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...
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How to Develop Your Inner Guidance: Charting a Path Through the Current Chaos with Jung’s Insights
This Jungian Life
Today you'll learn about inner guidance--the quiet, built-in compass that surfaces when we pause the outer noise long enough to feel what rings true inside. It is less a mystical oracle than a subtle convergence of bodily signals, emotional undertones, and intuitive "hunches" distilled from our lived experience. When we meet a decision with open attention—neither forcing a rational verdict nor surrendering to raw impulse—this inner faculty sorts, weighs, and hints at the direction that aligns with our deepest values. Acting on it demands two skills: discerning authentic signals from fear...
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[SUBSCRIBER-BONUS] How to work with Shadow Material
This Jungian Life
In this free edition of Jung Love, our -bonus content, a Patron asks: "What do you do with shadow material? Is it enough to just become aware of your shadows? Or does it require a fixing of oneself? What is the process of processing it? I'm still trying to wrap my head around the shadow. What if I'm aware, but still don't like the shadow? Robert Johnson talked about rituals for the shadow. Can you speak about that in more depth and perhaps provide some examples?" BECOME a TJL Patron and enjoy exclusive content like interpreting your dreams, explaining Jung's ideas, and more: LOOK &...
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Shadow and Self in Adolescence: Navigating Rage, Love, and Individuation
This Jungian Life
Think of adolescence as life’s built‑in boot camp: your body hits the gas, your mind scrambles to keep up, and suddenly you’re wrestling with raw impulses, big feelings, and the question “Who am I, really?” That surge of anger toward parents often hides an intense love that feels too risky to show, so teens push back while secretly measuring whether adults—and the wider world—can handle their storm. Without clear rites of passage, they test limits through friends, online thrills, and daring choices, all in service of hammering out a story that’s theirs, not just a...
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From Worry to Insight: making sense of uncertainty
This Jungian Life
Worry arises because we can imagine countless possibilities, yet it often traps us in unproductive loops. Recognizing when worry prompts useful action—and when it spirals into paralysis—can be transformative. By holding uncertainty with patience, rather than trying to eliminate it, we engage a deeper capacity to reflect, adapt, and discover hidden strength. Read along with our dream interpretation . LOOK & GROW If you’ve been struggling in the dark, trying to find the keys to unlock your dreams, help has arrived. Order your copy of from the hosts of This Jungian Life...
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Detective Archetype Decoded: Tracking Symbolic Clues
This Jungian Life
Ever felt that irresistible urge to poke around for answers? That’s the detective archetype calling. It taps into our natural drive to uncover hidden truths and bridges the gap between what’s out in the open and what’s hidden in shadow. Whether we’re looking at Sherlock Holmes’s logical wizardry or Miss Marple’s understated brilliance, detective stories grab our attention by setting things right when wrongdoing has thrown everyday life off-balance. But these tales aren’t just about catching a culprit; they mirror an inner process. It’s the part of us that wants to piece...
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Analytical Patisserie: When Pastry Sparked Genius
This Jungian Life
In 1906, during Carl Jung’s formative visit to Vienna to confer with Sigmund Freud, a seemingly incidental stop at the renowned Café Sacher catalyzed his enduring fascination with pastry-making. At the time, Freud was actively refining his drive-based theories—including the pleasure principle—and while Jung had not yet formulated his later concepts, his curiosity was piqued by the Sachertorte’s complex interplay of technique and sensory allure. Authentically prepared Sachertorte requires an aerated chocolate batter produced via partial egg-white separation and a precise bain-marie...
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Unlocking the Power of Your Shadow
This Jungian Life
Connie Zweig, author and Jungian therapist, joins us to explore the next level of shadow-work. This transformative practice identifies and integrates the repressed or disowned parts of ourselves, fostering deeper self-awareness, authenticity, and personal growth. These hidden dimensions often emerge in our relationships, politics, and cultural conflicts as unconscious projections and behaviors. By examining them—through dialogue, myth, and active imagination—we can move beyond shame, denial, and blame, transforming painful patterns into sources of emotional richness and empathy....
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The Boundary Paradox: How Limits Create Freedom
This Jungian Life
Boundaries define limits in relationships, work, and the psyche, balancing autonomy and connection. In relationships, they prevent enmeshment and detachment, fostering respect. Professionally, they maintain ethics and prevent burnout. Intrapsychically, they regulate self-cohesion and unconscious influences. Cultures shape boundary norms, with individualistic societies valuing personal space and collectivist ones emphasizing connection. Myths depict boundaries as transformative thresholds, like Janus symbolizing transition. The key dialectic is between rigidity and permeability—too rigid...
info_outlineThe tale of Beauty and the Beast is at least 4,000 years old, perhaps second in popularity only to Cinderella. It has generated many print versions, animated films, a Broadway show, and a Disney film. What about this tale continues to ensure its popularity? And what is this tale really about?
Beauty and the Beast is a metaphor for the development of the feminine, symbolized by an animal bridegroom—who, of course, is an enchanted prince. It’s tempting to see this tale as an example of women treated as chattel by misogynistic males, but as our archetypal bones, fairy tales show us universal problems, patterns, and psychic realities. Beauty’s task is to relate to her instinctual self, represented by the beast. Each of us has an inner other, often imaged as opposite sex, who possesses qualities that seem utterly foreign yet compel attention and interaction.
The tale begins with Beauty’s father stealing a rose for his favorite daughter from the beast’s garden. Outraged, the beast demands retribution: either the father or one of his daughters must agree to live with the beast. Beauty, described as “loyal and modest,” loves her father and insists on sacrificing herself to the beast, who they believe will kill her. A seemingly simple rose comes at a high price, and representations of masculine figures are negative: feckless father and fiend. However, the rose is a mandala. It opens like the lotus from a center and holds the promise of wholeness.
We see the interplay of opposites at the outset and throughout: Beauty’s innocence and self-sacrifice contrast with the beast’s domineering will. Beauty’s seemingly loving father is powerless and unable to protect her, but the beast provides for her every want despite her nightly refusal to wed him. In the beast’s domain, naïve and compliant Beauty discovers her power of self-determination: she stands up to the beast as she did not do with her father, and the beast agrees to let her visit her family. Given freedom from obligation, she chooses to return to the beast.
Beauty’s realization reflects her newfound ability to base loyalty on character and consciousness rather than reflexive filial duty. She needed to access autonomy, and her primal inner other—the beast--needed to relinquish control. Beauty and the Beast is a heartening tale of hard-won wholeness—and at its center is love.
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