Awaking to your Shadow / your Unconscious - Becoming Whole / Real

  Love and Emotion Love is more profound than emotion. The fundamental difference between the two is that love never causes pain, whereas emotion creates all the problems in the world. Emotion is the mind’s concept of love, which is conditioned by the feelings generated by the self-interest of the person. The difficulty is that, as human beings, we are raised from birth primed for emotional conflict as a consequence of our parents’ and society’s adherence to an emotional way of life. Emotion is personal, which means it only affects a particular person at any time and is therefore not universal. In other words, it’s subject to external influences which are always changing. Emotion has no power of endurance, whereas love is an impersonal state and not subject to the caprice of outer forces. The mass of emotion gathered in time is imbued with an intelligence which arises from the consciousness inherent within the body. The nucleus of this emotional body soon establishes a position...

  Notes on Life-Changing Psychotherapy / Pathways to Major Life-Changing Therapy Taken from the book  The Art of the Psychotherapist  – by James F.T. Bugental – (who worked closely with and share many of the same views as Rollo May)   The following is a Summary of  this book I completed  in  July 2013 – Basics Elements of Dynamic Psyhotherapy In his previous important work,  “The Search for Authenticity " (1965), Bugental summarized the postulates of  Humanistic Psychology , often quoted by other theorists: ·           Human beings cannot be reduced to components. ·           Human beings have in them a uniquely human context. ·           Human consciousness includes an awareness of oneself in the context of other people. ·           Human beings have choices and re...

  On the Jungian concept of "Individuation" or "Wholeness." All of us have, to some degree or other, the impulse towards individuation. Individuation was the core of Jung’s work. Yet individuation has nothing to do with Jung specifically. What I mean is that we find the notion of individuation portrayed in multiple areas. For instance, if you read the Gospel of Thomas you will be reading about Individuation. If you watch the Wizard of Oz you will be going through Dorothy’s process of Individuation. “Somewhere over the rainbow” turns out to be in her own home, in her own home town, within the particular circumstances of her life. It is an inner realisation, not dependent upon outer circumstances. If you watch the series "Judge John Deed", you will see the portrayal of a person who is, for the most part, individuating. The Hero’s Journey, whether the hero be Luke Skywalker or the Knights of the Round Table, is an archetype of Individuation. The hero’s ...

  Dearest Soul. When my mind is quiet, and I forget the blast of definitions of this world (and the low smoke clears... ) I'll free fall ~ down. Down... Past the dragons and the darkness, the briars and thorned hedges (called the old stories). Past the fluttering veils, and the towering walls (of learned defenses) -- into the depths, Where I hear Your voice, calling. (Find Me) Down. Until there, at the bottom of despair's dark well, I catch Your stillness ~ in the mirror. I find You, standing at your moon-milk windows (called my eyes). You take my hand, our first kiss like a babe's first gasp of air. And like secret lovers we'll explore our sacred Being. Its hidden rooms and deep, ancestral oceans ... where dreams thought lost appear again like ghosts. Old pains in nooks and memories tangled, like cobwebs. (And buried treasure). And there, in the dark swells of Your embrace, I finally see... Me. Not harsh words, not...

  The Death of one’s Soul   A few days ago a woman came to me for a consultation. She had been a patient of mine fifteen years ago. She was a difficult case because she would not see certain things, she would not play the game, she wanted to remain a child. Certain people cannot take life seriously, as if they were born to be eternal children. If a case comes to me with diabetes and the patient will not pay attention to his symptoms or take my advice, there is nothing I can do. A few days ago I saw my old patient again. She looked awful and I was shocked. She saw it and said, "Yes, it's very bad, but I have no problem any more." She wanted me to tell her husband that she was no longer hysterical, and it was true she had no problems, no troubles; she had sucked them in, converted them into her body. In such cases the heart races for psychological reasons, and the result is a neurosis comparable to a shell-shock. One jumps at everything and has no cont...

  Symbols, thresholds and rebirth An archetypal experience of being human is the need and possibility at certain times throughout our lives to be reborn. To reinvent ourselves, to make a fresh start, to reimagine our role and place in the world, to embrace new values and discard what no longer serves us. This need and possibility of creatively crafting our identity and journey is an integral part of what in Jungian terms we refer to as individuation. The process of becoming an ever more honest and refined version of yourself. I have been reflecting on this of late. How fortunate we are to be given these frequent and regular opportunities for renewal. I have always celebrated the threshold offered by a new year and put great stock in this. I count among my blessings that I have maintained a certain naiveite and resisted cynicism in this regard. The new year has never failed to renew my spirit and commitment to be a better version of my previous self. More recently though what ha...

  The aim of individuation is nothing less than to divest the self of the false wrappings of the persona on the one hand and of the suggestive power of primordial images on the other . . . But when we turn to . . . the influence of the collective unconscious, we find we are moving in a dark interior world that is vastly more difficult to understand than the psychology of the persona, which is accessible to everyone . . . It is another thing to describe . . . those subtle inner processes which invade the conscious mind with such suggestive force. Perhaps we can best portray these influences with the help of examples of mental illness, creative inspiration, and religious conversion. In a previous passage (1971:118) Jung points out that individuation is not identification with the collective unconscious, for this leads to a naive megalomania "in the form of prophetic inspiration and desire for martyrdom." Considering all this, it is not surprising that the path of the mystic has...