Alchemical Mortificatio: How to Survive the Wintering of Your Life
Release Date: 01/15/2026
Corruption Starts Inside You: Why Malignant Certainty Makes You Dangerous!
This Jungian Life
In this episode, Joseph, Lisa, and Deb explain why Corruption is not only a political problem, but a human one, why Power breaks trust long before it breaks laws, and why the most dangerous people are often the most certain. They reveal the core mechanism behind Corruption and Inflation: when unconscious drives flood the ego, making someone feel exceptional, entitled, and above ordinary rules. They unpack how Corruption escalates quietly, from small rationalisations and moral distortions to full-blown abuse of entrusted Power that destroys relationships, organisations, and communities....
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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...
info_outlineIf 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, perfectionism, people pleasing, or disappearing.
- Stop confusing coping with identity, and start practicing safer honesty.
- Practice the “30-minute return,” small windows to feel, speak, and be seen.
- Build endurance through gentle reveal-retreat-return, until you can stay safely present.
Joseph Lee and Deborah Stewart, Jungian analysts, turn this tale into a guide to show how your inner world can heal after trauma.
In the tale, the princess survives by covering herself in fur and soot, and you may have built a costume too. That costume once protected you; now it may block love, work opportunities, and genuine intimacy. You might scroll at night, over function in relationships, or stay “fine” so nobody asks.
Healing is repeated practice; you show up, you pull back, you show up again. The “gold” in the story is what stays intact in you, even after the worst day.
This week, choose one safe moment to let that gold show, one honest sentence, one boundary, one small ask, then note the result.
Read along with the dream HERE.
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 Dream Wise: Unlocking the Meaning of Your Dreams from the hosts of This Jungian Life podcast and open the secret door.