The meeting between lover and beloved is heart to heart, like that between sculptor and model, between hand and stone. When we fall in love we begin to imagine romantically, fiercely, wildly, madly, jealously, with possessive, paranoid intensity. And when we imagine strongly, we begin to fall in love with the images conjured before the heart's eye — as when starting a project, preparing a vacation trip, planning a new…

Part Four

With Oedipus as our primary example, let’s consider how Greek myth imagined three other young male heroes in more detail: Orestes, Pentheus, and Telemachus. All three boys were the only sons of heroic kings, yet none of them knew their fathers. Pentheus’ father Echion was absent or dead. Agamemnon, Orestes’s father, was gone ten years at Troy and murdered immediately upon his return. And Odysseus, father of Telemachus, wandered for ten more years before returning. But…

"We were born before the wind, also younger than the sun...let your soul and spirit fly into the mystic." There's nothing like the mystic when it comes to healing ourselves. It reaches deep within, and takes what is in need of enlightenment, shines a bright light, and the process begins. Without a doubt, inner depths that form the rich, loamy, soil of the mystic can be off putting. We're scared to go down so deep, into the mystic.

We're…

Part Three

Perhaps we need to look backwards toward old forms and old stories to re-imagine approaches to this dilemma. Greek myth is a tangled amalgam of stories, some of which date from the pre-patriarchal eras when, it is imagined, the genders lived in harmony. Over time, myths that justified the rule of men replaced most of the older tales. But we can still find the archetypal theme of initiation in many of them, because all stable societies have had to address…

Pacifica's Ladera campus bookstore is now selling my portfolio of Illuminated Letters. This limited-edition portfolio contains 22 of my detailed and luminous artist prints of the Hebrew alphabet and corresponding 22 illuminated prayer poems . The images are hand crafted from the original watercolor paintings, using the highest quality of archival pigment based inks on imported archival papers. Please stop by and take a look when you are next at Pacifica. (The related text is: "Illuminated…

Mythologist Michael Meade describes sacred occurrences as those in which the "seal that separates the worlds" is broken and Spirit enters through that break. In…

Part Two

Barbara Ehrenreich argued in 1983 that the “breadwinner ethic” had more or less collapsed in America. Men who avoided marriage were “deviant” in the fifties; now they are considered quite normal. By 1990 one third of all children (sixty percent of blacks) lived apart from their fathers, and fifty percent of children of divorced families saw their fathers once or twice per year, or not at all. Fifty percent of all children spend part of their childhood with one parent.…

A relationship with the mystic in life, nature, the way of all things ushers us into a healing connection with self and significant others. It proves itself a balm in the midst of pulls to find answers outside of self, as is the case in addiction. I remember as a teenager a yogi telling me that mystic consciousness is "the natural high." Now, fifty years later, his words continue to ring true and satisfy my soul!

Lisa Miller of Columbia University recently wrote in the New York Times…

A man needs a little madness, or else he never dares cut the rope and be free! – Nikos Kazantzakis, Zorba the Greek

Part One

The problems of our modern condition threaten to overwhelm us: meaningless work; broken communities; environmental degradation; rampant consumerism; religious literalism; the collapse of democracy and constant warfare, both abroad and in our streets. Despite being overloaded by media images and distractions, we have a diminished…

Barbara Holifield

On…

On February 22, 2014, the C. G. Jung Institute of San Francisco will offer the first of a series of eco-psychology seminars and workshops on the environment crisis. These workshops will be from differing perspectives but of one piece: the necessary crisis of consciousness in earth changes and what we can/must do. In this first workshop,…

 I have a client who loves history. Before working with this client I’d never thought much about history. I like watching historical movies, but I disliked history as a subject in school and I always did poorly in it because it required memorizing information (names, dates, places) that felt dry and dead to me. But when my client talks about history, it’s anything but dry and dead. For…