Embody Your Creative Spirit

The hypnotic storyteller Michael Meade weaves mythic tales with street savvy insights into a practical way of being with creativity. In this session, Meade will talk about the various ways we can find and connect with our creative muse, bringing for us the good news that everyone, not only the artists, has a muse. Creativity is a larger force than ourselves—it is spirit, the muse, the divine. It wants to flow through us, be expressed, and given to the community around us. 

Meade shares rituals we can engage in to help us move through these different stages of creativity. He shares myths that have to do with endings and beginnings. These myths show how creativity is present, in abundance, during times of ending, danger, and despair. Times of chaos also births creativity and will lead us to the next phase of life, in an never-ending dance of chaos, order, and ongoing creativity.

During this session you’ll discover:

• How to connect with you creative muse
• Rituals that help us move through stages of creativity
• Myths about creativity

About Michael Meade:

Michael Meade, D.H.L., is a renowned storyteller, author, and scholar of mythology, anthropology, and psychology and is one of the greatest depth psychological teachers of our time. He combines hypnotic storytelling, street-savvy perceptiveness, and spellbinding interpretations of ancient myths with a deep knowledge of cross-cultural rituals.

He has an unusual ability to distill and synthesize these disciplines, tapping into ancestral sources of wisdom and connecting them to the stories we are living today. He is the author of The Genius Myth, Fate and Destiny: The Two Agreements of The Soul, Why the World Doesn’t End and The Water of Life: Initiation and the Tempering of the Soul.

Meade is the founder of Mosaic Multicultural Foundation, a nonprofit network of artists, activists, and community builders that encourages greater understanding between diverse peoples.

Join this session with Tina Stromsted. Creativity, she says, is the ‘divine child’ within us. Our body, the temple holding this creativity inside it, dreams of the potentials yet to come. But the task is not simple. Even though it can spring up through the cracks of adversity, pointing to where our life’s energy is taking us, the creative spirit needs tending and cherishing for it to bloom. 

Breath, curiosity, and a hovering awareness allow us to become more comfortable with the unknown. As we open ourselves to the deep treasures that have been incubating in the dark, the creative spark sets into motion events that bring a profound sense of nourishment and renewal from an inner source. 

Through Jung’s Active Imagination and natural movement, we can give form to what was not yet visible in the unconscious. And, we can then begin the dialogue with it—through free writing, dance, drawing, dream work, singing, and other arts—to inform, direct, and enrich our life. These embodied methods allow the body to  remember why it is here, its purpose, its destination that is  experiencing healing, embodiment, and incarnation—in ourselves, in our community, and the life we hope to see in the world.

During this session you’ll discover:

• How the body and natural movement can give form to the unconscious
• How to open yourself to a creative spark
• That creativity enriches your life

About Tina Stromsted:

Tina Stromsted, Ph.D., MFT, LPCC, BC-DMT, RSME/T is a Jungian psychoanalyst, Board Certified Dance/ Movement therapist, and Somatic psychotherapist and educator. She teaches at the C.G. Jung Institute of San Francisco, the Depth Psychology & Somatics Doctoral program at Pacifica Graduate Institute, and as a core faculty member for the Marion Woodman Foundation. Past co-founder and faculty of the Authentic Movement Institute in California, she was a founding faculty member of the Women’s Spirituality Program, and faculty in the Somatic Psychology, and Expressive Arts Therapy departments at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco.

With 40+ years of clinical experience in hospitals, community mental health, and in private practice, her numerous articles and book chapters explore the integration of body, psyche, soul, relationship, community, and nature in healing and transformation. She has been co-leading the PreCongress Day in Active Imagination in Movement sessions at the International Association for Analytical Psychology Congresses with analysts Joan Chodorow, Marion Woodman and colleagues for decades, and has presented at and organized many programs and conferences on Embodied Jung, BodySoul work, DreamDancing, Embodied Alchemy and other depth-oriented themes in international settings. Dr. Stromsted lectures and teaches at universities and healing centers in many parts of the world and her private practice in San Francisco.

Dreams are a source of wisdom. They provide clues about our calling in life, they guide us in relationship matters, connect us to what truly matters to us, and they can also help us to express ourselves in our own unique ways.

This summit session is about asking your dream for guidance to connect and engage with the Creative Spirit that is alive in all of us. We can do this through a technique called ‘dream incubation’. Dream Incubation is also found in many spiritual traditions; we ask our night time dreams for guidance. Machiel Klerk (Jung Platform Founder) wrote a book on this topic that is available now. He explains how this effective technique can help us to be close to our Creative Spirit and give expression to it.

During this session you’ll discover:

• How to ask guidance from your dreams to relate to the Creative Spirit
• That dreams can offer clues about your Creative Spirit 
• That the Creative Spirit wants to help you realize your calling

About Machiel Klerk:

Machiel Klerk is a social entrepreneur, licensed mental health therapist, international speaker, dream worker, and published author.

He has been a mental health therapist since 2006, and currently has an online private practice. Machiel is fascinated by healing traditions. Next to obtaining a master’s degree on counseling psychology at Pacifica Graduate Institute, he studied extensively Jungian Psychology. He has traveled all over the world and studied many cultures and their healing and dream traditions, and in specific the African traditions as South Africa is the country of his birth.

Machiel has published a book ‘Dream Guidance’ with the respected HayHouse publishing company. The book is currently available through Amazon and Barnes &Nobles as a pre-order.

Machiel has given lectures and workshops in Europe, South Africa and North America about dreams and psychology. He also provides inspirational talks and workshops for companies on creativity, innovation and leadership. He has written several articles on dreams and released a course on Jung Platform.

Machiel has vocationally been guided by dreams when he founded the Jung Society of Utah and the online organization Jung Platform as a result of a night time dream. In appreciation for these contributions, he has received several awards from the local community.

He moved in his early youth from South Africa to the Netherlands, and lived a year in France during his teenage years. He backpacked a year through Asia and then moved in 2004 to the USA where he still lives and dreams.

This session with Jean Houston, a world-renowned global catalyst and one of the principal founders of the human potential movement, is about reaching for and touching into the creative genius. For this we need our imagination. Jean Houston talks about stuckness and how to break through (old) patterns of stuckness, as well as what imagination can do to create a breakthrough. 

In this session, she also offers an exercise, in which she encourages us to dwell on an image of the future. This exercise helps to sense that life has a passion for each of us. This is what she calls ‘the lure of becoming’. By expanding our consciousness of our co-creative powers, and by allowing imagination to be part of life, we touch into our own creativity. It becomes clear that our lives are creative self-expressions; we don’t necessarily need artistic talents or creativity—“the recreation of yourself is the greatest form of creativity.” 

This session is hosted by our guest host Stephen Aizenstat.

During this session you will:

• Become conscious of your co-creative powers
• Get a sense of how to be your authentic self
• Live a life in touch with your creative spirit

About Jean Houston:

Jean Houston, Ph.D., scholar, philosopher and researcher in Human Capacities, is one of the foremost visionary thinkers and doers of our time. She is long regarded as one of the principal founders of the Human Potential Movement.  Dr. Houston is noted for her ability to combine a deep knowledge of history, culture, new science, spirituality and human development into her teaching.  She is known for her interdisciplinary perspective delivered in inspirational and humorous keynote addresses. Jean Houston is the author of 26 books.

As Advisor to UNICEF in human and cultural development, she has worked around the world helping to implement some of their extensive educational programs.  Since 2003, she has been working with the United Nations Development Program. Together with other international agencies and companies, over the last 45 years, Dr. Houston has worked in over 100 countries. In 1965, along with her husband Dr. Robert Masters, Dr. Houston founded The Foundation for Mind Research. She is also the founder and principal teacher, since 1983, of the Mystery School, now called the Renaissance of Spirit, a school of human development, a program of cross-cultural, mythic and spiritual studies, dedicated to teaching history, philosophy, the New Physics, psychology, anthropology, and the many dimensions of human potential.

Creativity can make life sacred, says Thomas Moore. In this session, he suggests ways to open the doors to a life rich in the blessings of everyday creativity. Moore talks about the old times when people saw creativity as a direct link to God, to the divine, to that which is greater than us. Taking inspiration from this period, he calls for a re-imagining of the creative process, into a way of living that nourishes the spirit, and promises to bring awe and beauty to the smallest details of everyday life. This creativity, born of the soul, Moore teaches, is a path to self-enrichment open to each one of us. 

For Moore,  soulful creativity is a craft, an ongoing process that requires work, love, and tending. This is different from the vertical flashes of inspiration, which while they are part of the creative process, do not encompass the whole creative journey.

During this session you’ll discover:

• Ways to open up to everyday creativity
• Creativity as path to self-enrichment
• That soulful creativity is a craft

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.

The world today asks for creativity and creative expression of ourselves. However, more often than not, we are limited by our habitual consciousness and as a result, we end up recreating certain patterns of response. These patterns may have served us in the past but are no longer relevant in  approaching the world in the present times. 

This summit session is about cracking open routine consciousness so that the light of the Creative Genius can enter. Dutch Jungian Analyst Robert Bosnak will explain how this can be done with a therapeutic and creative form of working with dreams and memories that he has called Embodied Imagination®.

During this session you’ll discover:

• A practical embodied process that often results in fresh insights and increased creativity
• How to stay open to the genius of living
• How to invite the creative genius into your life

About Robert Bosnak:

Robert Bosnak, PsyA, is a Jungian psychoanalyst who graduated from the C.G. Jung Institute in Zurich in 1977. He pioneered the Embodied Imagination method, and his current interest is focused on exploring Embodied Intelligence (MQ). Robert Bosnak is a Core Faculty Member at Jung Platform.

Robert has written several books translated into a wide variety of languages, amongst which the worldwide bestseller A Little Course In Dreams and Embodiment: Creative Imagination in Medicine, Art and Travel. He’s a Past President of the International Association for the Study of Dreams and founder of the Santa Barbara Healing Sanctuary. He divides his life between Santa Barbara, California and Sydney, Australia. He trains the Embodied Imagination method worldwide.

Creativity as an expression of the soul emanates from a soulful engagement with the psyche. This session with Stephen Aizenstat focuses on developing a practice that cultivates this soul-enriched creativity. 

Aizenstat suggests that connecting to the Soul can be as simple as taking a step back. That is, we pause, we open our senses, and develop curiosity for what we encounter in nature, on a stroll through the city, in a mood, a song, a dream, or a fantasy figure. Our relationship with these ordinary experiences changes when we see them as ‘visitations’. When we develop a sensitivity, a responsiveness to these experiences, we start feeling more alive, more creative, and connected to our soul’s purpose.

During this session you’ll discover:

• How to connect with our creativity
• A daily practice to engage with our imagination
• How creativity and a soul-centered life are related

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.

Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche shares, from the Bon Buddhist tradition, his perspective on creativity. He says that everyone’s essential nature is creative. When we are connected to the source of being then joy, humor, playfulness, and creativity, naturally arise. When you express the creativity emanating from this space, it is sacred. This sacred creativity, when expressed, has deep meaning and purpose and benefits everyone.

However, we might often have blockages in our engagement with creativity. These blocks could be the lack of time, the mounting bills to pay, the fear of the process, the belief of ‘I can’t’, and so on. Rinpoche addresses how we can engage with these blockages by turning towards them with an open mind and attitude. In this session, Rinpoche will walk us through the different phases of creativity and teach us a meditation that we can practice to get in touch with our innate spontaneous creative nature. 

During this session you’ll discover:

• How to relate to blockages to your creativity
• That creativity is sacred and meaningful
• A meditation practice that brings you in touch with you creative nature

About Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche:

Founder and director of Ligmincha International, Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche is a well-known teacher and meditation master in the Bön Buddhist tradition of Tibet. He is dedicated to the study and the practice of the teachings of the Bon tradition. He has a gift to make this tradition available to a large public.

He is the acclaimed author of numerous books, including: The Tibetan Yogas of Dream and Sleep; Tibetan Sound Healing; Wonders of the Natural Mind; Healing With Form, Energy and Light: The Five Elements in Tibetan Shamanism, Tantra, and Dzogchen; Unbounded Wholeness (with Anne Carolyn Klein); Awakening the Sacred Body; Tibetan Yogas of Body, Speech and Mind; and Awakening the Luminous Mind (Hay House, 2012).

Your voice is the primary way your ideas and inspirations find their way into the world. Nothing much can happen without it. Opening more sound and freedom in your voice is a powerful way to enliven your creative spirit. 

In this interview, master voice coach and singer/songwriter Barbara McAfee will offer tools and insights for tapping the power of voice in your creative life. We’ll explore the role of voice in bringing the unconscious into consciousness, and how sacred play can awaken the unexpressed potential within us. Join this joyful conversation!

During this session you’ll discover:

• How to access the full potential of your voice
• A playful exploration of your voice
• How creative expression of the voice stimulates your personal development

About Barbara McAfee:

Master voice coach, Barbara McAfee, has spent decades supporting people from all walks of life to live more fully expressed lives. Her book, Full Voice: The Art and Practice of Vocal Presence (Berrett-Koehler Publishers), guides people to find their voice, whatever that means to them.

Her approach to voice incorporates various aspects of Jungian psychology, including the use of archetypes, the collective unconscious, and shadow. The work also includes concepts from the Roy Hart Centre, yoga, leadership development, and deep play.

Barbara is also a singer/songwriter with eight recordings of mostly original music. Her style incorporates flavors of jazz, gospel, folk, and blues. She has delivered widely seen TEDx talks.

She is founder of The Morning Star Singers, a volunteer comfort choir that brings songs of healing and peace to people facing health challenges.

Barbara lives an hour outside of Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota in St Croix Falls, Wisconsin where she starts her days hiking along the wild and scenic St. Croix River.

Enhanced creativity flows out of a deepening realization of the divine and helps root the divine truth and joy in the human experience. No one exemplifies this more than Kabir, the great 15th-century Indian saint. Andrew Harvey has spent ten years translating his poetry and will share his excitement and initiation with the participants. Andrew is himself infused with the divine creativity and exuberance we aspire to; and, this session is an invitation to experience the transcendental and wild creative state infused with the energies of Andrew Harvey and the divinely-inspired Indian saint. Andrew will share his findings on how to open up to the glory of the divine, engage with this tremendous force, and be a vessel for it in the world. 

In this session you’ll discover:

• Creativity that flows out of relationship to the divine
• How to open up to the creativity
• How to be a vessel for divine creativity

About Andrew Harvey:

Andrew Harvey is Founder & Director of the Institute for Sacred Activism, an international organization focused on inviting concerned people to take up the challenge of our contemporary global crises by becoming inspired, effective, and practical agents of institutional and systemic change, in order to create peace and sustainability. Andrew was born in south India in 1952. After his pursuit of an academic career in the UK, Harvey left Oxford in 1977 and returned to India, where a series of mystical experiences initiated his spiritual journey.

Andrew has since lived in all around the world, and has continued to study a variety of religions, including Hinduism, Buddhism, and Christianity. He has written and edited over 30 books.

Creativity is an opportunity to take risks—risk-taking is myth-making, states Dennis P. Slattery.

But what do creative moments look like? Are they extraordinary, elusive, and rare or can they be part of our common and ordinary lives? In this session, Slattery states and shows that with an open, porous, and creative attitude, everything we do and experience, can be moments of creativity. That is, all of our daily life engagements have the potential to and can be creative. 

The deep source of creativity innate within each of us, can be engaged through creative practices; Slattery also shows us their importance and their capacity to guide us in our yearnings to create. The session also delves into the dynamics of creativity and our limitations, imperfections, and boundaries.

During this session you’ll discover:

• That daily life is full of creative potential 
• How to engage with the deep source of creativity
• The potential of creative practices

About Dennis P. Slattery:

Dennis Patrick Slattery Ph.D.,  has been teaching for more than 50 years, the last 26 of which has been in the Mythological Studies Program at Pacifica Graduate Institute in Santa Barbara, California, where he is currently Emeritus Faculty. He is also a Core Faculty Member at Jung Platform since 2017. He is the author, co-author, editor or co-editor of 30 volumes, including 7 volumes of poetry and one novel co-authored with Charles Asher.

His most recent titles include Deep Creativity: Seven Ways to Spark Your Creative Spirit, co-authored with Deborah Ann Quibell and Jennifer Leigh Selig, and From War to Wonder: Recovering Your Personal Myth Through Homer’s Odyssey. In addition, he has written over 200 articles, book reviews and Op-Ed pieces. He offers Writing Retreats on C.G. Jung’s The Red Book as well as on Writing One’s Personal Myth through the works of Joseph Campbell and other writers. He has been taking painting classes in water color and acrylics for the past 8 years as well as enjoying riding his Harley Davidson motorcycle with his sons Matt and Steve in the Texas Hill Country.

In this interview, Alia Aizenstat, a licensed psychotherapist and digital responsibility educator, will explore one of the new frontiers—the digital world—where the creative spirit can be ignited, embodied, and pushed to the furthest edges of possibility. 

The digital world has expanded the limits of reality and has become the boundless frontier of creative imagination. In this place, curiosity meets imagination and imagination meets embodied experiences. This session explores how creativity is played out online as a means of searching for and manifesting soul, spirit, and identity. It will look at the negative and positive effects of having virtual identities in our lives. 

Alia will show how depth psychology can help us integrate our virtual identities that otherwise might remain fragmented and unacknowledged. How do we embody our virtual identities? We will conclude this session by exploring how creativity and embodying virtual identities can be the high play acting out the soul’s desire. That is,  maybe we do not escape ourselves online, but we meet a deeper Me within the Metaverse.

During this session you’ll discover:

• How the creative spirit can be ignited by the digital world.
• How to host the identities as imaginal figures and utilize them as internal resources. 
• How Jung’s psychology can be of help in dealing with online/screen addictions.

About Alia Aizenstat:

Alia Aizenstat is a licensed depth psychotherapist, speaker, and educator both locally and internationally. She is the Content Director at Dream Tending and a certified clinical Dream Tender. Alia specializes in internet addiction and the use of dreams and imagination as a path to healing. She has a psychotherapy practice in Santa Barbara, California and is passionate about teaching psychoeducation and digital responsibility in schools, graduate programs, and therapeutic treatment centers.

Ms. Aizenstat is the author of Psychotherapy in the Digital Age: The Integration of Online Identities in the Therapeutic Process, and the founder of the Virtual Identities Integration Treatment model. She is certified in EMDR trauma therapy with an attachment focus, Acceptance Commitment Therapy (ACT), holds a certificate in Leadership Development, and is a Registered Yoga Teacher (RYT-440). At the heart of Alia’s work is exploring ways that creative spirit can be ignited, embodied, and guided toward finding the soul’s desire.