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_outlineMarriage is a mystery woven into the fabric of time. A 4,000-year-old contract etched in stone bears witness to its timeless significance. But what is the meaning behind this union of two souls?
Jung saw the definition of marriage as an alchemy of instinct and divinity, a blending of the physical and the spiritual. It is a bond that extends beyond legal and familial ties into the realm of the sacred.
The purpose of marriage is a journey of individuation, a chance for each partner to grow and flourish within the embrace of a supportive union - it is a crucible of transformation. Tempered by our shadow, it can forge us into our best selves.
In marriage, we embark on a dance with our beloved, discovering new parts of ourselves with each step. But as time passes and our projections fade, we must pass through disappointment and conflict.
But as Jung saw it, these difficulties are opportunities for internal work, leading to the transformation of emotional connection into conscious relationships. The purpose of marriage is not just to provide comfort and security but to nurture personal growth.
We can see marriage as a symphony, where each partner's individual growth is intertwined with the growth of the relationship, and view it as a sacred bond, where each partner maintains their unique identity while being strengthened by the union.
What is marriage? It's a journey through the wilds of the human soul, a union that brings us closer to our true selves. This podcast episode explores the complicated and layered world of marriage through a Jungian lens.
Join us on a journey to the heart of this mystery, where the definition, purpose, and meaning of marriage are waiting to be uncovered. Let us answer the question, what is marriage together?
Here's the dream we analyze:
"I am parking for an open mic at a dive bar that I frequent. However, when I exit the car, I am on a residential street situated across from a church. I immediately panicked, not being where I believed I had just driven to, but think "I just need to park closer" and return to the car. I am then in my bed, alone in the camper I live in with my partner. This is how I fell asleep so at first I believe I've truly awoken. I look at my phone, no notifications but it is 8:50. I am disastrously late to meet a friend I record a podcast with. I get in my car and start towards his house. It doesn't occur to me that I am lost until I reach a pair of train tracks that once passed lead onto a road that goes through a trailer park filled with nice, white mobile homes shrouded in deep red light. I attempt to use my brakes right before passing over the tracks. On my dashboard a warning flashes that I can't read. I then lose control of my vehicle and it begins slowly sputtering over the train tracks closer and closer to the trailer park. This leads to another false awakening. I am relieved for a moment that what had occurred was only a dream. Again, I am home alone in my bed. The time on my phone is 8:51. I realize once again that I am late for the podcast. On the drive, I quickly become lost once again and am led back to the same train tracks and trailer park still drenched in red light. This time I know once my car crosses the tracks something bad will happen to me. Out of one of the mobile homes walks a man, slender and attractive but quite old. He is approaching my car, I slowly drive down the street. The man gets taller as I near him and his body is covered in eyes like an angel. He is acting almost like a zombie. I am scared until I tell myself, in a moment of lucid dreaming, "There’s a gun in my hand.” And just like that, there is. I get out of the car and shoot the creature three times before it falls dead. This leads to one last false awakening. This time my boyfriend is in the camper with me. I begin explaining the dream to him. I am then truly awakened by my alarm.”
REFERENCES:
C.G. Jung. Collected Works, Vol. 17: Marriage as a Psychological Relationship. https://a.co/d/9KZj3fN
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