protective Mother and Destroyer’, and ‘Rumi, Poet of Heart’. Her interests include yoga, meditation, poetry, Eastern philosophy and consciousness studies.