Animal Medicine: Developing Body Awareness
When it comes to body awareness, my horse Shadow was a genius. In this respect, he was the opposite of my conscious, cerebral self, which tends to be so inner directed and one-track minded that I can be oblivious to what’s going on in my body and the world around me. Have you ever known someone who can be feeling vaguely uncomfortable for hours before realizing she’s cold, or hungry, or has a headache? Or who can be standing directly in front of the object she’s looking for and simply not see it? That’s me. Or it was me before Shadow.
Unconsciousness: Our Greatest Threat
“If, for a moment, we regard mankind as one individual, we see that the human race is like a person carried away by unconscious powers, and the human race also likes to keep certain problems tucked away in separate drawers. But this is why we should give a great deal of consideration to what we […]
Feeling and Dreaming Myself into Life
At that time it must have looked to others as if I had the world by the tail; but inside a battle had been raging for over nine years between two apparently irreconcilable opposites.
Remind Me of What I Know
Suffering that is not understood is hard to bear, while on the other hand it is often astounding to see how much a person can endure when he understands the why and the wherefore. A philosophical or religious view of the world enables him to do this, and such views prove to be, at the very […]
The Soul’s Twins: A Video Interview
Last week Susan Scott, an author friend from South Africa, interviewed me about The Soul’s Twins. Most of you know Susan. She comments here often. She recorded our talk on video and posted it on her blog this week, so I’m re-posting it here for you to see. The video versions on her post below are small, […]
Taming the Untamed Psyche: The Path to World Peace
“Man, like the other animals, is originally simply the puppet of instinct, just as the infant is. Unless he is moved by instinct, he remains passive, even asleep. When instinct is aroused he reacts precipitately, with a characteristic all-or-none type of reaction. He is aware, it is true, of what he does and of what […]
Stepping out of the Mist
I lived the first half of my life in a mist. I thought I could see but was blind to the sacred. At 17 a spiritual awakening turned me into an avid seeker. My ideas about God came from other people and the Bible. I read a chapter every night. At 27 I experienced a […]
Daimons, Archetypes, and Gods
“The method of active imagination that Jung inaugurated in modern psychology is the answer to the classical question of introspection at such a profound level that it changes the image of human being, of the psyche, and what Know Thyself essentially means. Before Freud, knowing thyself in psychology meant to know one’s ego-consciousness and its […]
Are You Becoming Who You Want to Be?
“The cooperation of conscious reasoning with the data of the unconscious is called the ‘transcendent function’….This function progressively unites the opposites. Psychotherapy makes use of it to heal neurotic dissociations, but this function had already served as the basis of Hermetic philosophy for seventeen centuries.” ~Carl Jung, CW 18, par. 1554. My previous post, The […]
How to Use Your Feminine Energy to Provoke Change
Your personality was shaped by messages that came from outside of you. Much of what you were taught about the “correct” actions and attitudes, and much of what you did in response, goes against the grain of your soul. Your artificially conditioned conscious attitude (your ego), combined with the parts of yourself you disowned (your […]
