Friday, April 19 | 7:30pm - 9:00pm, Eastern Time

An Evening With Tim Lyons: Dialoguing with the Dissociative Identities of Psyche and Soma:Understanding Metabolism and Individuation

Every psychic and somatic experience originates from the metabolic combustion furnace that constitutes the human body. This inner fire ignites the life force, burning organic fuels and processing psychic experiences that can nourish and regenerate the cells of our body or sicken and destroy them. Autonomic functions of our organs, body systems, and the desires of our ego consciousness often find themselves at odds, dissociated from each other. In The Psychogenesis of Mental Disease (1960), Carl Jung pointed out that from this conflict unexpected contents may emerge from the unconscious: “the dissociation can even go so far as to create one or more secondary personalities, each, apparently, with a separate consciousness of its own.”  (Continue reading on his program page) 

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Saturday, April 27 | 11:00am - 2:00pm, Eastern Time

Uncertainty, Is It a Gift? A Lecture with Ann Ulanov

What a disturbing title! Some days we feel that the foundations that we have relied upon are upended; some nights we worry -- what can we depend on? Can we trust that truth is accessible and real? How will our children manage? Personal and collective problems mix. What does the psyche say? How do we discern the archetypal power during personal experience? 

We will take up the gifts psyche offers amid uncertainty by exploring recalling projections, integrative projections, locality, naming, and new forms of communication resulting from placement of the ego. Psyche responds to uncertainty with creative gestures.

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Friday, May 3 | 7:30pm - 9:00pm, Eastern Time

Earth and Psyche: Archetypal Responses to the Climate Crisis, A Lecture with Stephen Foster

In Carl Jung’s 1961 essay, Healing the Split, he discussed how humanity was connected with nature but that we have lost this connection. Humanity was essentially woven into the fabric of nature, and our instinctual and archetypal patterns were established within this fabric. Jung described how, through scientific rationalism, we lost our connection with nature, which resulted in the relegation of nature to the unconscious.

With the news media constantly reinforcing eco-trauma by showing scenes of destruction, or what I refer to as the Four Horsemen of the Climate Apocalypse: Fire, Flood, Disease, and Disconnection (the uncoupling of species inter-dependence), it is easy to become “bewitched” and disenchanted, that is, frozen and incapacitated.  We fail to act, unless we can remember that we remain woven into the fabric of nature through physical need and through our feelings for the earth, expressed by archetypal patterns of nature in the psyche. (Continue reading on his program page)

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Saturday, May 4 | 1:00pm - 4:00pm, Eastern Time

Exploring the Nature Archetype Through Story and Image, A Workshop with Stephen Foster

In The Silmarillion, J.R.R. Tolkien tells a story called the Lay of Lúthien, where the love between a human (Beren) and an Earth Spirit (Lúthien) may be seen as the metaphorical setting for a relationship between humans and nature. The Lay of Lúthien is a modern fairy tale.  In this workshop, we will analyze this tale, using classical Jungian methods, including alchemical interpretation, to uncover its archetypal themes and images.

The Silmarillion tells the story of the Silmarils, three gems that contain the light of the Trees of Valinor, that is, the Light of Nature (lumen naturae). The jewels are stolen and rest in the crown of Morgoth, who represents the evil of their time.  To marry Lúthien, Beren must retrieve a jewel from Morgoth’s crown and deliver it to Lúthien’s father.  It is a compelling love story with a seemingly insoluble relational paradox. The Lay of Lúthien may also be seen as a metaphorical fairy tale about rescuing the lumen naturae in our time. Symbolically, in our immediate future, we will need the power from lumen naturae (nature’s light—sunlight) to replace fossil fuels and restore global temperatures to pre-industrial levels. (Continue reading on his program page) 

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Three Tuesdays, May 14 - 28 | 7:30pm - 9:30pm, Eastern Time

Cultural Complexes and Phantom Narratives: Working with the Unseen that Exists in Plain Sight: A Course with Samuel Kimbles

What if your worst fears are the story of our time?

-Naomi Ruth Lowinsky, “In the Wild Wake of the Election”

During these times of social and political upheavals, the cultural unconscious is bursting through its expressions and enactments of chronic historic racial injustices, political polarizations, the global pandemic, global warming, social media, and a multitude of other national and international political and cultural problems, which I call Cultural Complexes.  These processes carry the phantom narratives of our collective legacies, ghosts, histories, and their intergenerational traumas. How can the understandings we gleaned from these processes help us to both see and deal with the extreme collective emotional states that are expressed and confront us in plain sight?  What are their clinical implications?

Our focus during this course will be working with and experiencing “within” the cultural veil, the spirit of our times.

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Friday, May 17 | 7:30pm - 9:00pm, Eastern Time

Love in a Time of War: Awakening of the Heart Field via Active Imagination to Titrate Relationship with the Abject in Self, Other, and the World: A Lecture with Monika Wikman 

How is it that with psyche’s help we can learn to be present to the darkness -- the abject -- in the world, in self, and in other?  A large and life-long question to be sure, with new discoveries arising all along the way.

Tonight’s presentation will look at dreams and processes in the psyche that help us in these times to learn to attune to the eternal world in new ways, creating a growing capacity to be present to the darkness happening in the world at large.  

In a traumatized psyche, as it is in war-torn countries, it is the fabric of the parasympathetic nervous system that needs help so direly. (Continue reading on her program page) 

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Saturday, May 18 | 1:00pm - 4:00pm, Eastern Time

In the workshop, we take the dialog from the lecture further into application. Practical tools will be given. We will tune in together with the larger psyche and the transcendent via dreams and active imagination with the somatic unconscious. And we will utilize the Axiom of Maria and more to help grow this awakened heart field that helps us with the abject, through active imagination, writing exercises, discussion, and meditation. 

The warrior archetype, whose aim in the psyche is true to Eros, that serves the mysterium coniunctionis -- the union of opposites -- will also be explored to deepen our experience and understanding of these forces at work in our lives.