Season: Fall 2011

Inner work did not begin with Jung; it has rich traditions in India and the Far East.  In this workshop we will compare Jungian ideas about individuation with Eastern traditions.  Dr. Ruhl will present practical techniques for quieting the mind’s constant chatter and talking back to dysfunctional mental patterns that keep us stuck.  Other topics will include psychological inflation versus enlightenment, the myth of meaning, and the wisdom of uncertainty and insecurity.

The workshop provides a deeper examination of the ideas raised in the Friday night lecture.

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.

Analytical psychology, with its emphasis on intuitive images, has frequently recorded the way a particularly arresting inner image can foster healing.   Comparing the psychotherapist’s work to that of the Renaissance alchemist, similarly engaged in promoting a process of transformation, Jung was fond of quoting the hermetic maxim, “For those who have the image, the passage is easy.”    But how does a patient in psychotherapy “have” the image that has such a transformative effect on personality and behavior?  John Beebe believes the image needs to be “achieved,” a process that involves heart and mind in submitting to the contours of the image, allowing it to communicate its pattern to our minds, which must then translate the image in an authentic way to us so that we come to live inside it.   If we allow ourselves to become shaped by the image, rather than trying to shape it to our own ends, it will show us a new way to live.  In this lecture, Dr. Beebe will draw on insights and images from classical Chinese philosophy, especially Taoist and Confucian understandings of integrity, and the Book of Transformations, the I Ching, to help us see and feel the dynamic potential of this process.