How Did I Become a Statistic?
This Jungian Life
Jung wrote “The Undiscovered Self” in 1957, opening with “What will the future bring?”, as the Cold War, the Iron Curtain, and nuclear weapons gained enough momentum to threaten survival. He argued that mass-mindedness, amplified by state power, corporate bureaucracy, and scientific rationalism, reduces people to statistics, numbs conscience, and makes evil all the easier to project. When institutions promise safety and efficiency, what happens to individual responsibility? If religion is an instinct, what strange substitutes will it flow into when it’s suppressed? What can we...
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Alchemical Mortificatio: How to Survive the Wintering of Your Life
This Jungian Life
If you have been through betrayal or loss, you may still be living by a terrible rule you made when in pain. It can look like hiding, overworking, numbing out, or letting people cross lines because being unseen feels safer. This episode uses the fairy tale “All-Kinds-of-Fur” to help you identify your survival pattern and take the next step out of it. When you update the rule you made when in trauma, you get your choices back. What you’ll learn Identify the “impossible promise” that keeps you stuck, and where it began. Notice your “fur cloak,” the mask of busyness,...
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Purpose as Service to a Self-Led Future
This Jungian Life
You're invited to our free Dreams for Change seminar on Sunday January 18th. . ***** Modernity promotes endless techniques to optimize goal-setting and productivity. Yet most of us race from one task to the next, telling our friends how busy we are, secretly knowing we lack direction. This conversation defines Self-led purpose as an orientation to a future beyond our ego needs. This can align our tasks with Individuation even as we face seductive collective agendas. When we look outside for purpose institutions and communities are all too ready to supply meaning, but at what cost to our inner...
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Can Angels Survive in Our Disenchanted World?
This Jungian Life
Angels persist in dreams, scripture, and art, while modern institutions psychologize them into coincidences or flatten them into greeting cards. In this episode, we explore angels as autonomous psychic facts, reimagined from age to age but always carrying meaning across the unconscious threshold to the ego’s surprise and benefit. When we learn to welcome the sacred messengers and “…fear not, for behold…” they bring tidings that can right the course of our conscious life. What is gained, and what is lost, when angels are interpreted as natural law rather than moral ideals? How does...
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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...
info_outlineSharon Blackie calls us to the ancient archetype of the Hag as a figure of unapologetic emergence from cultural pressures that lock us into outworn roles and limiting beliefs.
Drawing upon her transformative experiences in menopause Blackie grounds the mythic figure of the old woman who fashioned the world in her fierce determination to dissolve and reconfigure her professional and personal life. Identifying and rejecting cultural pressures to look and act a certain way as she ages, she claims the second half of her life for a post-heroic journey of intense creativity and unapologetic self-expression.
Ancient Celtic fairytales, myths, and folk stories carry the spirit of the Cailleach, the divine old woman who shapes the landscape and scourges it clean through winter storms. This Queen of Winter is sharp and wild. Those who discover the Cailleach within carry her ruthless truths as unavoidable facts that demand acknowledgment. Her stark reality strips away one's inner illusions and avoidance of death, leaving her sharp eye facing outward. Tending the web of life becomes the great task, and acting to restore balance to the community, the central role.
The path to the Hag is hidden in stories. Blackie reminds us that reviving ancient themes and images expands our imagination and helps us recover the dark woods we once knew well. Wise old ones revive awe and connection. Trees and plants, rivers and crows have secrets to teach us that require a depth of listening undisturbed by collective gibbering.
Elderhood can be a time to shed the roles assigned to us. Menopause can be welcomed as a rite of passage with the Hag silently waiting for us to see her. If we have learned how to recognize her, renewal and reclaiming is possible. The stories of those who have gone before us carry a strange beauty that can stir a memory in our soul and set us on the path.
REFERENCES:
Order her book: Hagitude. Reimagining the second half of life
RESOURCES:
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