Corruption Starts Inside You: Why Malignant Certainty Makes You Dangerous!
This Jungian Life
In this episode, Joseph, Lisa, and Deb explain why Corruption is not only a political problem, but a human one, why Power breaks trust long before it breaks laws, and why the most dangerous people are often the most certain. They reveal the core mechanism behind Corruption and Inflation: when unconscious drives flood the ego, making someone feel exceptional, entitled, and above ordinary rules. They unpack how Corruption escalates quietly, from small rationalisations and moral distortions to full-blown abuse of entrusted Power that destroys relationships, organisations, and communities....
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How Did I Become a Statistic?
This Jungian Life
Jung wrote “The Undiscovered Self” in 1957, opening with “What will the future bring?”, as the Cold War, the Iron Curtain, and nuclear weapons gained enough momentum to threaten survival. He argued that mass-mindedness, amplified by state power, corporate bureaucracy, and scientific rationalism, reduces people to statistics, numbs conscience, and makes evil all the easier to project. When institutions promise safety and efficiency, what happens to individual responsibility? If religion is an instinct, what strange substitutes will it flow into when it’s suppressed? What can we...
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Alchemical Mortificatio: How to Survive the Wintering of Your Life
This Jungian Life
If you have been through betrayal or loss, you may still be living by a terrible rule you made when in pain. It can look like hiding, overworking, numbing out, or letting people cross lines because being unseen feels safer. This episode uses the fairy tale “All-Kinds-of-Fur” to help you identify your survival pattern and take the next step out of it. When you update the rule you made when in trauma, you get your choices back. What you’ll learn Identify the “impossible promise” that keeps you stuck, and where it began. Notice your “fur cloak,” the mask of busyness,...
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Purpose as Service to a Self-Led Future
This Jungian Life
You're invited to our free Dreams for Change seminar on Sunday January 18th. . ***** Modernity promotes endless techniques to optimize goal-setting and productivity. Yet most of us race from one task to the next, telling our friends how busy we are, secretly knowing we lack direction. This conversation defines Self-led purpose as an orientation to a future beyond our ego needs. This can align our tasks with Individuation even as we face seductive collective agendas. When we look outside for purpose institutions and communities are all too ready to supply meaning, but at what cost to our inner...
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Can Angels Survive in Our Disenchanted World?
This Jungian Life
Angels persist in dreams, scripture, and art, while modern institutions psychologize them into coincidences or flatten them into greeting cards. In this episode, we explore angels as autonomous psychic facts, reimagined from age to age but always carrying meaning across the unconscious threshold to the ego’s surprise and benefit. When we learn to welcome the sacred messengers and “…fear not, for behold…” they bring tidings that can right the course of our conscious life. What is gained, and what is lost, when angels are interpreted as natural law rather than moral ideals? How does...
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Santa and Krampus: Why the “Nice List” Needs a Shadow
This Jungian Life
✨ The Gift of Dreamwork: Join This Jungian Life Dream School with 10% off from now until December 31st. Just use code HOLIDAY2025 when you purchase Dream School for yourself or as a gift. ----------------------------------------------------- Santa Claus persists as a central figure who teaches children that their desires can be understood and met, on the condition of good behavior. The Christmas morning ritual is staged to delight and mystify: Santa crosses thresholds unseen, cookies are eaten, milk is gone, gifts appear. His all-seeing mind takes a moral accounting, drafts the...
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Alchemical Mortificatio: How to Survive the Wintering of Your Life
This Jungian Life
✨ The Gift of Dreamwork: Join This Jungian Life Dream School with 10% off from now until December 31st. Just use code HOLIDAY2025 when you purchase Dream School for yourself or as a gift. ----------------------------------------------------- Mortificatio is an alchemical term for the moment a life-organizing identity collapses. We might call it burnout, divorce, depression, retirement shock, institutional betrayal, or a terrifying medical diagnosis. The alchemists called it “death,” and Jungians understand it as part of the psychology of transformation. Read along with the dream...
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How to Work with Denial: A Jungian Guide to Facing Reality
This Jungian Life
✨ The Gift of Dreamwork: Join This Jungian Life Dream School with 10% off from now until December 31st. Just use code HOLIDAY2025 when you purchase Dream School for yourself or as a gift. ----------------------------------------------------- People often mistake denial for stubbornness, self-deception, or moral failure. Denial is actually a primal psychological defense that attempts to regulate which aspects of reality are permitted to reach awareness. Today, we explore how denial operates within Psyche, why it activates powerfully in response to traumatic experiences and addiction,...
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Have We Ever Really Read Jung? Sonu Shamdasani on the Collected Works Crisis
This Jungian Life
✨ The Gift of Dreamwork: Join This Jungian Life Dream School with 10% off from now until December 31st. Just use code HOLIDAY2025 when you purchase Dream School for yourself or as a gift. ----------------------------------------------------- Jung’s translator and editor for the English edition of his Collected Works took it upon himself to alter more than 60% of Jung’s ideas to make the books more marketable. Finally, this will be corrected. Sonu Shamdasani and his team at the Philemon Foundation are meticulously researching Jung’s original documents, and the results...
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Gratitude and Reverence: How to Lead a Sacred, Soulful Life
This Jungian Life
✨ The Gift of Dreamwork: Join This Jungian Life Dream School with ten percent off from now until the 31st of December. Just use code HOLIDAY2025 when you purchase Dream School for yourself or as a gift. ----------------------------------------------------- A Jungian Look at Gratitude (and Why It Usually Arrives Late) Have you ever suddenly realized, “I never really thanked them for that,” a parent, teacher, mentor, or community that quietly carried you through a hard stretch? Gratitude is a psychological turning point: the moment you grasp that your life rests on the real, sometimes...
info_outlineEmpathy, the ability to feel into the suffering of another, is an intrinsic part of being human. We have such a capacity to imagine others’ experience that we react physiologically and emotionally to painful situations even in film. We are surprised, sometimes shocked, when the empathy we expect in a given situation is not forthcoming. Although empathic deficits create wounding, an overly empathic stance can also be problematic, fostering psychic stasis. Jung related empathy to the causal, or “mechanistic” aspect of analysis, in which painful past experiences are traced to their origin in order to more fully integrate feelings, expand consciousness, and depotentiate a complex. However, Jung also emphasized the “abstract,” or “final-energic” direction of traumatic experience, which is more objective and relates to achieving a state of equilibrium. We are thus asked to hold the tension between empathy for feelings—our own or another’s—and a more objective stance toward meaning, choice, and action.
Dream
I'm standing somewhere that is slightly above the level of the ground, and looking down on an alley that has water below. I know I have come to get into the water, but while looking at the way to get to the water is very steep and harsh. So I think of jumping. The water is very, very clear, and I see that after a few meters on the side of the wall that I'm standing on, it gets very deep and blue. So I think it might be very dangerous, if I throw myself in, and can't swim. I don't believe anyone will be able to either find me or help me get out of the water. So I don't jump. But for the rest of the dream I continue carrying a secret with myself that I should have jumped, but I haven't. It feels like having to do something, but not doing it.