Episode 225 - Archetype of the Wave: image of energy and motion
Release Date: 08/04/2022
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...
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Signs Contempt Is Ruining Your Relationship & Ways to Cope
This Jungian Life
Contempt feels like a gut punch. It’s a cold, distancing act that devalues a person even as it avoids solving a real problem. The contemptuous are full of shame, fear, or hurt, so they recreate those feelings in others to evade their own issues. Unlike anger (which tries to correct an injustice), disgust (which avoids what feels contaminating), or hatred (which seeks destruction), contempt asserts superiority and cuts off relatedness. It shows up in eye‑rolling, sarcasm, mockery, and a habit of judging others as beneath one’s standards. Whether you’re struggling to survive it...
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SEPARATIO: The Alchemical Secret That Ends Confusion
This Jungian Life
Alchemical separatio is the skill of sorting out your mind. You separate what belongs to you—your complexes, habitual triggers, and painful memories--from what is happening in the world around you. In the laboratory of your life, you separate present triggers from older wounds, and literal facts from symbolic meanings. This is part of your essential self-ordering instinct. As you bring more and more of yourself into conscious awareness, a delightful calm will tell you you’re on the right path. Join us and learn how to gain the profound clarity necessary on the path of Individuation. Read...
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LUCID DREAMING: How to Make the Most of a Magical Opportunity
This Jungian Life
Lucid dreaming is an interesting ego state when we are dreaming and regain full self-awareness. Being awake in the dream world can be useful, but imposing a rigid agenda can undermine the Dream Maker’s attempts to educate and help us. Each dream is crafted to incrementally expand our awareness and acceptance of unconscious factors we need in order to grow. When we wake inside a dream, we can lose track of that important attitude and may use the dream as our playground—most people try to fly and miss significant opportunities. If we can achieve a non-grasping clarity, lucidity can deepen...
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Shadow, Evil, and Individuation: Jung’s View of the Devil
This Jungian Life
The devil archetype carries three qualities: it promotes bestial violence of every kind, it tries to convince us that the material world is the only reality, and it fools us into thinking we can spiritually ascend through intellect alone. On a personal level, it gathers our disowned infernal traits—envy, rage, greed, and the wish to dominate —and seduces us into believing those qualities are virtues. Once we face our own devilishness and grant it a symbolic form, we can assume a choiceful stance. Lacking that, we try to evacuate our own evil by projecting it onto others and then...
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Horror as a Mirror: What Netflix’s MONSTER Makes Us See
This Jungian Life
The new controversial Netflix series MONSTER: The Ed Gein Story offers a window into the devouring mother archetype, a transformation fantasy gone horribly wrong, and the human capacity for monstrous behavior. Gein’s crimes inspired the Hitchcock movie Psycho, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and Silence of the Lambs. It challenges the audience to confront its fascination with evil and begs the question, where do the monsters hide in our own Psyche? To help us wrestle with these questions, we’re joined by Joey Pollari—actor, musician, director, editor, and the man who plays Anthony Perkins...
info_outlineImages of earth’s perpetual restlessness waves gently rock us, lift us up for an exhilarating ride – or inundate us in the terrifying phenomenon of a tsunami. Surfers surrender to the rhythm of waves, an embodied metaphor of attuning to the rising and falling of unconscious forces. Poseidon, Greek god of the ocean, was also the deity of destructive tidal waves, which can sweep us away and show up often in dreams. In physics, a wave is a disturbance that travels through space and matter, transferring energy from one place to another and, therefore, part of the fabric of the subatomic universe. From playful white caps on a summer’s day to waves that pound the shore as they break, waves are a potent image of energy and reflect inner psychic processes.
Here’s the dream we analyze:
“I am paddleboarding with my ex-boyfriend and several other people, mostly older adults. We are in a mountain lake, with an evergreen, tree-covered mountain rising from the lake behind us. The sun is out, and the water is calm. It feels pleasant. After some time passes, I notice several people quickly swimming to shore. The sky has suddenly drastically darkened, and I think it’s either about to rain or the sun is setting, so it’s time to leave. The water gets rougher now, too. My ex and I swim to shore, and I am surprised by how quickly and easily I am able to swim. When I get to shore, I notice that the older adults are struggling in the water. I want to help them, but my ex stops me. It is now that I notice that the dark sky is actually due to the fact that the mountain is completely on fire, and the fire is rushing down toward the water. I have to stand and watch, hoping all the older adults make it. The fire reaches the water, and the last of the older adults are thrust to shore. It is very dark now, and there is something beautiful about the fire. I want to get a closer look but am wary of getting near the water, which I know will be scalding. I get closer and try to take a picture, but at the moment I go to capture the image, the smoke obscures my view.”
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