Left by the Side of the Road: Individuation and Homecoming

This workshop explores the connection between the psychoid archetype presented in the Friday evening lecture and individuation. Beginning with that beautiful story of the rainmaker that Jung tells in Mysterium Coniunctionis, we will explore how a radical ecology that puts us in harmony with nature presumes and requires a sense of harmony within oneself.

For Jung individuation refers to those moments and occasions in one’s life when one is called to follow the law of one’s own being, to become the person one was meant to be. Such moments often occur in mid- life, but they can take place at any moment of important transitions. Anxiety most often accompanies these moments and they are also quite often expressed in dreams and symptoms. Individuation is a crisis but as such it is not only a danger, it is also an opportunity. Individuation presents each of us with the chance to transform one’s fate into a destiny.

In this workshop we will explore Jung’s theme of individuation as a process of homecoming and show how in coming home to oneself one also comes home to the world. Through music, film, story and poetry we will create a space of reverie in which we will make use of dream material, symptoms, fantasies, and writing exercises to tap into the creative unconscious in order to begin the work of transforming memory into memoir. Together we will engage in a journey whose steps include slowing down, learning to linger in the moment and adopting an attitude of hospitality that allows us to be turned back toward and to be addressed by those aspects of ourselves that have been forgotten, ignored, abandoned, left behind or otherwise sacrificed. Along this path we will engage those who wait for us with the unfinished business of our lives.

The goal of this workshop is for each participant to begin crafting a narrative of homecoming that arises within a slowness that reaches toward the stillness of a solitude that reaches toward the silence of a sorrow that reaches toward and be-comes serenity.