The Handless Maiden: A Tale to Heal the Wounded Feminine
This Jungian Life
Everyone faces a moment when they are tempted to sacrifice their true self to chase wealth, approval, success, or security, but doing so strips away their strength and leaves them hollow. To reclaim their lost agency, a person must embrace the uncertainty and vulnerability they've been avoiding. They must stand alone, undefended, and trust the wisdom hidden in their wounds. The Handless Maiden fairytale will help us understand the path back to wholeness. Read along with our dream interpretation . LOOK & GROW If you’ve been struggling in the dark, trying to find the keys to unlock...
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TAMING YOUR INNER CRITIC: Turn Self-Attack into Self-Awareness
This Jungian Life
Our inner critic—that voice constantly tearing us down—can stem from difficult childhood experiences, negative cultural messages, or even powerful archetypal forces deep within us. While healthy self-assessment involves honestly owning our mistakes, feeling genuine regret, and making amends, the harsh inner critic keeps us stuck in cycles of self-hatred and shame. Sometimes, beating ourselves up can actually be a sneaky way to avoid openly engaging a problem or soberly accepting responsibility. The trick is to slow down, get curious, and talk back to that voice—to have an honest inner...
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SHARK: Elemental Symbol of Our Will to Survive and Ravenous Hunger for Experience
This Jungian Life
Primeval, silent, relentless—the shark announces itself as its fin slices the water. In that instant, ego’s barriers shudder and give way: you’re not anxious; you’re utterly alert, stripped of distraction by a force both familiar and uncanny. When you stop battling that raw terror and honor it—offer a silent libation of attention—the predator becomes a protector. Here, in the shark’s unblinking gaze, you meet the stranger in your depths, the animality you once fled, now guiding you to face what you’ve long denied. Read along with our dream analysis ....
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MOTIVATION: What Happens When Your Get-Up-and-Go Leaves Without You?
This Jungian Life
Motivation rises from conscious and unconscious dynamics. We can reason with ourselves to take logical action while our libido flows with its own intelligence. When these two aspects align, we find ourselves acting decisively and effectively with remarkable freedom. When we’re at odds with the secret intelligence of the unconscious, we can find ourselves uncomfortably suspended. As we honor the autonomy of Psyche and cultivate a curious friendship with it, we can discover a creative collaboration that sets us in a fresh direction aligned with the Self. Read along with our dream analysis ....
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Sibling Rivalry: Archetypal Conflicts and Shadow Dynamics in Families
This Jungian Life
Sibling rivalry can bruise and build in equal measure. On the hard side, the older child feels toppled from the throne, the younger scrambles for a foothold, and both learn how quickly envy, resentment, and score-keeping ignite—whether over a parent’s extra hour of attention or the larger slice of birthday cake. Those early contests can calcify into adult grudges that surface in estate negotiations, workplace jockeying, or mismatched relationships. Yet the same daily friction teaches useful skills: we sharpen empathy by reading a sibling’s next move, develop a theory of mind through...
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Mandala Archetype: How the Self Turns Chaos into Cosmos
This Jungian Life
Mandalas are Psyche’s way of drawing a compass for you when life feels off-kilter. Jung noticed that these circular patterns—whether they appear in Navajo sand paintings, Tibetan yantras, or last night’s dream—pull everything back toward a stable center he called the Self. The rim defines where your ego ends; the cross-lines and repeating fours help you locate sensation, feeling, thinking, and intuition in relation to your core. By “walking” the circle, even in imagination, the ego learns to orbit rather than hijack the organizing center, and the usual tug-of-war between instinct...
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House Dreams: Schematics of Your Psychological Functioning
This Jungian Life
When a house turns up in a dream, it isn’t a staging background—it’s an architectural X-ray of your inner life, drafted by the dream maker overnight and delivered to your doorstep at dawn. Floors chart levels of awareness, locked doors expose repressed material, intruders crash in as disowned traits, and every leaking pipe or crooked stair announces a personal attitude in need of repair. In this episode, we’ll teach you how to read the blueprint with the same clarity you’d bring to structural engineering, and your dream will hand you a working map for shadow work,...
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Ready for the Real Snow White? The True Tale of Envy, Murder, and Retribution
This Jungian Life
Ever wonder why “Snow White” still hooks us after all the Disney glitter flakes off? This episode strips the tale down to its psychological wiring: murderous envy of the mother shadow, malignant innocence, the unforgiving “mirror” inside that only answers the questions we’re brave enough to ask, and the dangerous alchemy that transforms three lethal mistakes into mature authority. You’ll hear why the dwarflike bits of half-formed masculinity in all of us mine gold from the unconscious, how raw instinct often finishes the work refined methods can’t, and how real agency...
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Forging the Upward Thread: Why Do We Create Religions?
This Jungian Life
The religious function is part of who we are — as natural as needing food or love. It’s the inner drive that pushes us to find meaning, to touch something larger than ourselves. Jung saw that if we don’t tend it, it doesn’t go away; it twists itself into addictions, compulsions, or a kind of soul-sickness. Religion, in the deepest sense, isn’t about belief systems. It’s about real encounters with the Self — the larger reality inside us that humbles, heals, and reshapes us. Dreams, symbols, and moments of awe are how Psyche keeps that connection alive. Without them,...
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Trauma Can Be Rewritten: The Use of Art to Reimagine our Past and Grant Us New Life
This Jungian Life
Viviane Silvera animated 30,000 of her hand-painted images to explore how traumatic memories are formed, stored, and ultimately transformed. Her animated documentary, SEE MEMORY, traces the intimate story of a young woman caught between past and present; her film captures the fragmented texture of trauma and the healing that becomes possible when painful memories are witnessed. In our conversation with Viviane, we explore her process of recovering lost memories and how opposing perspectives can constellate new attitudes toward trauma. We discuss cutting-edge findings on the way the brain...
info_outlineThe Bible as sacred text serves as a source of revelation and wisdom about the divine. As mythology, the Bible establishes norms for daily life and organizes psychic life forces. For Jung, mythologies and religions are symbolic expressions of archetypal patterns that foster the development of consciousness. Mythology reveals the dreams of a culture just as dreams bring personal mythology to light. Jung said, “We must read the Bible or we shall not understand psychology.” The Bible is not psychological only, but unless it is also psychological, we may not be able to relate its contents to our personal lives. We, therefore, engage the mythos of Jonah and his whale of a tale a dream. Orienting to Jonah as dream in the world, a dream for the world, and a dream of each of us can help us better understand ourselves in the context of a greater whole.
Here’s the dream we analyze:
“I’m at my girlfriend’s apartment, standing in a hallway with several doors. All of them save one are closed. Behind them, I sense a tremendous power. I stop in front of one of the closed doors and open it, but I don’t cross the threshold. It’s either my girlfriend’s childhood room, or it is mine. I guess that I first believe it to be hers but then understand that it’s mine. The room looks quite innocent, but I sense a trap inside. I somehow understand that I may ask one question to the presence that lingers in the room and that the question will be answered. I also understand that if I enter the room and the force is benign, I may exit and come back as I please, but if the presence is not benign, I will never be able to leave once I enter. So I need to construct a question that operates on two levels at the same time: it must seem to be an innocent question, but with a hidden purpose to determine the nature of the force. I start to think but draw a blank. Then a question very clearly “drops down” into my mind, and I examine it. It’s not only a good question, it’s the perfect question, and I put it forth: “How can one know when it is enough?” The answer comes quickly, accompanied by the sound of gnashing teeth and crushing boulders, and all too clearly reveal the nature of this entity: “It can NEVER be enough!” I then understand that it is the devil who dresses his frustrated angst in these words, and the answer makes me completely uninterested in entering the room. I decide instead to continue; I’m done with the things that are here. So, I go to the room with the open door, and after a short period of preparation, I fly away. When I fly through the window, a strange thing happens: as I pass through the glass, I feel that my amber body is being cleansed. It is as if all the impurities that it has accumulated during the entire ordeal were stopped from passing through as if the glass was some sort of filter. As a result, I feel more free as I continue my journey.”
REFERENCES:
Joseph, Diele, FCR. Jonah: The Story of Us https://www.amazon.com/dp/1556053924/ref=cm_sw_em_r_mt_dp_8SGRSZT47FB9YA4RN6PV
Hollis, James. Tracking the Gods: The Place of Myth in Modern Life https://www.amazon.com/dp/0919123694/ref=cm_sw_em_r_mt_dp_VZMCVWT0D7FQ0880MW1W
Stein, Murray. The Bible as Dream: A Jungian Interpretation
https://www.amazon.com/dp/1630516686/ref=cm_sw_em_r_mt_dp_HW0D3QRPE2HH0X20PM3V
RESOURCES:
Learn to Analyze your own Dreams: https://thisjungianlife.com/enroll/