The Thanksgiving Gift of Two-Way Partnership
Most people think working with horses is a one-way form of communication: the human does the training and the horse does the listening and learning so it can serve the human’s needs. Most riders and trainers love horses very much and train them with kindness and patience; others believe they need to “break” horses with bullying and brute force. Either type can achieve great success…from the perspective of the human ego.
Learn Your Story: Write Your Myth
“Just as dreams do not conceal something already known, or express it under a disguise, but try rather to formulate an as yet unconscious fact as clearly as possible, so myths and alchemical symbols are not…allegories that hide artificial secrets. On the contrary, they seek to translate natural secrets into the language of consciousness and […]
The Delicious Blessing of Being
We have a tendency to think in terms of doing and not in terms of being. We think that when we are not doing anything, we are wasting our time. But that is not true. Our time is first of all for us to be. To be what? To be alive, to be peaceful, to […]
The Defining Characteristics of the Opus
It’s life that matters, nothing but life — the process of discovering, the everlasting and perpetual process, not the discovery itself, at all. ~Fyodor Dostoevsky. The Idiot Any real change implies the breakup of the world as one has always known it, the loss of all that gave one an identity, the end of safety. And […]
The Essential Thing Is the Opus
I observe myself in the stillness of Bollingen and with all my experience of nearly eight decades must admit that I have found no rounded answer to myself. I am just as much in doubt about myself as before, the more so the more I try to say something definite. It is as though familiarity […]
What Do Dreams Say About This Phase of Your Life?
I’m going through an uncomfortable phase. I’ve had the same dream almost every night for three weeks. It has no images. Just thoughts and words: I’m writing a blog post about the Mediatrix archetype. Although the words vary, the same three elements appear in every dream. First, I’m determined to understand and describe this archetype. […]
Overcoming the Obstacles to Emotional Intelligence
“We think too much and feel too little. More than machinery, we need humanity; more than cleverness, we need kindness and gentleness. Without these qualities, life will be violent and all will be lost.” ~ Charlie Chaplin “If your emotional abilities aren’t in hand, if you don’t have self-awareness, if you are not able to […]
Dancing to the Laws of Your Own Nature
So if we follow the laws that are in our own nature, they will lead us to the right end…. You have got to trust yourself with your own experience, because, according to the natural law, it will lead to a state of completeness. I do not speak of a state of perfection—that is prejudice—but […]
Using Your Imagination to Care for Your Many Selves
“…the outer world and inner world are interdependent at every moment. We are simply the locus of their collision and whether we like it or not our life is what we are able to make of that collision…So what we need is a faculty that embraces both worlds simultaneously…” ~Ted Hughes, quoted in Lindsay Clarke, […]
Staying Close and Letting Go
We must be willing to let go of the life we planned so as to have the life that is waiting for us. Joseph Campbell I’ve been writing this blog for eleven years and five months. I started in March of 2010 with two posts a week. Expressing myself freely and meeting so many wonderful […]
