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...
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WEDDING DREAMS: Symbols of Sacred Union and Inner Transformation
This Jungian Life
How does one reconcile and integrate opposing forces within to achieve wholeness? Wedding dreams symbolize the union of opposites that spans psychological, spiritual, and alchemical dimensions. Encountering the wedding archetype in dreams constellates an inner marriage that calls for synthesis of known and novel traits and attitudes—depicted as the merging of masculine and feminine aspects or encounters with shadow. Dream Wise: Unlocking the Meaning of Your Dreams will help you understand and prepare for inner union: https://a.co/d/9EyMMgE Alchemy called this process the hierosgamos, or...
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DECISION ARCHETYPE: the power of sacrificing options
This Jungian Life
How do we navigate the forces within us to make choices that reflect our authentic nature? Every decision acts as a bridge between the conscious mind and the unconscious depths, connecting archetypal patterns to individual choices that define human experience. Each choice reveals inner conflicts and values, compelling us to confront both personal desires and universal forces within psyche. Decision-making is not merely logical; it is a convergence of intuition, cultural imprint, and raw instinct, calling for integration rather than domination by one mode of thought. In conscious choosing, we...
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SATANIC PANIC: The Archetypal Slanderer and False Memory Syndrome
This Jungian Life
What drives us to seek meaning in the shadows, and how do we discern the real from the imagined when fear and faith converge? The rise of the Satanic Panic in the 1980s drew upon ancient archetypal fears of evil embedded in the collective unconscious, merging with societal stressors like the emergence of fundamentalist Christianity in American politics and women’s increased participation in the workforce with the resultant rise of daycare use. The archetype of the Devil as slanderer can capture a community. Even as they are prompted to accuse others of devilish behavior, they themselves are...
info_outlineHaving mixed feelings, or strongly opposing feelings is a normal occurrence in human life. We can find ourselves in a quandary about big decisions, upcoming life events, or experience being stuck without quite knowing why. Deb, Joseph, and Lisa consider various facets of ambivalence: anxiety around foreclosing options and missing out fear of regret over a possible wrong choice, or inability to raise complexes and shadow elements into consciousness. All aspects of the personality need to be allowed to dialogue and have it out with one another. Instead of complicating matters and adding to stasis, this process releases energy for movement in life. We can come to accept the certainty of uncertainty—and find our life-giving psychic wellsprings.
The Dream:
I was walking on a cobbled street looking for a store where honey was sold. I was looking for honey to heal (however, I don't know what was that I needed to heal). I entered into the store through what seemed to be the back door. Inside, I saw wooden shelves with glass mason jars full of different-colored honey on them. The room was rustic and had a dim light, though sunrays illuminated it. One of my great aunts from my mother's side, whose name is C., was there working, filling up bottles with honey. She greeted me and was happy to see me as she always is, and
the owner of the place, whose face I don't remember, came to me and told me the honey would help me heal. He gave me honey. I think I ate it because it was for me to taste; I don't remember clearly. However, I do remember he also told me to cover my body with honey, especially over my arms, chest, belly, face and hair, so he poured some honey on my hand (I think it was the left hand), because the hand was the most effective way to cover my body, according to him. I did cover.
The honey had chunks of honeycomb in it. The owner told me to eat the honeycomb chunks, so I grabbed a honeycomb chunk I had in the left side of my neck with my right hand, and ate it. Its taste was delicious.
References
Jung, C.G. Aion (Volume 9ii, Collected Works)
Harari, Yuval Noah. Sapiens, HarperCollins, 2015.