Episode 096 - Polyamory: Navigating the Complexities of the Heart
Release Date: 01/30/2020
Changing the Foundation of Personality: the Secret Power of Attitudes
This Jungian Life
Revolutionize Your Nights – Join Dream School and Master Your Dreams! Transformation isn’t about muscling through change—it’s about loosening the grip on rigid perspectives so energy can move. Resist, and the unconscious will find a way forward anyway—through symptoms, dreams, and compulsions that shake up the illusion of control. Neurosis is just a traffic jam in the psyche—energy stuck where it no longer belongs. Real change isn’t an intellectual hack; it’s a shift in how we hold and release energy. The unconscious doesn’t hand out easy answers; it reveals what’s...
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What Remains When All Is Taken: Standing in the LA Wildfires
This Jungian Life
Unlock the Hidden Power of Your Dreams – Join Dream School Today! Fire strips everything away, leaving only what truly matters. In the wake of the Los Angeles wildfires, homes have become ash, familiar streets are unrecognizable, and life feels uncertain. But fire is not just destructive—it is also transformational. Pamela Power, a Los Angeles Jungian analyst and author, joins us in exploring the psychic tensions that arise from this experience. Fire erases yet reveals. It devastates yet clears space for renewal. Loss forces us to let go yet also asks: What endures? Though grief pulls us...
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Feet, Fashion, and Freedom: Shoes as Symbols of Identity
This Jungian Life
Shoes as Symbols connect identity, culture, and creative adaptation. Shoes reflect our movement through life and mark pivotal transitions, helping us hold the tension between vulnerability and agency. They appear in myths and stories as agents of change, signaling the emergence of a new attitude and facilitating its embodiment. The simple act of wearing shoes bridges the physical and psychological, grounding us while enabling exploration. Shoes communicate individual and collective identity, shaping and revealing roles in society. Tales, like Hans Christian Andersen’s The Red Shoes and...
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Analyzing Our Childhood Dreams
This Jungian Life
What do our earliest dreams reveal about the hidden forces shaping our lives? Childhood dreams offer unmediated access to the collective unconscious, revealing symbols that shape lifelong development. These dreams often dramatize psyche's early encounters with polarities, fostering individuation through the integration of opposites. Nightmares and numinous imagery invite engagement with shadow and the sacred, acting as catalysts for growth and transformation. By revisiting childhood dreams through active imagination, individuals unlock their latent meanings. These dreams serve as both...
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The Psychology of Meaning: Keys to Authentic Living
This Jungian Life
What gives life meaning and guides us through times of emptiness and uncertainty? The Psychology of Meaning: Keys to Authentic Living explores the processes of self-discovery, purpose, and transformation. Along with James Hollis, Ph.D., we examine how meaning shapes our lives through symbolic living, midlife transitions, dreams, and navigating despair. You’ll gain insights into aligning your inner and outer worlds, reclaiming your lost connections, and making choices that reflect your core values. Join us and wrestle with questions about purpose, fulfillment, and the human journey. Prepare...
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THE STAR: Archetype of Revelation
This Jungian Life
We have looked to the stars to navigate our ships across night-shrouded seas. We have studied the stars to find their qualities in our character and divine our destiny. We have yearned for the stars as the gates of heaven where we hope to reside one day. Mysterious and inscrutable, humanity has ever projected the arcane depths of its collective psyche onto the sky and marveled at what they saw. Prepare to discover who the first astrologers were, why we require the night sky to encounter our depths, what the stars have meant to humanity across time, where we must seek to understand the legends...
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DREAM WISE: Unlocking the Meaning of Your Dreams
This Jungian Life
Dream Wise: Unlocking the Meaning of Your Dreams is a practical guide to interpreting your dreams. It is the fruit of our collective experience analyzing thousands of dreams and collaborating to create our podcast and Dream School. It is an answer to the collective call to know and be more. Jung understood the next stage of human development could only come from within, and dreams are the key to that living process. The images we receive each night express a symbolic language, carrying multiple levels of meaning, emotional energy, and archetypal patterns. The dream meets your personal history...
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Stoicism and Jungian Psychology: A Recipe for Resilience
This Jungian Life
Stoicism and Jungian psychology are a natural fit. The first invigorates and organizes the reasoning mind, and the second ensouls it. The amalgam of Stoicism and Jungian Psychology generates a natural resilience. It offers a frame to understand the interplay of reason, emotion, and imagination in service to inner growth. Integrated philosophical reflection empowers us to confront societal crises and develop autonomy through rational self-awareness. Inclusive Stoicism connects personal development to shared human values. The ancient discipline of clear thinking can heal us through narrative...
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Finding Our Way Back: Healing from Self-Betrayal
This Jungian Life
When we betray ourselves, we abandon our values, needs, or truths to gain approval or avoid discomfort. This leaves us disconnected, fragmented, and unsure of who we really are. These patterns often start in childhood, where conditional love or invalidation teaches us to hide our authentic selves to stay safe or gain acceptance. We see this in our daily lives—staying in unbalanced relationships, ignoring our emotions, overworking, or making choices that don’t align with who we are. We justify it, suppress what we feel, or take on others’ beliefs without realizing how much it costs us....
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ECSTATIC TRANSFORMATION: Activating the Archetype of Radical Joy
This Jungian Life
What does it mean to depose the ego and encounter the dismantling joy of the Self? Ecstatic transformation challenges our understanding of ourselves and breaks the boundaries of ordinary experience, leaving us questioning a lifetime of assumptions. It shatters our ego’s illusions of separation, shifting the foundation of our identity. It is the greater solutio where our ego and Self come face to face. This psycho-spiritual process is symbolized in the Dionysiac archetypal themes of death and rebirth through ecstatic states that transcend the rational, intensify emotion, and connect us to...
info_outlinePolyamory, a current phenomenon, endorses open relationships with multiple lovers. The term means many loves, and polyamory strives to legitimize the benefits of non-monogamous romance and sexuality among adults.
Jung engaged in an open, extramarital relationship with Toni Wolff. Does polyamory represent an overthrow of outdated cultural mores in an age when sex can be safe? Or is committed, often sanctified bonding a deeply rooted part of human nature and development? There are parallels in the development of a relationship between two people and the relationship of ego to the unconscious.
Jung discovered that the alchemical images in The Rosarium Philosophorum, depicting stages of relationship for a couple, illustrated the individuation process. Is polyamory a way of rationalizing ego gratification and avoiding monogamous commitment? Or is polyamory a call to forgo outmoded cultural restrictions and experience connections with others that can facilitate inner growth?
Dream
"I am walking alongside the man that I am currently dating. He is on my right side. Suddenly on my left side, the man I am still in love with appears with the woman he has a child with (in waking life, he has a child with a woman he did not marry and co-parents. I am still not over him and wish we were together). In the dream, he has had another child with her. I’m surprised he’s had another child with her. It makes me think he has had even more intimacy and “work to do” with her in his life path. I am stuck in the middle... the man I am dating is on my right side, but I am not really interested in him (even though he treats me wonderfully in real life, he doesn’t feel like “the one”). The man I desire is on my left, with a woman and two kids, a life and world he’s been focusing on. He sees me, and I feel this strong and pleasant attraction and connection between us - like a youthful friendship mixed with love - I realize/know that he continues to be interested in me too, even though we are apart. I wake up, confused but happy to have a positive dream about his feelings towards me (In waking life, I continue to regret our breakup and he has ignored attempts I have made to rekindle a friendship and begin communication again)."