Therapy through the Ether

I have spent all day alone in my office

Seeing people…

C.G. Jung wrote, "..the world is empty only to him who does not know how to direct his libido toward things and people and to render them alive and beautiful." (CW vol. 5 253). The capacity to feel happiness is thus a cultivated ability. Shamanic psychology teaches that illness and well being are choices. We direct energy into life and beauty and happiness becomes possible.

Of course, this depends on clearing out emotional debris. We can't put on a happy face and suddenly experience…

I often refer to the question of privilege in the pages, so I thought it would be helpful to spell it out. Of all that I have written, this is the one essay I would encourage you to print out and discuss with your friends.

Privilege is utterly invisible to most whites and perfectly, constantly, daily, painfully obvious to almost all minorities. It provides whites with a place in the social hierarchy, a belief in upward mobility and a sense of identity – they can know…

Culture has changed in the last fifty years as in no comparable period in history. The religious perspective of the last century, indeed centuries, is quickly losing relevance for an increasingly material viewpoint. Media technology now serves and promotes a commercial thing-orientation as calculated and contrived as it is self-serving -- and self-alienating.

Beneath the changing viewpoints lies a major shift in cultural values (in case you haven't…

We just got a gracious and insight-full review of "Images of Soul: Reimagining Astrology" on the Astrology News Service website (lots of good stuff there) http://astrologynewsservice.com/book-reviews/book-review-images-of-soul-reimagining-astrology/

It's a welcome augury on the day of this 7th Uranus-Pluto square.

Stilling mind conjures creative psychic images. Archetypal presences come our way once mind becomes calm, receptive. They speak to us of what furthers growth, prohibits stagnation. They are energies that in old religious language were referred to as angels.

Carl Jung on “Meditation in Alchemy" noted, " ..But the alchemists really try to establish an objective relation to a "second" in their meditation, and this "second" has been regarded since…

When they want you to buy something they will call you.

When they want you to die for profit they will let you know.

— Wendell Berry

I don’t really care what you believe about the causes of the 9-11 attacks; or about who killed the Kennedys and Martin Luther King; or whether the elections of 2000 and 2004 were stolen; or whether Muammar Gaddafi, Saddam Hussain, male daycare teachers, Latino gardeners or Muslims were threats to your children; or…

I am honored to have been invited to post a guest blog on the Pacifica Graduate Institute Alumni Association. It's about the Alliance and it just went up! Check it out if you have a moment:



Greater than the Sum of Its Parts: Depth Psychology and the Honeybee Hive



One glorious late spring day on Pacifica’s Ladera Campus I witnessed a humming, writhing, vibrant swarm of honeybees on a bougainvillea bush. It stopped me in my tracks, entrancing me with the…

C.G. Jung was a strong proponent of balancing rational thought with non-cerebral intelligence, insisting that consciousness inherently resides in the body and in the natural world around us. In fact, he was quite taken by Austrian Nobel prize-winning ethologist Karl von Frisch’s notion of how bees communicated navigational information to their…

If you’re submitting budget proposals for a law enforcement agency…you’re not going to submit the proposal that “We won the war on terror and everything’s great,” because…your budget’s gonna be cut in half. You know, it’s my opposite of Jesse Jackson’s ‘Keep Hope Alive’—it’s ‘Keep Fear Alive.’ – former FBI assistant director Thomas Fuentes

In the era of constant electronic media, Ronald Reagan mastered a new technique, the intermittent…

Be Afraid…be very afraid… – The Fly, 1986

The major media casually dismiss “conspiracy theories.” Indeed, the phrase itself clearly demarcates the range of acceptable discourse; it is a verbal symbol of the walls of the polis. But we must at least acknowledge the sheer numbers of questionable political events that have occurred in the past sixty years: multiple political assassinations; Operations “Paper Clip” and “Northwoods” (google them if you must); mind control…

With today's blog post, I'm going to be wrapping up my series on Urban Terrapsychology and Creative Placemaking for the foreseeable future. 

In my last post I discussed how the people of the Upper Mississippi Valley became aware that the 1854 Grand Excursion went awry in some ways that were evident at that time, but in other ways that weren't evident until our own time.  The problem recognized in 1854 was Saint Paul's failure to exhibit appropriate hospitality to visitors. …