So, have Maya and I been engaging in cultural appropriation? And which cultural forms are we making use of? The terms we need to make peace with are calling, permission, authenticity and community.

After participating in several Dagara (West African) grief rituals led by Malidoma Some´at men’s conferences in the 1990s, it was quite clear to me that I was called to this important work. Maya speaks of her calling…

C.G. Jung wrote, "When a patient begins to feel the inescapable nature of his inner development, he may easily be overcome by a panic fear that he is slipping helplessly into some kind of madness that he can no longer understand" (The Philosophical Tree 1945/1954 CW 13, 325). When patients first enter depth psychotherapy, it's not uncommon that they are panic stricken. Their lives seem as if they are falling apart. "I'm tumbling down a deep hole, into an abyss," one person shared,…

Archetypal Reflections: Dr. Keiron Le Grice on Jungian and Depth Psychologies

C.G. Jung contended that our personalities are made up of a multitude of archetypes, Dr. Keiron Le Grice, Chair of the Jungian and Archetypal Studies program at Pacifica Graduate Institute, reminded me when he recently sat…

I did not want to face the truth about the archetypal story of the Republican convention, as I was hoping for better. However, it is clear to me that, overall, the convention was embodying an Innocent trance. The Innocent as an archetype has the virtues of a spontaneous, happy child, and when in positive and conscious form is optimistic and idealistic. We could see a bit of this latter aspect in the evocation of the image of America as “a shining city on a hill” that beckons others to us.…

When the iron bird flies and horses run on wheels, the Dharma will come to the land of the red faces. — Tibetan Prophecy

S0 — What about those emissaries from Tibet and countless other cultures who have relocated to America and Western Europe specifically for the purpose of teaching their ways? All those Yogis and Sufis and shamans and Taoists and ayahuasca priests and Zen masters and gurus (the word “guru” is now used so commonly in…

(This is a blog post I wrote for the Jung Society of Utah, and can be found in its entirety here.)

“When animus and anima meet, the animus draws his sword of power and the anima ejects her poison of illusion and seduction. The outcome need not always be negative, since the two are equally likely…

When I first began writing about “keys for the future of dreams,” I had reached four key words when I had a dream that told me I had to add afifth word. Furthermore, the dream insisted, it had to be a fifth “C-word.”

Having learned that there is more wisdom in obeying the orders of dreams than in refusing them, I consulted the I Ching “dream gourd” that has become part of my daily practice.

The dream-gourd answered my query with Hexagram 3 (Zhun, tr. “beginning”).…

Epic

I inclined 

To lose my faith in Ballyrush and Gortin

Til Homer’s ghost came whispering to my mind,

He said: I made the Iliad from such

A local row. Gods make their own importance.

-Patrick Kavanagh

Outlander season 2 is complete, and boy has it been a season for the ages. As this…

We experience times of breakdown and transformation. We need both. We can't stay the same and change. Breakdown takes down what needs to be taken down so that, potentially, what is really there and new and more meaningful can flourish.

Transformation, as psychologist Michael Eigen notes, gets its power from " . . . the moments of breakdown that went into them." Dreams say everything is falling apart. We panic. But, hold on, if we step back and gain insight…

“The body is merely the visibility of the soul, the psyche; and the soul is the

psychological experience of the body” —C.G. Jung

“Yoga is most often understood as the union of the individual…

As an activist working with NGOs to stop shark finning in Central America years ago, Dr. Lori Pye was once a target of a malicious act intended to intimidate her.

The experience plunged her into a sort of psychological crisis.…

I find myself ironically posting Part Two of this essay on what we may eventually call Interdependence Day.

The alternative to cultural appropriation is cultural appreciation: learning about another culture with respect and courtesy. Some prefer the term “cultural exchange.” It is appreciating a certain culture enough to take time to learn about it, interact (or study with) with members of its community, and receive a certain blessing to carry its wisdom forward. The…

Gays in Search of Meaning

Many gay people (gay here refers to entire LGBT community) are acknowledging a need for a more meaningful way of living to avoid a motionless and purposeless existence. Lack of…